The tragic killing of the 13 U.S. soldiers in Fort Hood by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is one is a string of events involving Muslim soldiers and veterans who have gone astray, raising delicate questions about the role and trustworthiness of the 3,000 Muslim soldiers in the U.S. military. The major incidents include the March 2003 attack in Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait by an American Muslim soldier, Asan Akbar, who rolled grenades into three tents where officers of the 101st Airborne’s 1st Brigade were sleeping, killing one serviceman and wounding 15; the six Islamic radicals who in May 2007 plotted to storm New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army Base with automatic weapons and execute as many soldiers as possible; and John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway Sniper, a Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam who was responsible for 16 shootings and 10 murders and who is scheduled to be executed today.

It would be inappropriate to malign or even question the loyalty of the hard-working Muslim men and women wearing the uniforms of the United States. But it would be equally irresponsible to ignore the amassing evidence that subversive and combustible elements with radical Islamic persuasion have infiltrated our military, often putting our personnel at bigger risk in their own bases than from their enemies on the battlefield.

While Muslim soldiers have served in uniforms loyally for decades, it is the rising number of Wahhabi-trained and converted Muslims that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since Wahhabism is one of the most radical and puritan strands of Islam, the penetration of Wahhabi thinking into the ranks of the military must be treated with care.

The genesis of radical Islamic thinking within the military was in the 1990-91 Gulf War, when nearly half a million soldiers and marines were deployed in Saudi Arabia to liberate Kuwait and defend the oil kingdom from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. While the Saudis were adamantly opposed to any expression of religious practice by their guests, including a ban on Christmas carols, bible classes and Christian and Jewish prayers, they embarked on a well-orchestrated and generously funded effort sponsored by the Saudi government to convert as many American military members as possible to Islam.

According to General Norman Schwarzkopf’s aide Rick Francona,

Saudi officers appeared to have been directed by their senior military or religious leadership to spot and assess potential converts to Islam among American military members. Once a particular American was ‘targeted,’ […] a few Saudi military officers, including a military imam, would attempt to meet the American in either a purely social setting or at least outside of the work area. These approaches usually included fairly generous gifts and of course, literature about Islam. The gifts included expensive briefcases, pens, books and other personal items. Americans who decided to convert to Islam were rewarded handsomely […] including all expenses paid trips to Mecca, and payments as high as $30,000.

The commander of Saudi forces in the Gulf, Prince Khaled bin Sultan bragged in his memoir that more than 2,000 American troops converted to Islam through this campaign. “These Muslim troops are now the messengers of Islam in the U.S. forces,” said Dr. Abu Ameena Bilal Phillips, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam (1972) who worked during the Gulf war under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force while converting U.S. troops to Islam in his spare time. After the war, Phillips moved to the United States to “set up Islamic chapters in the U.S. Defense Department.”

Nearly two decades have passed since the Saudi conversion campaign, and most of the converts may no longer be in uniforms. But the seeds sown during the Gulf War have germinated, creating scores of radicalized Americans who are a threat to their comrades in uniforms as well as to their civilian communities.

Fort Hood’s Hasan yelled “Allahu Akbar“—Arabic for “God is Great”—just before the shooting. As Camp Pennsylvania’s killer Akbar was being led away after the incident, fellow soldiers heard him shout: “You guys are coming into our countries and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.” Allahu Akbar, “you guys,” “our countries”—strong words which tell us that it is time to investigate what exactly happened back then in the desert and assess how serious and deep-rooted the damage is.

While Washington is mulling over what to do next in order to weaken Iran economically, this summer the Islamic Republic has taught us a lesson in strategic maneuvering, taking major steps to bolster its economy and geopolitical posture by positioning itself as an indispensable energy supplier to hundreds of millions of people.

Last May, I described here how after 14 years of negotiations, Iran, which has the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, signed a deal to connect its economy with its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, via a 1,300-mile natural gas pipeline. Both Iran and Pakistan hope to extend the pipeline into India and perhaps even into China. This would not only give Iran a foothold in the Asian gas market and ensure that millions of Pakistanis, Indians and perhaps Chinese are beholden to Iran’s gas, but it would also provide Iran with an economic lifeline and the diplomatic protection energy-dependent economies typically grant their suppliers.

