The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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into an article.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded outlines the expansion of the napkin into four separate graphs:
On one axis, I plotted the average global price of crude oil going back to 1979, and along the other axis I plotted the pace of expanding or contracting freedoms, both economic and political—as measured by the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” report and the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World Report”—for Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria.34
According to Friedman, the resulting four graphs indicate that
as oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation, and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries—as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started, and companies privatized. But as oil prices started to soar after 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs tended to erode in these countries.35
This correlation sounds delightful, especially when it is compounded by compelling evidence such as that “a Westernized Iranian woman reporter in Tehran once said to me as we were walking down the street: ‘If only we didn’t have oil, we could be just like Japan.’”36 The project’s flaws, however, are numerous, and cannot be compensated for via Friedman’s simple disclaimer that “this is not a scientific lab experiment.”37
First of all, the graphs do not take into account the wide range of freedom indicators listed by Friedman.38 The graph on Iran, for example, plots crude oil prices against “Freedom to Trade Internationally,” which in the Iranian context is presumably a reflection of the intensity of sanctions by international actors. It is difficult to argue that this specific category is at all representative of the general level of domestic freedom.
The Nigeria graph plots oil prices against “Legal System and Property Rights,” while the Venezuela graph plots oil prices against the country’s Freedom House rankings. All of the graphs indicate an inverse relationship, but a glance at the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” data from 1973 to 201039 turns up contradictions such as these:
1. Following a string of “Partly Free” years, Nigeria’s Freedom Status switches to “Not Free” in 1993. This is precisely the year of the Nigerian oil field privatization that appears on Friedman’s cumulative FLOP graph as one of three global historical events signifying an increase in the pace of freedom.
2. Venezuela has maintained a “Partly Free” status since 1999, even when Chávez was telling various international entities to go to hell.
3. Bahrain transforms from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” in 2009, despite Friedman’s insistence—undeterred by his own discussion in The World Is Flat of the Bahraini regime’s Internet censorship and reliance on walled palaces and Sunni dominance—that dwindling oil reserves have forced the country’s democratization.
More important than any of these contradictions, however, is Friedman’s cheerleading of the U.S. war on Iraq “to create a free, open and progressive model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world to promote the ideas of tolerance, pluralism and democratization”40 when he is already convinced in 2002 that unless the United States “encourage[s] alternative energies that will slowly bring the price of oil down and force [Arab/Muslim] countries to open up and adapt to modernity—we can invade Iraq once a week and it’s not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world.”41 This same year he nonetheless classifies the invasion of Iraq as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,” even while admitting that it “would be a huge, long, costly task—if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don’t know if it is.”42
Taking into account the speculation by oil economist and World Bank adviser Dr. Mamdouh Salameh in 2008 that the invasion of Iraq has thus far trebled the price of crude oil,43 Friedman’s 2006 proposal for a Geo-Green party in the United States to “advanc[e] political and economic reform in the Arab-Muslim world, without another war”44 acquires an even more tragicomic hue. According to Friedman, “however the Iraq war ends,” the Geo-Green party will stimulate alternatives to oil and thus “gradually bring down the price, possibly as low as $25 to $30 a barrel”—i.e., the approximate price of oil in 2002.45
Recent years have seen a surge in Friedman’s insistence on the need for “nation-building at home,”46 in order to resolve issues ranging from the United States’ “mounting education deficit, energy deficit, budget deficit, health care deficit and ambition deficit”47 to Penn Station’s “disgusting track-side platforms [that] apparently have not been cleaned since World War II”48 to the fact that, while China spent the post-9/11 period enhancing its national infrastructure in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, “we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.”49 Friedman’s fury over funding cuts to the National Science Foundation might be more understandable, however, had:
1. The NSF appeared somewhere on the 2002 hierarchy of most-important-even-if-impossible-tasks.
2. He specified that the Iraq war be fought without Humvees.
3. He not advised Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 to “connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: ‘Does this man understand that we have real enemies?’” by “drop[ping] everything else—health care, deficits and middle-class tax cuts—and focus[ing] on this issue. Everything else is secondary.”50
Consider for a moment that over half of U.S. government spending goes to the military,51 an institution Friedman lauds as the protector of American economic hegemony in The Lexus:
Indeed, McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.52
Consider, then, the 2007 estimate by the American Friends Service Committee that the hidden fist’s not-so-hidden maneuverings in Iraq were costing $720 million a day. The Washington Post reports that this sum alone “could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity,” as well as making substantial contributions to the U.S. education system, which Friedman has categorized as one of the many areas in which the country “has been swimming buck naked.”53
This is not to imply, of course, that had these funds not been used on war they would have been used on these specific domestic nation-building projects, but rather to point out the sort of self-contradictions one invites by maintaining unwavering commitment to few principles aside from the idea that America should dominate the world.
Despite Friedman’s newfound annoyance that the United States is preoccupied with nation-building abroad and that “the Cheneyites want to make fighting Al Qaeda our Sputnik”54 while “China is doing moon shots”55 and turning from red to green, he credits the U.S. army with “outgreening al-Qaeda”56 in Iraq. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, we learn that this has been achieved via a combination of insulation foam and renewable energy sources, reducing the amount of fuel required to air condition troop accommodations in certain locations.
After speaking with army energy consultant Dan Nolan—whom he “couldn’t help but ask, ‘Is anybody in the military saying, “Oh gosh, poor Dan has gone green—has he gone girly-man on us now?” ’57—Friedman announces that the outgreening of Al Qaeda constitutes a typical example
of what happens when you try to solve a problem by outgreening the competition—you buy one and you get four free. In Nolan’s case, you save lives by getting [fuel transportation] convoys off the road, save money by lowering fuel costs [from the quoted “hundreds of dollars per gallon”58 often required to cover delivery], and maybe have some power left over to give the local mosque’s imam so his community might even toss a flower at you one day, rather than a grenade.59
The fourth benefit, courtesy of Nolan, is that soldiers will be so inspired