By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, # The New York Times Reprints,
February 22, 2011
What's unfolding in the Arab world today is the
mother of all wake-up calls. And what the voice
on the other end of the line is telling us is
clear as a bell:
"America, you have built your house at the foot
of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava
from different cracks and is rumbling like it's
going to blow. Move your house!" In this case,
"move your house" means "end your addiction to
oil."
No one is rooting harder for the democracy
movements in the Arab world to succeed than I am.
But even if things go well, this will be a long
and rocky road. The smart thing for us to do
right now is to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline
tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning
in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the
deficit. Legislating a higher energy price today
that takes effect in the future, notes the
Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a
shift in buying and investment well before the
tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we
can make ourselves more economically and
strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts
and free ourselves to openly push for democratic
values in the Middle East without worrying
anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes,
it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are
going up anyway, folks. Let's capture some it for
ourselves.
It is about time. For the last 50 years, America
(and Europe and Asia) have treated the Middle
East as if it were just a collection of big gas
stations: Saudi station, Iran station, Kuwait
station, Bahrain station, Egypt station, Libya
station, Iraq station, United Arab Emirates
station, etc. Our message to the region has been
very consistent: "Guys (it was only guys we spoke
with), here's the deal. Keep your pumps open,
your oil prices low, don't bother the Israelis
too much and, as far as we're concerned, you can
do whatever you want out back. You can deprive
your people of whatever civil rights you like.
You can engage in however much corruption you
like. You can preach whatever intolerance from
your mosques that you like. You can print
whatever conspiracy theories about us in your
newspapers that you like. You can keep your women
as illiterate as you like. You can create
whatever vast welfare-state economies, without
any innovative capacity, that you like. You can
undereducate your youth as much as you like. Just
keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don't
hassle the Jews too much - and you can do
whatever you want out back."
It was that attitude that enabled the Arab world
to be insulated from history for the last 50
years - to be ruled for decades by the same kings
and dictators. Well, history is back. The
combination of rising food prices, huge bulges of
unemployed youth and social networks that are
enabling those youths to organize against their
leaders is breaking down all the barriers of fear
that kept these kleptocracies in power.
But fasten your seat belts. This is not going to
be a joy ride because the lid is being blown off
an entire region with frail institutions, scant
civil society and virtually no democratic
traditions or culture of innovation. The United
Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002
warned us about all of this, but the Arab League
made sure that that report was ignored in the
Arab world and the West turned a blind eye. But
that report - compiled by a group of Arab
intellectuals led by Nader Fergany, an Egyptian
statistician - was prophetic. It merits
re-reading today to appreciate just how hard this
democratic transition will be.
The report stated that the Arab world is
suffering from three huge deficits - a deficit of
education, a deficit of freedom and a deficit of
women's empowerment. A summary of the report in
Middle East Quarterly in the Fall of 2002
detailed the key evidence: the gross domestic
product of the entire Arab world combined was
less than that of Spain. Per capita expenditure
on education in Arab countries dropped from 20
percent of that in industrialized countries in
1980 to 10 percent in the mid-1990s. In terms of
the number of scientific papers per unit of
population, the average output of the Arab world
per million inhabitants was roughly 2 percent of
that of an industrialized country.
When the report was compiled, the Arab world
translated about 330 books annually, one-fifth of
the number that Greece did. Out of seven world
regions, the Arab countries had the lowest
freedom score in the late 1990s in the rankings
of Freedom House. At the dawn of the 21st
century, the Arab world had more than 60 million
illiterate adults, the majority of whom were
women. Yemen could be the first country in the
world to run out of water within 10 years.
This is the vaunted "stability" all these
dictators provided - the stability of societies
frozen in time.
Seeing the Arab democracy movements in Egypt and
elsewhere succeed in modernizing their countries
would be hugely beneficial to them and to the
world. We must do whatever we can to help. But no
one should have any illusions about how difficult
and convulsive the Arabs' return to history is
going to be. Let's root for it, without being in
the middle of it.
More in Opinion (3 of 19 articles)
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