Not wasting any time, Iran is now implementing the second tenet of its pipeline strategy. In July, it announced that by the end of 2009 it will be connected with its northern neighbor, Turkmenistan, Central Asia’s largest gas producer, via a pipeline. Turkmenistan’s interest in pumping its gas to Iran stems from its desire to diversify its export market. Two-thirds of Turkmenistan’s gas flow to Russia, and the dependence on one major client allows Moscow to take advantage of its former republic. But why would energy-rich Iran want to import gas from its neighbor? The answer is the Nabucco pipeline.

For some years, a number of European governments and a consortium of energy companies have been lobbying for the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Turkey and the Balkan states to Austria, aimed to ease Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. Last July an intergovernmental accord on Nabucco was signed in Ankara. Scheduled to be completed by 2014 at a cost of over $11 billion, the 2,000-mile pipe is estimated to supply between 5-10 percent of the EU’s projected gas consumption in 2020.

The problem, though, is that it is far from certain where the gas for Nabucco would come from. To date, not a single gas-producing country has signed on to the project. The U.S. position toward Nabucco has been supportive, with the caveat that no Iranian gas should supply the pipeline. But this is an exercise in self-delusion. Even if the 10-15 billion cubic meters of gas per year projected to be tapped from Azeri fields were to become available, much gas would still be needed to meet the pipeline’s capacity of 31 billion cubic meters of gas a year. No doubt about it: Nabucco would have to access both Turkmen and Iranian reserves.

This inconvenient truth is well known to all those involved with the project. But in order to maintain U.S. support, European governments, Turkey—the main transit state—and the consortium of companies which have undertaken to build the pipeline have made sure to drop Iran’s name from any official document or statement related to Nabucco. Tehran, so it seems, does not believe in denial. Its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows well that making Europe beholden to his gas is the best insurance for his regime and that Iran is an appealing alternative to Russia for those for whom Vladimir Putin is a far bigger menace than him. Once Nabucco is constructed, it will be only a matter of short time before Iranian gas will be requested. Hence, the pipeline to Turkmenistan will also make Iran a conduit for Turkmen gas.

In Iran’s effort to bring its gas into the heart of Europe, it has another project: a 1,100-mile pipeline currently being constructed from Iran’s South Pars gas field through Turkey and onward to Greece, Italy and other European countries. This pipeline is expected to deliver 20.4 billion cubic meters per year.

Whether Iran’s natural gas ends up powering turbines in New Delhi, Karachi or Vienna, one thing is certain: Iran will be richer and more geopolitically indispensable. As in the case of U.S. dependence on Saudi Arabia, China’s on Sudan or Germany’s on Russia, energy dependency is a major driver of foreign policy. Once these new gas conduits are established, it will be far more difficult for the United States to gather international support for policies aimed to reign in Iran.

All of these developments have received little attention in Washington, where sanctions on imported gasoline are the only game in town when it comes to crippling the mullah’s regime. Unlike the Bush administration, which was vocally opposed to the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, the Obama Administration has been mute on the issue. Instead, it has pressured India to give more consideration to global warming, essentially pushing India to shift from coal-powered electricity to cleaner burning Iranian natural gas. In doing so, the Obama administration has demonstrated that environmental stewardship enjoys higher priority than nuclear proliferation. At a volatile time when the Taliban is at Islamabad’s gate, the Obama administration has also refrained from pressuring Pakistan to reconsider its decision to provide Iran with an umbilical cord. As a result, should the worst happen and a Taliban-style regime take over Pakistan, the economies of the world’s most radical Shiite state and that of what could be the world’s most radical Sunni state would be connected to each other for decades to come like conjoined twins.

But all’s not lost. The Obama administration should actively promote alternative energy corridors which will prevent Iranian gas from reaching major markets while addressing Asia’s and Europe’s energy needs. One potential gas-pipeline project is the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. The project can supply Pakistan and India as much gas at a lower construction cost, while providing the impoverished Afghan government with a steady revenue stream in the form of transit fees. Most important, TAPI would allow Turkmenistan to sell its gas to India, enriching two U.S. allies (Afghanistan and Pakistan) rather than selling the same gas to Europe, enriching a U.S. enemy (Iran).

