From his perch in the leafy canopy, the three-toed sloth teaches us how to read Richard Perle and David Frum: they are sending all of us a secret message to oppose the reelection of George W. Bush:
Three-Toed Sloth: Persecution and the Art of Neoconservative Writing: Any number of people have remarked on the profound oddness of this op-ed in today's New York Times, by Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and David "Axis of Evil" Frum. The concluding passage, in particular, is very puzzling:
Saudi Arabia provides about 10 percent of the 80 million barrels of oil the world burns every day, and earns about $63 billion a year. If we were to cut our oil consumption by some heroic amount, say 10 percent, it would be a drop in the barrel. Assuming everything else remained equal, the Saudis would still take in $57 billion a year. That can pay for a lot more of the extremist ideology they have been buying.
Rather, we must prevail on the Saudis to stop financing the extremism that breeds holy warriors, young men willing to die in order to realize their vision of an Islamist universe. The United States is the main obstacle to this extremist vision, which is why we are engaged in a war on terrorism.
If the Democrats are serious about their stated analyses of the terrorist threat, then they need to tell America their plan to destroy the terrorists and change the policies — or, if necessary, the regimes — of the states that support them. In addition, they need to propose a policy toward Saudi Arabia equal to the magnitude of the Saudi problem. Such a policy would be based on this direct challenge: either the Saudis put an end to the direct flow of money from the kingdom to extremist organizations or else the United States will no longer have an interest in the continued tenure of the present regime.
Can the Democrats credibly convey this message to the Saudis? Will they fight terrorism rather than chase terrorists? These are tests that they have thus far refused to take.
What is so strange here is that fortunes of the House of Bush are deeply linked to those of the Banu Saud (Prof. Kleiman goes so far as to speak of vassalage), and, as Prof. Balkin explains, the Bush administration's actions have been quite the reverse of what Perle and Frum recommend.
Now, Perle and Frum are intelligent and articulate men, and presumably chose their words with care, especially when writing in a prominent place (the Times editorial page), especially in a highly-salient part of their text (the finale). We are forced, then, to one of two conclusions. (1) These words should be taken at face value, and their authors are delusional. (2) These words do not mean what they seem to mean.
In support of the first alternative, we have evidence that Perle, at least, has been wildly out of touch with reality in the past; for instance, this (not suitable for family audiences). But to reason in this way is to be merely inductive, even grubbily empirical; can we not be more elevated? Indeed we can. Consider that Perle, while not a student of the late Leo Strauss, admits to having been influenced by him. (About Frum, I don't know, and it doesn't seem worthwhile to check.) One of Strauss's more prominent ideas is the that of secret writing, expounded in many places, including the essays collected in his little book Persecution and the Art of Writing. The philosophers of ancient and medieval times, Strauss says, would hide their most controversial and provocative teachings --- the doctrines most likely to provoke the priests and the mob --- in plain sight, by writing in a deliberately obscure and contradictory way. An astute reader, knowing that the philosopher was intelligent, and skilled in writing, and chose his words carefully, would be led to meditate on these difficulties, and so grasp what was really being said. Stupid people would merely get confused, and the philosopher himself could honestly point to many places where what he wrote upheld conventional pieties. Prof. DeLong provides a brilliant illustration of the method in action, by applying it to Strauss's own book on Machiavelli.
Strauss, then, certainly taught about secret writing, and may well have practiced it himself (as DeLong suggests). Certainly he opened the door for anyone who read him. Re-examining Perle and Frum's op-ed in this light, as a piece of openly concealed writing, we are led inescapably to the conclusion that these two prominent members of the neo-conservative tendency are in fact denouncing Bush for his ineffective, indeed counter-productive, policies. Just as philosophers who depends for their livelihoods on church and king would not write openly about the mortality of the soul or the constitution of the ideal republic, these two, being so closely associated with the present administration, do not discuss its flaws in plain terms. But for those who have eyes to see, they are endorsing the eventual Democratic nominee, whomever he is, as the country's only hope for a serious security policy.
Works for me.
Posted by DeLong at January 21, 2004 03:43 PM | TrackBack
Well, yeah, it does work ... except for that little problem concerning Perle's sanity.
Ah, but that's quibbling. Of course, since I'm in that mood, I'd like to comment on one of Frum and Perle's briefly-stated assumptions: that it would require a "heroic" effort by the U.S. to cut its oil consumption by a (gasp! staggering!) 10%.
Amory Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute, www.rmi.org) has quite satisfactory shown that had Ronald Reagan not gutted America's energy conservation efforts (principally in rolling back tough auto fuel standards, standards which have never been re-established since), the United States would have in fact eventually achieved oil INDEPENDENCE. That is, our oil imports would have dropped to zero, and we might even have enjoyed a period of once again being a net oil exporter.
In fact, as an RMI monograph on the topic puts it, "Between 1973 and 1986, the United States cut the energy intensity of the economy by a fourth, its oil and gas intensity by a third, and OPEC's market share by half. Oil imports fell from 46 percent of 1977 consumption to 28 percent five years later. By 1985, Persian oil imports were only one-tenth their 1979 peak. By 1986, U.S. energy savings, chiefly in oil and gas, had become a national energy source two-fifths larger than the entire domestic oil industry." (http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid320.php)
Now there is no telling how long such independence would have continued. Maybe it would have lasted for a few years, and then we'd have once again fallen back on oil imports. Maybe not. But the fact is that we were, in reality, well on our way to such a happy situation.
But it never happened: Ronald Reagan saw to that in an act that I, personally, consider pretty much a crime against our nation. The consequences were monstrous. Again, to quote the RMI monograph:
"... in 1986 the Reagan Administration rolled back mandated light-vehicle efficiency standards and cut the print run of the government's car efficiency guide by two-thirds. These actions doubled oil imports from the Persian Gulf—wasting oil at the same rate at which the government hoped oil could be extracted from beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—and contributed to Japan's growing share of the U.S. car market. Imports of Persian Gulf oil surged more than 500 percent from 1985 to 1989, to more than 600 million barrels of oil each year."
If you buy Perle and Frum's assumptions, of course, then "manfully" confronting the Saudi government is one of the necessary options that must be considered if you are to effectively tamp down future terrorism. But if you recognize Perle and Frum's assumption -- about energy, anyhow -- to be the nitwitism that it is, it's quite evident that our options could be far greater and in many respects more pleasing. If we weren't sending a nickel to Saudi Arabia every year, would we be nearly so likely to even give a rat's ass about who was running those countries?
-- Roger Keeling
Portland, OR.
[One last thought: unlike you, Dr. DeLong, I'm not an economist -- though if I could relive my college years, I think I'd much more seriously consider the field -- but it seems to me that Perle and Frum are quite wrong about the money Saudi Arabia would receive for its oil if we were "only" able to cut our consumption by 10%. They imply that it would result in a mere 10% reduction in revenue. Is that right? I mean, isn't it true that when a commodity is already fairly tight, a very small rise in demand can result in a notably dramatic rise in price ... and vice versa, wherein when a commodity is in high demand, a fairly small drop in that demand can result in a significant drop in price? Wouldn't a 10% drop in U.S. oil demand have quite significant impacts on the entire world oil market?]
Posted by: Marsman on January 24, 2004 04:48 PM