November 3, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to “State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

October 27, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Allies Dressed in Green

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Heidelberg, Germany

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western allies have been asking: What will replace the threat of communism as the cement that holds together the Atlantic alliance? Some have argued terrorism, but I don’t think so. I think my German friends have the best idea: the issue that will and should unite the West is energy and all its challenges.

After all, nothing is a bigger threat today to the Western way of life and quality of life than the combination of climate change, pollution, species loss, and Islamist radicalism and petro-authoritarianism — all fueled by our energy addictions. And no solution is possible to these problems without concerted government actions to reduce emissions, to inspire green innovation and to shift from oil to renewable power.

Therefore, green is not just the new red, white and blue — the next great American national security project — it should also be the color, focus and cement of the Atlantic alliance in the 21st century. As a German official remarked to me, “The whole issue has the potential of becoming a big trans-Atlantic project at a time when we have no other good big project that [embodies] a vision.”

The intertwined environmental and energy challenges we face today are so acute that they can no longer be addressed by “virtuous individuals hopping on a bus instead of taking the car,” argued Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian. “This is a job for government.”

Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently gave a major address on how “energy security will strongly influence the global security agenda in the 21st century.” And Britain’s foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, just delivered a speech declaring that climate change “is not just an environmental problem. It is a defense problem. It is a problem for those who deal with economics and development, conflict prevention, agriculture, finance, housing, transport, innovation, trade and health.”

The fact that the foreign ministers are making this their agendas suggests that energy will soon move to the heart of the alliance’s agenda. As Mr. Freedland put it, “If climate change is a foreign policy problem, foreign policy can surely be part of the climate change solution.”

However, for what I call “geo-greenism” — thinking about green in strategic terms — to become the new core of the alliance, European greens will have to become more “geo” and the U.S. government more “green.”

European Green parties have tended to wrap their environmentalism in a very high-minded tone that was always more moralizing than strategic. For instance, Europe’s Greens led the global campaign against genetically modified crops, which will be critically important if we want to grow more of our fuel — à la corn ethanol or soy biodiesel. The Greens in Germany also forced the previous government to agree to phase out Germany’s nuclear power plants by 2021. That would mean uninstalling 30 percent of Germany’s energy capacity. It would be great if it were all replaced by wind or solar power, but it will most likely be replaced by coal.

Jürgen Hogrefe, who was spokesman for the Green Party in Lower Saxony, Germany, in the 1980s, is today a senior executive with EnBW, a German energy company with nuclear plants.

“The Green Party has been extremely important for German society,” he said, helping to transform the post-Nazi society into a more liberal domain. But an antinuclear stance has been at the core of the party, and now that the German mainstream has embraced a green agenda, the Greens need to rethink nuclear energy. “The Green Party should redefine itself,” added Mr. Hogrefe. “In some fields they are very modern party. … But concerning nuclear energy and ecology they are stubborn, not open enough to see what is happening around the globe.”

One reason President Bush has failed to become the leader of the West is because he has failed to lead on green, which has become so important to all our allies. I doubt that he’ll redefine U.S. policy in his last two years, but the issues around climate change and energy conservation are now rising so fast it’s impossible to imagine that his successor won’t — whoever it is. And once that happens, it is impossible to imagine that living green, instead of fighting reds, won’t become the new glue of the Atlantic alliance.

Or as Hermann Ott, head of the Berlin office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, remarked to me, “We don’t need aliens to unite our world, we have a problem right at the center” now — and the solution is green.