Washington should therefore impress upon Islamabad, recipient of $1 billion-plus yearly of U.S. aid, to adopt TAPI rather than the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline.

If the United States aims to stop Iran’s ambitions for regional hegemony, it is also in its interest to advance Europe’s and India’s use of renewable electricity and even coal rather than natural gas. And if those two markets insist on using gas, this gas should come in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) which can be imported from any gas exporter rather than in the form of Iranian gas.

The United States should cooperate with India on the development of a thorium nuclear fuel cycle rather than the commonly used highly problematic uranium-based nuclear fuel cycle. Thorium cannot be used as bomb material in any way; its fuel cycle is inherently incapable of causing a meltdown; its waste material consists mostly of 233-uranium, which can be recycled as fuel; its waste material is radiotoxic for tens of years, as opposed to the thousands of years with today’s standard radioactive waste; and it exists in greater abundance than uranium.

Only this month India announced that it has designed a new version of its advanced heavy water atomic reactor which will use thorium and low-enriched uranium (instead of highly enriched uranium) as fuel. At a time when the entire Middle East is going nuclear, this is a major opportunity for the United States to cooperate with India—after Australia, India and the United States have the second- and third-largest reserves of thorium—on advancing a safe pathway to globally-used peaceful nuclear power.

Finally, the United States should curb its enthusiasm toward Nabucco, take a more sober look at it and see the project for what it is: an economic lifeline for Iran. While this ambitious pipeline project may serve the interests of some European countries it would inevitably undermine those of the United States. Here the United States will find commonality of interests with Russia, the main opponent of Nabucco.

Nabucco was Verdi’s opera about the difficult plight of Jews under the ancient Persian Gulf ruler, Nebuchadnezzar. What an historical irony it would be if this eponymous pipeline ended up emboldening a modern regional ruler, one with much more sinister plans.

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to the United States, has a suggestion for America: drop this nonsense called energy independence. In a strongly-worded essay in Foreign Policy magazine, which coincides with the 150th anniversary of Edwin Drake’s discovery of oil in the United States, Turki lambastes American politicians for invoking energy independence, which “is now as essential as baby-kissing,” accusing them of “demagoguery.” For him, energy independence is “political posturing at its worst—a concept that is unrealistic, misguided, and ultimately harmful to energy-producing and consuming countries alike.” “Like it or not,” Turki concludes, “the fates of the United States and Saudi Arabia are connected and will remain so for decades to come.” (He said much the same in this clip from last May; if you don’t see it, click here.)

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We’ve heard these lines before each time the United States made progress toward lessening its dependence on oil. In February, for example, Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, warned of a “nightmare scenario” if consuming countries made progress in the development of alternative fuels. A decade ago, his predecessor, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, called technology “the real enemy for OPEC.” This is understandable. After all, no pusher wants to see his client circling around a rehab clinic. For Saudi Arabia, a world where oil plays a marginal role is the nightmarish materialization of the Saudi saying, “My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a jet plane, his son will ride a camel.”

More troubling is the parade of prominent Americans who deride the notion of energy independence, viewing it as jingoistic, unsophisticated, naive and misleading. One cannot doubt the patriotism of former CIA director John Deutch, who said “energy independence is not a constructive idea,” or former secretary of defense and energy James Schlesinger, who called it a “forlorn hope,” or Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin who referred to it as “pipe dream,” or Andy Grove, former chairman of Intel, who called the concept “a faulty goal,” or even the members of the Council on Foreign Relations energy security task force who went so far as to accuse those promoting energy independence of “doing the nation a disservice.” But just like Prince Turki, all of those distinguished Americans misunderstand what energy independence really is. As a result, they underestimate our ability to get there.

Contrary to popular conception, energy independence does not mean self-sufficiency. It doesn’t mean not importing any oil or walling ourselves off from the global market. Energy independence is not a function of the amount of oil we consume or import. Rather, energy independence means turning oil from a strategic commodity second to none—one that underlies the global economy and determines the course of world affairs—into just another commodity to trade.

