I’m glad President Bush gave a sober talk about where the US is going in Iraq and in confronting terrorism. But I can’t say I found it reassuring. I still don’t feel we have a broad, workable strategy. We currently have two national commissions looking backward — one on how 9/11 happened, and another about why no WMD were found in Iraq. Those are key questions. But what we really need is a bipartisan commission looking forward. I’d call it the National Commission for Doing Things Right. Its mandate would be simple: Tell the country what US policy would be if we were determined to do things right in confronting terrorism, no matter what the political costs — so we don’t have to have yet another commission looking backward two years from now. Here’s what I’d like to see: We would take all the money the Bush team has wasted on PR campaigns directed at the Arab-Muslim world and put it into three programs: a huge expansion of US 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 our 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 US. You don’t get better PR from ads. You get it from bringing people into America or American libraries and letting them draw their own conclusions. We would adopt a 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax and the Patriot Tax. A Patriot Tax would help pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars and help finance a Manhattan project to speed the development of a hydrogen economy, enabling the public to make a contribution to the war effort while lessening our 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 favouring a gasoline tax? Had we imposed a Patriot Tax 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. We would spearhead efforts in trade talks to reduce US, 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 subsidised produce. We would make a serious effort to diffuse the toxic Arab-Israeli conflict, including using NATO forces to separate the parties. We would 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. We have 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 9/11 as if all the old rules and methods had to go. I believe 9/11 was gigantic. But the old rule book — emphasising allies, the Geneva Conventions, self-sacrifice, economic development, education, Arab-Israeli diplomacy — was and remains America’s 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 recognising what has not changed. Because only through this recognition will we focus on an effective multilateral response to WMD proliferation, the creation of real stakeholders in globalization among the world’s poor, the need for reform in the Arab world and a style of US 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 recognise 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.’’
