Like yesterday, snowy days in Washington are when the weather
wimps shut things down, people call in sick, and only the mailman
is out enjoying the weather that displays our capital city’s beauty
best. Though February 28 won’t be remembered longer than it takes
to shovel out the snowfall, it was a benchmark day against which
the rest of the year should be measured. Politically and
militarily, but not economically, events are turning in America’s
favor.
Put whatever caveats on this as you’d like, but today we are
winning the war against Islamist terrorists and the nations that
support them. As Churchill said after the 1942 victory at El
Alamein, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end of
this war. But it may well be the end of the beginning. As many
times as the left may bleat that Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,
Iraq today is just what the President said it would be: a beachhead
for democracy in the Arab Middle East. The Iraq election is only a
month past, and now there are street demonstrations against Hosni
Mubarak’s Egyptian despotism, and in Lebanon the yoke of Syrian
oppression is becoming too heavy. Syria, which overplayed its hand
by assassinating former Lebanese prime minister Harriri is under
pressure to remove its troops from Lebanon and to end its open
support for every Islamic terrorist organization. Even Kofi Annan
and Jacques Chirac are at least giving lip service to the idea.
Crowds flooding the streets of Beirut aren’t protesting America or
Israel: they’re protesting Syrian occupation.
The Middle Eastern despotisms are under considerable pressure,
and they will survive it for some time, but that time grows
shorter. While the Iraq democracy functions, all the neighboring
despotisms and dictatorships — including the Iranian kakistocracy
— are threatened. They will become more and more desperate, and
reckless, in trying to stanch the flow of freedom into their
region. They will do their best to raise the price of our success
in blood and treasure. They will raise the cost, as will events
that have nothing to do with the war and everything to do with the
economy of the world’s most populous nation.
THERE IS ELATION IN Europe, even in Britain, at the perception of a
diminished America. America is weaker than we were before
9-11 or before the Iraq campaign. The dollar’s value is too low,
the price of oil is astronomical and still rising, and the war is
costing us considerable blood and treasure. And the EUnuchs are
quite happy about it all, even though the oil problem hurts them as
much or more than it hurts us. The weak dollar isn’t even the main
reason for the rise in oil prices: it’s just that demand is
skyrocketing and the supply isn’t following suit.
America imports more than eight million barrels of oil every day
from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and
Nigeria. Our trade deficit last year — about $1.1 trillion — is
roughly equal to the price of imported oil. To the extent we can
diminish oil imports, our economy rebounds. The price of oil, now
over $50 per barrel, will remain high for a long time to come, and
not just because the OPEC nations want it to.
China has doubled its oil imports over the last five years and
increased oil imports by almost 40% in 2004. China’s GDP rose
almost ten percent last year, and — according to a Time
magazine report — about 2.5 million more cars will be on Chinese
roads this year alone. Chinese economic expansion will keep oil
prices high, and the dollar weak. It is long past time for us to
open ANWR, reinvigorate offshore drilling, and to make nuclear
power what it must be if our economy is to continue to grow: a
common and reliable source of energy. We can push the price of
energy down domestically, and let the rest of the world market
function as it should, freely and to the economic detriment of
Europe.
The European celebration is mis-timed. Yes, the dollar is weak,
but the euro is artificially high. Because the price of oil is
pegged to the dollar, not the euro, the oil price burden on
European economies is proportionally higher than it is on ours. And
at the same time that Chevrolet is building a car factory in
Shandong Province, China, France is suffering a five-year high
unemployment rate of ten percent. The EUnuchs want to compete with
us economically. And they choose to do so by increasing our need
for defense spending while profiting from arms sales.
AS PRESIDENT BUSH LAST week tried to dissuade them from doing,
Europe means to lift the leaky arms embargo against China. Europe’s
response has been much like its response to the President’s renewed
request for help in Iraq. When France promised to send a single
officer to help train Iraqis, it answered the President’s request
with contempt. Mr. Bush went to Europe seeking reconciliation and
failed. As George Melloan wrote in the Wall Street Journal
last week, Europe regards the burden of reconciliation to be ours
and ours alone. So long as it is — and I saw no hint to the
contrary from the leaders Mr. Bush met with last week —
reconciliation efforts are doomed to failure. There is no
flexibility or change in the European positions on the Iraq war,
Iran, China, or anything else of importance.
So far, there has been little more than bad feeling between us
and Europe. Jokes and mini-embargos of French products amuse, but
do not really damage. If there is no change in the European
positions now taken, and the policies now being pursued, there will
be more than just hurt feelings. There may be a trade war over
subsidized Airbus’s competition against Boeing, technology
sanctions as a result of European selling of arms to China, and
worse. When you have usually moderate senators such as Richard
Lugar threatening technology sanctions over the China arms sales as
he did last week, I gauge the political situation here to be
approaching a watershed. American politics are changing in as
fundamental a way as they did in the 1930s. Europe fails to
understand this at its peril. And ours.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than
You Think (Regnery, 2004).
