Seinfeld Option on Iran and Biden-Gelb (+Six Neighbors) Plan for Iraq

The latest AP-Ipsos poll finds that “Angry conservatives are driving the approval ratings of President Bush and the GOP-led Congress to dismal new lows”. It suggests to me that even the "war on terror" is taking a back seat to $3/gallon gas for the party faithful. I find this amusing only because all manner of conservative pundits have been singing of the same "law of supply and demand" song sheet after gas broke the $3/gallon milestone again last month for the first time since Hurricane Katrina – only this time around there were no natural disasters to blame! In fact, in the April 28th edition of The Washington Post, neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer head-lined his column “Say It With Me: Supply and Demand”. However, I strongly believe the reasons that we are paying $3/gallon at the pump has more to do with our foreign policy of the past few years than as much to do with the laws of a dismal science.

On the demand side, we cannot do much in the short-term to influence China and India from “gobbling huge amounts of energy” as Mr. Krauthammer calls it. But then the Bush Administration could do far more to curb our own insatiable domestic demand in the short-term – something that Mr. Krauthammer chose not to address despite waxing nostalgic about how we did the very same thing back in the seventies? On the supply side, Mr. Krauthammer is surprisingly silent on the Bush Administration’s current (Iraq) and perceived (Iran) casus belli that is contributing to the steep hike in the price of oil. He offers the perennial long-term conservative answer in “the missing supply of might-have-been American crude” from the “Arctic and outer continental shelf”. I would dare suggest that more immediate changes in our foreign policy could bring about an equally rapid decline in oil prices in short order.

Only a couple of days prior to Mr. Krauthammer’s lesson in macroeconomics, President Bush had announced his decision to tinker with the "supply side" of the oil equation. A front-page story in the April 26th edition of the Post reported:

“Amid growing Republican unrest about the politics of $3-plus gasoline, Bush told the Renewable Fuels Association he will take the unusual step of suspending shipments to the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to boost supply and help hold down oil prices.”

Ironically, in September 2000, Governor Bush had said the following at a presidential campaign stop in Cleveland, and I quote him from the CNN archive:

“Strategic Reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election. It should not be used for short-term political gain at the cost of long-term national security.”

I think it is foolhardy for the President to expect that, by skipping a few deposits into a reserve that is nearly full, he is going to make any immediate difference to the price of gas at the pump. Although, it could make a difference if he decided to open the spigot to the tune of one million barrels a day every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day? But then he would only be further guilty of fueling our “addiction to oil” – a belated conclusion that he had arrived at in his 2006 State of the Union speech, when he pontificated:

“America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

One would imagine that if we are importing this “drug” from “unstable parts of the world”, we should either wean ourselves off the drug or try to stabilize parts of the world from where we get it? In the past five years President Bush has not offered any serious rehab program to wean American motorists off their oil addiction. More distressingly, his foreign policy initiatives have only further “destabilized” parts of the world (Middle East, Venezuela) from where we import our oil.

In an interesting theory, New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman postulates in his May 5th column that there is a direct correlation between rising energy prices and the decline of democracy in, what he calls “petro-ist” states. I would take his theory one step further and suggest that the United States has had a decline in its bilateral relationships with each one of these petro-ist states throughout the Bush presidency. So I would posit that instead of the price of oil, it should be the larger Bush foreign policy – that has brought about this precipitous decline in our bilateral relationships with many of these petro-ist states – that needs to become, what Mr. Friedman refers to as “a daily preoccupation of the secretary of state”. A less confrontational foreign policy would bring about an upsurge in our bilateral relationships with several of these petro-ist states, which in turn would result in a dramatic and faster drop in the price of oil.

With regards to petro-ist Iran, the Wall Street Journal came up short in its April 21st editorial, “Bush and Iran”. They reiterated our long-standing problem with Iran but offered no solutions – something that they have been critical about with the “Bush and Iraq” critics? Unfortunately, the river of bad blood between Iran and the U.S. has been flowing for far too long and far too deep to offer any hope for a serious breakthrough via bilateral negotiations. Unless President Bush can get the international community to agree to prolonged and comprehensive sanctions enforced by a complete land, air, and sea blockade of Iran – he might as well get used to a nuclear Iran, just as he has become accustomed to a nuclear North Korea.

With regards to petro-ist Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie H. Gelb (President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations) recently proposed a very reasonable plan in an op-ed in The New York Times. Most of the Biden-Gelb plan for “Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq” makes a lot of sense. However, it did not take into consideration one very important geo-political consideration that is critical to the plan’s success – Iraq’s neighbors. When Saddam was in power he was a constant threat to his neighbors. Once the United States withdraws and with no unifying authoritarian figure in control of Iraq, its neighbors will become a threat to its unity. We cannot forget that Iraq was a country created by the British from disparate nomadic regions. The Turks have had historical issues with the Kurds and Iran will continue to become increasingly influential and meddlesome with the autonomous Shia portion of Iraq. So we need to involve all of Iraq’s neighbors ¬– Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey – upfront in a Dayton-type round of discussions to ensure that the Biden-Gelb plan is destined to succeed.

Conclusion: The Bush Administration must ignore Iran for the rest of its term (I call this the Seinfeld option – “Do Nothing”), as it has ignored North Korea (since the start of the second term), and also immediately initiate another “six-countries” round of talks on implementing the Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq. If President Bush immediately executes the Seinfeld option on Iran and Biden-Gelb (+Six Neighbors) Plan for Iraq, I am confident that we will see crude oil prices sink below $50 a barrel and domestic gas at the pump under $2/gallon by the fall! More importantly, we will witness a more stable Middle East and a concomitant increase in our standing in the world.