Oil’s strategic status stems from its virtual monopoly over fuel for transportation, which in turn underlies our entire way of life. Worldwide, 95 percent of our transportation energy is petroleum-based. Our cars, trucks planes and ships can run on nothing but petroleum. This is why the much-touted policies that aim to either increase oil supply through domestic drilling or decrease its use by boosting fuel efficiency, while helpful, are insufficient as they do not address the factor that gives oil its strategic status: the petroleum-only vehicle.

Energy independence thus requires breaking the virtual monopoly of oil over transportation fuels, and this can only be done via competition in the transportation fuel sector. (Think about our electricity sector, where a variety of competing energy sources—coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar and wind—can contribute to the grid.) If our cars and trucks were able to run on other fuels in addition to those refined from petroleum, Saudi Arabia’s oil would have to compete over the drivers’ wallet against utility companies, alternative liquid fuels producers and natural gas suppliers. But as long as our cars are gasoline-only, oil remains the only game in town, which is exactly what Saudi Arabia wants.

A few types of vehicle technologies allow us to break oil’s monopoly. The first, and most affordable, is the flex-fuel vehicle that can run on any combination of gasoline and alcohol (alcohol does not mean just ethanol, and ethanol does not mean just corn). It costs an extra $100 per new car to make a regular car flex-fuel. All it takes is a fuel sensor and a corrosion-resistant fuel line. An Open Fuel Standard ensuring that every new car sold in the United States be flex-fuel would not only give rise to an industry of alternative fuels and the associated refueling infrastructure, but it would also drive foreign automakers to add fuel flexibility to all of their models, effectively making it an international standard.

Electricity is another transportation fuel that can compete against oil. It is cheap, largely clean, domestically produced and can be made from multiple sources. Its refueling infrastructure is widely available. All that is needed for an electric car to connect to the grid is an extension cord. Most automakers have already committed to produce models of limited-range pure electric vehicles (EV) or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). The latter allow drivers to travel on stored electric power for the first 20-40 miles, after which the car keeps running on the liquid fuel in the tank, providing the standard 200-400 mile range. For the 50 percent of Americans who drive 25 miles per day or less, shifting from barrels to electrons would make the visit to the local gas station a rarity. If all of those Americans owned PHEVs, a population the size of New York, Florida and Pennsylvania combined would be off oil most days of the year. A PHEV would normally drive 100-150 miles per gallon of gasoline. If it is also made as flex-fuel and fueled with a blend of 80 percent alcohol and 20 percent gasoline, oil economy could reach over 500 miles per gallon of gasoline.

These technologies are either at or few years away from commercialization. If we only understood energy independence properly and took the relevant measures to open the transportation fuel market to competition, oil would be far less central to the world economy than it is today. If we ensure that new cars are platforms on which fuels can compete rather than perpetuate the petroleum standard, then Prince Turki’s descendants, on the 200th anniversary of Drake’s discovery, will be more likely to ride camels than private jets. No wonder he wants us to think otherwise.

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While the world’s eyes are focused on Iran and Pakistan, little attention has been paid to the two countries’ decision from last week to move ahead with their plans to connect their economies via a natural gas pipeline. What may seem like a standard energy project could have profound implications for the geopolitics of energy in the 21st century and for the future of south Asia, as well as for America’s ability to check Iran’s hegemony in the Persian Gulf.

For both Iran and Pakistan, the pipeline project would be highly beneficial. Iran sees in the pipeline not only an economic lifeline at a time when the United States and its European allies are trying to weaken it economically, but also an opportunity, should the pipeline be extended to India, to create an unbreakable long-term political and economic dependence of one billion Indian customers on its gas.

Pakistan, for its part, views the pipeline as the solution to its energy security challenge. Pakistan’s domestic gas production is falling and its import dependence is growing by leaps and bounds. By connecting itself with the world’s second-largest gas reserve, Pakistan would guarantee reliable supply for decades to come. If the pipeline were to be extended to India it could also be an instrument for stability in often tense Pakistan-India relations as well as a source of revenue for Islamabad through transit fees.

