And They Call It (Petrol) Democracy
The Hidden Columnists--Tom Friedman Edition (23 Dec)

In which Mr. Friedman calls Iran as he sees it--and it's not a democracy (here's the link to the full article behind the Times Select firewall):

I'd like to thank Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his observation that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews was just a "myth." You just don't see world leaders expressing themselves so honestly anymore - not about the Holocaust, but about their own anti-Semitism and the real character of their regimes.

But since Iran's president has raised the subject of "myths," why stop with the Holocaust? Let's talk about Iran. Let's start with the myth that Iran is an Islamic "democracy" and that Ahmadinejad was democratically elected.

Sure he was elected - after all the Iranian reformers had their newspapers shut down, and parties and candidates were banned by the unelected clerics who really run the show in Tehran. Sorry, Ahmadinejad, they don't serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, they don't allow bikinis at nudist colonies, and they don't call it "democracy" when you ban your most popular rivals from running. So you are nothing more than a shah with a turban and a few crooked ballot boxes sprinkled around.

And speaking of myths, here's another one: that Iran's clerics have any popularity with the broad cross-section of Iranian youth.

This week, Ahmadinejad exposed that myth himself when he banned all Western music on Iran's state radio and TV stations. Whenever a regime has to ban certain music or literature, it means it has lost its hold on its young people. It can't trust them to make the "right" judgments on their own. The state must do it for them. If Ahmadinejad's vision for Iran is so compelling, why does he have to ban Beethoven and the Beatles?

Well, at least he didn't have to deal with Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.

And before we leave this subject of myths, let me add one more: the myth that anyone would pay a whit of attention to the bigoted slurs of Iran's president if his country were not sitting on a dome of oil and gas. Iran has an energetic and educated population, but the ability of Iranians to innovate and realize their full potential has been stunted ever since the Iranian revolution. Iran's most famous exports today, other than oil, are carpets and pistachios - the same as they were in 1979, when the clerics took over.

Sad. Iran's youth are as talented as young Indians and Chinese, but they have no chance to show it. Iran has been reduced to selling its natural resources to India and China - so Chinese and Indian youth can invent the future, while Iran's young people are trapped in the past.

No wonder Ahmadinejad, like some court jester, tries to distract young Iranians from his failings by bellowing anti-Jewish diatribes and banning rock 'n' roll.

Hmmm... sounds like a certain other democracy I know where the pious President likes to make hay with cultural wedge issues.

What is a fact is the danger someone like Ahmadinejad would pose if his country developed a nuclear weapon. But that is where things are heading. Iran today has so much oil money to sprinkle around Europe, it doesn't worry for a second that the Europeans would ever impose real sanctions on Tehran for refusing to open its nuclear program.

"The West has lost its leverage," notes Gal Luft, an energy expert at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Europe is addicted to Iran's oil and to Iran's purchases of European goods. At the same time, the Iranian regime has been very clever at petro-diplomacy.

[...]

The word from the White House is that President Bush is trying to figure out a theme for his State of the Union speech and for his next three years. Mr. President, what more has to happen - how many more Katrinas, how much more reckless behavior by Iran, how many more allies bought off by petro-dollars - before you realize that there is only one thing to do for the next three years: lead America and the world in an all-out push to conserve energy, reduce dependence on oil and develop alternatives?

Because three more years of $60-a-barrel oil will undermine everything good in the world that the U.S. wants to do - and that's no myth.

Speaking of reducing dependence on foreign oil (full and complete energy independence is a myth, but we can and need to reduce starting now). Here are some thoughts from Wired's Autotopia blog for starting points:

Receiving more than 50 percent of our petroleum from foreign countries that are by and large not democracies (and therefore politically unstable) is an unacceptable risk to our economy and way of life. Therefore, we need to determine what percentage is acceptable (10, 20, 30 percent?), and set a target date for achieving that objective.

We do not have enough domestic petroleum reserves to meet our increasing energy needs, and since similarly global reserves cannot meet global demands (eg. explosion of use in China and India) the price of petroleum will continue to rise. The Energy Information Administration updated its model to show more realistic projections of pricing over time, but that assumes we still get nearly 60 percent of our oil from foreign sources.

Alternative fuel and fuel-efficiency technologies are being developed that should fill the void between the current amount of fuel being imported and what is acceptable. We need to establish how much of the gap should be filled from fuel economy (through hybrids, lighter chassis materials, increasing use of diesel), and how much should come through increasing domestic production.

Alternative fuel technologies such as ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal gasification, hydrogen fuel cells and pyrolysis must be advanced to become cost-competitive with future oil prices without negatively affecting our agricultural production. We cannot (because the technologies aren't fully understood) and should not pick winners and losers among these technologies, but should establish an independent panel of scientists to audit the research to determine appropriate federal funding for each technology. Today funding is handed out to dozens of similar projects based in part on political favors.

These actions should be based on science and economics and free of lobbyists (eg. oil, ethanol). After defining a national strategy, we then invite the petroleum, auto industries and developing democratic nations (Brazil, Venezuela) that can provide us with the necessary materials to a summit where we all has out the implementation.

In the past, we have dedicated a week of our collective attention to watching Congress debate an issue of much lesser importance (steroid use in baseball) that provided some benefit, so this essential issue deserves similar page 1 treatment. We need to break our analysis paralysis and act on an attainable and comprehensive plan.

Damn straight!