Oil Dependence

I think the common arguments about our dependency on Mid-East oil ("The Fuel Cell Solution"?) are seriously wrong-headed. Our dependency on that resource may be much more a good thing than a bad thing, and those looking back a century from now may decide that our dependency saved us. Here's my argument:

The necessity of reforming Muslim societies is the result of a demographic/economic crisis in that region: astronomical birth rates making for young, job-hungry populations combined with failed economies that provide no opportunity. It is also a political crisis, because economic failure has been produced by the traditional oligarchical or repressive socialist political regimes that have dominated the region (the comparison with Israel tells this tale). Religious fanaticism is almost completely a consequence of these problems, not a cause of them; it will recede as Muslim societies become more economically successful -- which will require political liberalization.

(Sidebar: We are fortunate that political repression and dictatorship do not seem to be consistent with how modern economies work, with their requirements for free-flowing information, entrepreneurial nimbleness, and warp-speed shuffling of capital and other resources. Imagine the situation if, for example, Saddam Hussein's regime had been able to also become an economic powerhouse providing rapidly rising standards of living for the Iraqi population. That is what made Hitler such a nightmare for the democracies in the 1930s.)

Muslim societies as they exist now are malignant in the sense that they can produce and export suicidal jihadists in unlimited numbers. If Muslim societies cannot be successfully liberalized, then the developed world has no secure future, NO MATTER WHAT ELSE WE DO. There is *no way* to dodge this, and there is no diplomatic solution.

OIL: There is also no possible technological fix, such as any version of "The Fuel Cell Solution". The idea that these problems would be solved if we could just eliminate our dependence on Mid-East oil is utterly wrong. That would succeed only in destroying the only economy those failed societies have, further impoverishing them, and making everything instantly worse. We should be very glad that they have oil, and that we need it enough to buy it from them, because that is all that is keeping the Muslim world minimally, if temporarily, afloat.

We are buying oil from the Mid-East, but at the same time we are also buying something else at least as important: Time. Specifically, we are buying the time - a peculiarly vicious, precarious, and bullet-riddled grace period - to introduce liberalizing reforms into those societies in order to change them fundamentally. The race is between effecting those changes and the explosive demographic/economic pressures that are building in the region. That building pressure is not something that is threatened or that might occur; that pressure has been building for years and can only accelerate. Demography is unforgiving. Rapidly-growing populations with an average age of 15 are not something that *might* happen in the Muslim world, they are already here. Sept 11 was extremely important for two reasons. First, it gave us the hard slap in the face that while we were focused on other things, the Mid-East time horizon had crept awfully close; second, Sept 11 provided the political resolve to get started on what we have to do, which is to remake the Mid-East (fortunately, that will be good for Muslim people, too). It is almost beyond irony that, in that sense, Osama bin Laden may have saved the West. Osama, and our oil dependence.

Byron