For the Obama administration, the signing of the pipeline deal is a diplomatic setback which could undermine its policy of weakening Iran economically. Unlike the Bush administration, which vocally opposed the project, the Obama team chose to remain mute, either in order to facilitate rapprochement with Tehran or due to its reluctance to burden U.S.-Pakistan relations at a volatile time when the Taliban is at Islamabad’s gate. Should the worst happen and a Taliban-style regime take over Pakistan, the economies of the world’s most radical Shiite state and that of what could be the world’s most radical Sunni state would be connected to each other for decades to come, like conjoined twins.

But all’s not lost for the United States. Years would elapse between the signing of the deal and the actual running of gas in the pipe. Baluchistan, where the pipeline is supposed to run, is one of Pakistan’s poorest and most restive provinces. In recent years it has been a battleground of militias belonging to Baluch tribes who hate the government of Tehran as much as they hate the one in Islamabad. Taliban or Al Qaeda members who have reportedly moved from the tribal border region to Baluchistan and who are known for their dislike of both governments may find common ground with the Baluch. One can rest assured that the Baluch Liberation Army (which for years has conducted sporadic attacks against water pipelines, power transmission lines and gas installations), and Al Qaeda members (who perfected the art of pipeline sabotage in Iraq) would not spare the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, causing delays in construction and perhaps even termination of the project altogether.

Open U.S. support for those opposition groups is unthinkable, as any collaboration—overt or covert—would severely cripple our relations with Islamabad. What the United States can do is minimize the pipeline’s damage to its strategic objectives by ensuring that it ends in Pakistan and does not extend further into India, as both Iran and Pakistan wish. To date, India has been hesitant to join the project and entrust its energy future in the hands of its unstable neighbors. The deterioration in the India-Pakistan relations following the terror attacks in Mumbai has effectively taken the project off the table. But this could easily change in the future as India’s energy crunch deepens: some 400 million Indians already suffer from energy poverty. This is what the Obama administration should preempt today, by increasing energy cooperation with India. Pressure on India to curtail its use of coal for power generation may help reduce carbon emissions, but it could force India to shift to cleaner burning natural gas and hence drive it right into the welcoming arms of Iran.

It is in the interest of the United States to help India increase its share of nuclear power and renewable energy while constructing liquefied natural gas terminals along the coasts of the Indian subcontinent to allow diversity of supply. Without active U.S. participation in the effort to alleviate India’s energy poverty, Iran could soon become to India what Russia is to Europe.

There is so much blame to go around in the wake of the financial crisis that there is no wonder OPEC’s name shows up high in the list of culprits. After all, soaring oil prices and loss of wealth in 2008 to the tune of $1.2-$1.9 billion each and every working day, depending on the price of crude, not only helped pop the U.S. mortgage bubble but have also helped create the economic conditions that brought the U.S. economy to its current dire straits.

I don’t like the oil cartel and have even been called “the most hated man in Riyadh.” My positions on OPEC and its methodical price manipulation and looting of the world’s poor are well documented. But alleging that OPEC by some grand design brought America to the abyss and then pushed her over the cliff or, worse, concocted a vast conspiracy to impoverish millions of middle-class Americans seems like one bridge too far, especially in light of the fact that OPEC countries themselves are among the biggest casualties of the crisis. Oil prices have already fallen to $88 from their record $147 in July.

Since the beginning of the crisis, the Saudi stock market, the largest in the Arab world, lost more than 17 percent of its value. Qatar lost 19 percent, and Dubai’s exchange shed a quarter of its value in just four days of trading. Due to their relative insulation, Iranian and Venezuelan stocks were almost unscathed by the meltdown, but make no mistake: Iran and Venezuela are likely to suffer greatly from the current downturn. The IMF recently determined that oil prices must remain at $90-$95 for Iran and Venezuela to be able to balance their books. If the price of oil falls to $75-$80 a barrel, Caracas and Tehran will have to cut government subsidies and shave government spending. At such price levels the Iranian economy alone will lose $50 billion a year, which amounts to a per capita loss of $700-$800.

