WASHINGTON — I'm glad President Bush gave a sober talk about where America is going in Iraq and in confronting terrorism. But I can't say I found it reassuring. I still don't feel the United States has a broad, workable strategy.
Two national commissions are currently looking backward — one on how the Sept. 11 attacks happened, and another about why no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Those are key questions. But what America really needs is a bipartisan commission looking forward.
I'd call it the National Commission for Doing Things Right. Its mandate would be simple: Tell Americans what U.S. policy would be if America was determined to do things right in confronting terrorism, no matter what the political costs — so yet another commission won't have to look backward two years from now. Here's what I'd like to see:
Take all the money the Bush team has wasted on public relations campaigns directed at the Arab-Muslim world and put it into three programs: a huge expansion of U.S. Embassy libraries around the world, which have been cut in recent years (you'd be amazed at how many young people abroad had their first contact with America through an embassy library), a huge expansion of scholarships for foreign students to study in America and a huge expansion of the U.S. immigration service so it can quickly figure out who should get visas to study or work in America and who shouldn't.
Too many good students are getting shut out of the United States. You don't get better public relations from ads. You get it from bringing people into America or American libraries and letting them draw their own conclusions.
Adopt a 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax, the Patriot Tax (along with my wife's proposal: free public parking anywhere in America for any hybrid or other car getting more than 35 miles per gallon). A Patriot Tax would help pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and help finance a Manhattan project to speed the development of a hydrogen economy, enabling Americans to make a contribution to the war effort while lessening America's dependence on foreign oil.
There is simply no way to stimulate a process of economic and political reform in the Arab-Muslim world without radically reducing their revenues from oil, thereby forcing these governments to reform their economies, and societies, to produce real jobs for their people.
Is there anything dumber than the Bush campaign ads chastising John Kerry for once favoring a gasoline tax? Had a Patriot Tax been imposed a year ago, gasoline might still cost $2 a gallon today, but 50 cents of that would have gone to paying for American schools rather than Saudi madrassas.
Spearhead efforts in trade talks to reduce U.S., European and Japanese farm subsidies. Nothing would be more helpful to Pakistani, Egyptian and other poor farmers in the Muslim and developing worlds than no longer having to compete with our subsidized produce.
Make a serious effort to diffuse the toxic Arab-Israeli conflict, including using NATO forces to separate the parties.
Spell out that the war on terrorism is a long-term war on radical Islam — and while force is necessary in that effort, it is not sufficient. America has to connect all of the above dots to strengthen Arab-Muslim moderates, because only they can take on their extremists.
Unfortunately, the Bush team reacted to the Sept. 11 attacks as if all the old rules and methods had to go. I believe Sept. 11 was gigantic. But the old rule book — emphasizing allies, the Geneva conventions, self-sacrifice, economic development, education, Arab-Israeli diplomacy — was and remains our greatest source of strength in the effort to promote gradual reform in the regions most likely to breed threats to our open society.
I think David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it best: "The answer for us lies not in what has changed but in recognizing what has not changed. Because only through this recognition will we focus on an effective multilateral response to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the creation of real stakeholders in globalization among the world's poor, the need for reform in the Arab world and a style of U.S. leadership that seeks to build our base of support worldwide by getting more people to voluntarily sign onto our values. We need to remember that those values are the real foundation for our security and the real source of our strength.
"And we need to recognize that our enemies can never defeat us — only we can defeat ourselves, by throwing out the rule book that has worked for us for a long, long time."
New York Times News Service