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Wednesday, February 09, 20051107966900
Friedman, Flit(tm), and Oil
"Corner and Kill Friedman," by "TM Lutas," Flit(TM), http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/005197.html, 5 February 2005.
Tom Friedman is reviving his fly me to the moon dream, and TM Lutas isn't having any of it
In reality, productive reform requires more capital flowing into a society, not less.
If productive reform requires more capital, then we can only sanction regimes we have given up on transforming.
The spur of peaceful reform in South Africa was a growing international sanctions regime.
But more relevantly, why do the Gulf Emirates have better governments than mainland Arab states? It is because they have come to grips with limited oil. They realized they could no longer buy internal support from oil revenues.
Cornering a regime and killing off an economy leads people straight into the arms of the extremists, in this case the Islamists. Under crushing, punitive sanctions in the '90s, Saddam started getting awfully religious for a secular tyrant. He changed the national flag to include a religious saying in arabic script. He famously gave enough blood to write out an entire Koran, and he also went on a mosque building spree with some really unusual architecture cropping up. If an authoritarian regime doesn't have money to stay in power anymore, fanaticism is cheap, if dangerous.
This Geo-Green strategy is one that will put these societies in a corner and when they lash out at us (perhaps in another 9/11?) we'll have to kill them off.
The Iraq analogy is poor. Oil is perfectly fungible and it is extremely hard to have an effective oil sanctions regime. Iraq subverted UN sanctions and our "allies" to buy loyal Sunni elements we are fighting now.
"Fanaticism" may be financially cheap, but it is very dangerous for the regime itself. Regimes guided by fanatics do not last. This is why there are so few of them, even in the Gap. And fanatics experiments with fanaticism have proven so dangerous (Salafist elements are complicated the Ba'ath 4GW war) it further undermines the "Fanaticism = Cheap" argument.
Instead of doing that, we need to lead them out of their current dead end and give the elite an exit strategy that makes lashing out to retain power highly unattractive.
If they wanted out of their end, a "shrink the Gap" GWOT would not be needed. We could rely on the Global Herd and Golden Straightjacket and all the other wonderful talk of the 1990s. But too many leaders do not want to lose power and too many societies cannot handle the content flows.
I don't see how $18 a barrel oil is going to get us there.
Emerging Core states will require a lot of energy. This will require oil unless a disruptive technology is exploited. High prices would make that more likely. Why build a substitute when the original good is just as cheap?
10:35 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Oil, Thomas Friedman | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: tm lutas, geogreen