Furthermore, sovereign wealth funds owned by Persian Gulf governments are heavily invested in crumbling financial institutions, and their losses are monumental. Only last July, Abu Dhabi Investment Council caused a stir when it bought the Chrysler building in New York City for $800 million. Considering the desolation of New York’s financial district and the slumping U.S. real estate sector, this no longer looks like such a great deal.

So if OPEC indeed has a grand economic warfare plan, as of this writing it proves to be a spectacular failure. No doubt most OPEC governments do not have America’s best interests in mind, but their correlation of interest does not imply causality. The problem with laying the blame for our economic calamity on OPEC is that it hides the plain truth that this crisis is about our greed, not theirs. Any attempt to masquerade this inconvenient truth will only obstruct our lesson-learning process and therefore undermine our road to recovery. As Pogo once said “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Gal Luft :: During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and that are by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.

This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.

The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) can we drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either.

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Jacqueline Newmyer :: The next president’s foreign policy should be attentive to the ways in which the balance of global economic and military power has tilted toward Asia. To the extent that the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Central Asia and the Middle East since 9/11, an eastward shift in the U.S.’s foreign policy focus may be warranted. That said, the new administration should keep three points in mind as it crafts a Middle East agenda:

1. As the United States draws down its forces in Iraq (while renewing attention to Afghanistan), other external powers with strategic interests in the region are likely to perceive a vacuum to fill. For instance, China can be expected to continue to expand its ties in the Middle East by means of investments and agreements in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The United States may want to try to prevent any other single outside power from exercising undo influence. Options would include allowing India to develop better relations with Iran; encouraging Indian, Korean, and Japanese development of Iraq; and maintaining naval and air forces in the region.
2. The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is likely to have follow-on effects in the Gulf, where India has traditionally had strong ties. New Delhi will have incentives to transfer technology received from the United States. If American know-how is going to spread, it would be best for Washington to try to shape that process and build capital that might prove useful in the event of a future Middle East conflagration or crisis.
3. Whether John McCain or Barack Obama prevails, the United States will be led by a president with a compelling biography and personal appeal. Such a commander in chief creates a potential competitive advantage in executive diplomacy for the United States, relative to China and other Asian powers, in a region with a tradition of charismatic leadership and around the world. At least at the beginning of the first 100 days, the new occupant of the White House will project an image of U.S. strength, based on a record of self-sacrifice and resolve or a demonstration of the American electorate’s liberal tolerance and openness. Both kinds of strength have their uses in outreach to strategic interlocutors. After a campaign that seems poised to revolve around domestic issues, President McCain or Obama would do well to exploit this advantage by visiting allies with interests in the Middle East early in his term.

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Stephen Peter Rosen :: There are a number of ways in which we can think about the president’s agenda during his first 100 days. My suggestions reflect the belief that the new president will have essentially no staff in place, precious little knowledge of the ongoing work of the permanent bureaucracy, and not enough time to have developed a long term strategy. As a result, an agenda for the first 100 days should address an urgent problem in the international environment, and should make use of the president’s political capital at home in order to undertake necessary but difficult initiatives.

Most issues in the Middle East are not amenable to bold initiatives. The Arab-Israeli problem is not a problem, but a more or less permanent condition. Managing Iran will call for the slow and quiet development of American and allied military capabilities in the region, and new nuclear guarantees. Iraq and Afghanistan are problems for the long haul, both militarily and economically. Limiting the growth of Chinese influence in the region is a basic strategic goal, which presidential diplomacy can assist, as Jacqueline Newmyer points out.

But the destabilization of Pakistan could occur quickly and might already be underway before the new president is sworn in. There is a generation of Pakistani Army officers who came of professional age in the 1990s, who remember the United States walking away from Afghanistan and abandoning Pakistan. They are reported to be more Islamist than their elders. The frontier province in the north of Pakistan is the current home of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is safe there from the Pakistani Army. No Pakistani officer, old or young, was willing to fire on Pakistani civilians in the rioting earlier this year. The expectation, valid for 60 years, that the Pakistani Army will be able to hold the country together, is no longer supportable.

The American president-elect should begin private discussions with India, Israel, and China about what those countries would do in the event of a civil war in Pakistan that splits the Pakistani Army. This discussion would focus on how to contain the effects of the war within Pakistan, and how to ensure control of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The president-elect must not only ask the American military to present their contingency plans for such an event, but become deeply involved in shaping them. Homeland security must prepare for Pakistani nuclear weapons that are suddenly not under verifiable control. History, recent and old, confirms that absent a process that educates both political leaders and military officers about their often conflicting perspectives and needs, military plans will fail.

This is a problem which can benefit from timely preparation, in the days before and during the first 100 days of the next president.

What’s behind the sudden burst of willingness on the part of the Saudis, who announced that they will increase oil output by 500,000 barrels per day in the coming months? After all, for many months they were quite unfazed by the economic havoc caused throughout the world by the rise in oil prices. Even two visits by President Bush, loaded with offers of sophisticated weapons, nuclear technology collaboration and other goodies, didn’t convince them to open the spigot. So what changed? And why are the Iranians so opposed to the Saudi newfound goodwill? “If Saudi Arabia takes a measure to unilaterally increase [oil] output, it is a wrong move,” complained Mohammad Ali Khatibi, Iran’s new representative to OPEC, repeating the mantra that “the oil market is saturated.”

Here is a theory: The dispute within OPEC between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the first and second largest exporting members, has, in part, to do with the upcoming presidential elections. Unlike the Iranians who would like the United States to withdraw from Iraq so they can turn the country into another Iranian satellite, the Saudis dread nothing more than a strengthened and emboldened Iran and prefer the United States to stick around for a while. Their concerns about the regional destabilization associated with a nuclear Iran, and hence their loss of points in the centuries-old Sunni-Shiite rivalry, is only part of the story. What keeps the Saudis awake at night is the challenge to their ability to control the oil fields in the Eastern Province where most of Saudi Arabia’s oppressed Shiites happen to live. Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf could inspire a Shiite intifada in the place where Saudi Arabia’s wealth is generated, constituting a real danger to the survival of the House of Saud.

From a Saudi perspective, an American president who plans to withdraw from Iraq while being conciliatory toward Iran is bad news. The Saudis, therefore, vote McCain; Iran goes for Obama.

Pouring oil into the global market five months prior to the elections could influence the tight race in a non-trivial way. The state of the U.S. economy and high energy prices are at the top of the voters’ agenda. Most oil contracts are traded three to six months prior to delivery. The Saudi announcement would therefore signal to speculators that more supply is on the way, driving prices down in the futures markets. This could have a calming effect on the economy in the coming months, which is likely to benefit McCain. The question now is whether Iran will do something in response to help Obama.

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Four months and thirty extra dollars a barrel later, President Bush is again in Saudi Arabia trying to persuade the Saudis to open the spigot and increase OPEC production. Last time the answer was a resounding no. Not even a gift of 900 precision-guided bombs helped convince the Saudis to show more oomph at the pump. The lesson for the Administration: speak softer and wave a bigger gift. This time the United States has agreed to help Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, develop “civilian” nuclear power.

Of course the Saudi interest in nuclear power has nothing to do with energy production but with Iran and the Sunnis’ fears of Iranian hegemony. Does President Bush really believe that helping the Saudis with nuclear technologies would cause Tehran to pull the plug on its nuclear program?

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi insists that the oil market is well supplied, blaming the high prices on hedge funds and speculators. Considering the fact that OPEC production level is not much higher than its level thirty years ago and that Saudi output is lower than it was two years ago, putting the entire blame on speculators is utter nonsense.

The Saudis have always taken pride in their role as swing producers, claiming to own over 2mbd in spare capacity. But what good is this liquidity mechanism if they are not prepared to use it? When last month Nigeria’s production fell by 330,000 bpd, OPEC did not lift a finger to compensate for the loss. At what level will they provide us with liquidity? $200? $300?

If the Saudis are right and it’s all about the speculators, why not put this to test? This is exactly what Bush should have suggested: pour some oil into the market for a limited period of time and let’s measure the effect on prices so we can determine who is the culprit. With projected revenues of $400 billion this year, the Saudis can surely afford to embark on such an experiment and clear their name once and for all. But as I wrote here in January, we’d rather beg than blame.

The spectacle of an American president begging for oil every few months only to be rewarded with a slap in the face is getting a bit tedious. What’s next? Naming one of our aircraft carriers USS Ibn Saud?

President Bush’s appeal to the Saudis to increase oil production is more pitiful than understandable. At $100 a barrel, the United States bleeds over a billion dollars per day in order to finance its petroleum import needs. The result: ballooning trade deficits, growing unemployment, a weakened dollar and crumbling financial institutions like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch now forced to beg Persian Gulf monarchies for cash infusions. At current oil prices, the U.S. economy is melting faster than the ice caps.

But despite the president’s sweet-talk, his ridiculous appearance in a traditional Arab robe, his hand-holding with the Saudi monarchs, and even his gift of 900 precision-guided bombs, the Saudis were quick to respond with a slap in the face. Within one hour, the kingdom’s oil minister announced that oil prices would remain tied to market forces and the Saudis would not open the spigot.

This is hardly a surprise to me. The Saudis—despite their claims that oil high prices are the doing of Wall Street speculators and American SUV-driving soccer moms—are the first to blame for the current oil crisis. Their reluctance to invest in new production, their lack of transparency on reserve data and their anti-market practices, which prevent international oil companies from operating in their midst in any meaningful way, are the real reason for the quadrupling of prices in the past six years.

The Saudis are also the prime reason for the failure of the Iraqi oil industry to take off. Exactly four years ago I warned that the United States was turning a blind eye to the Saudi failure to seal its border with Iraq. This led to a migration of thousands of Saudi jihadists into Iraq, a fact that contributed to the terror campaign against Iraq’s oil industry. If not for the attacks, Iraq today could have been producing at least five million barrels per day. Instead it does less than three. Of course no one has ever held the Saudis accountable for the loss of two million barrels per day—an amount of oil that, were it in the market today, would have dropped prices by at least $30 a barrel. We’d rather beg than blame.

The truth is that the Saudis feel quite cozy at $100 oil. The world economy hasn’t come down (yet), the American public is docile, and oil-exporting countries—the recipients of a transfer on a scale the world has never known—are having a jolly time. Furthermore, the Saudis feel they have already met their obligation to the American economy by standing steadfast against other OPEC members like Iran and Venezuela, which are pushing for an OPEC decision to dump the dollar as the currency used for oil trades. Such a step could send the dollar down like a rocket.

So much of this is our own doing. Two years ago President Bush committed a major blunder, allowing Saudi Arabia’s admission to the World Trade Organization. By dint of Saudi Arabia’s leadership of the OPEC cartel, no other country is more responsible for violating free trade. Yet, its admission was not contingent on any behavioral change. Thus the Saudis enjoy the benefits of free trade while continuing to manipulate the price of the world’s most important traded commodity.

Furthermore, the United States has its own mechanisms to bring down oil prices. It owns 770 million barrels in strategic reserves. OECD countries have between them 4 billion barrels in stock. Yet, not a drop of oil has been released. Now that the Iowa caucuses are over, the United States could remove the 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol and bring billions of gallons of alternative fuel into the country almost overnight. This alone could drive down gasoline prices by at least 50 cents per gallon. And there are more strategic solutions which could remove the yoke of our oil dependence, like providing fuel choice and electrifying our transportation system. (We no longer produce electricity from oil.)

The spectacle of American presidents kowtowing to the Saudis is as old as U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Six decades ago FDR had to steal a cigarette in a stairwell of the USS Quincy in order not to smoke in King Abdulaziz’s presence. (Winston Churchill, on the other hand, had a smoke and a drink!) With growing dependence on the Saudis, our sovereignty and freedom of action have been steadily eroded. Barring some serious action, no matter who the next president is, he or she will have to ride a lot of camels and wear a lot of robes to keep the oil barrels rolling.