Is Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty Encouraging Terrorism by Opposing Gas Tax Hike?

by Leigh Pomeroy

If we don't take measures now to reduce our dependence on oil, we only increase our vulnerability to the whims of terrorists and the anger of Mother Earth

"Sometime after 9/11 — an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudis — green went geostrategic, as Americans started to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were financing a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant strand, with our gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?" — Thomas L. Friedman, "The Power of Green," New York Times, Sunday, April 15

Every once in a while someone sends you an article that really blows away a little wall of your mental paradigm and becomes a "Duh! Why didn't I think of that?" moment.

I spend way too much time sorting through useless email, about half of which has links to or the actual text of sometimes substantial articles. Most are worthwhile, but one physically just can't read all that stuff.

As I tell my students, human beings biologically were not made to deal with the onslaught of data that we're bombarded with every day in this new "information age."

That's why, as Mankato Free Press Managing Editor Joe Spear quoted Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick in a lecture in Mankato Thursday night, "[i]t has now become possible to wake up, drive to work, listen to AM radio, sit at your desk, surf 200 different web sites, go home, turn on cable news, and never once all day encounter an idea or viewpoint that challenges the ones with which you woke up."

No wonder there's division in the country.

When an old friend, a medical economist, sent me the article from which I extracted the quote above, I quickly scrolled through the text. Tom Friedman, that's good. Over 25 double-spaced pages of Tom Friedman in a Word document, that's not so good. Long tomes like that I usually save for the wee hours of the morning when I need to read to get back to sleep.

We know what Tom Friedman's going to say: "The world is flat, blah, blah, blah." OK, so what else is new?

But when I stumbled upon the paragraph quoted above, it was a true "Aha!" moment.

Not that I already didn't know that American petrodollars were indirectly — if not directly — financing the very same insurgents and terrorists fighting U.S. interests around the world. I had read Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," which recently won a Pulitzer Prize, and Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars." Both made the fact very clear: It is Saudi money that is the primary funding source for militant Islamism.

Lest I sound anti-Islamic, let me put this in context. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA, the Pakistani ISI (their CIA and FBI rolled into one), and the mujahideen, some of whom where extreme Islamists, all worked together with and were amply fueled by Saudi funding sources. In other words, we were all on the same side fighting the Russians. This is not a secret.

But as it became clear that the Soviets were eventually going to pull out of Afghanistan, and that U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War were not going to leave as promised, Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist funding sources began to wonder if they were not replacing one devil with another, this one actually in Saudi Arabia.

It was this reality that most experts, including Wright and Coll, believe led directly to 9/11.

What Friedman argues (among many other things) in "The Power of Green" is that America's dependence upon Middle Eastern oil puts us at odds with ourselves. On the one hand, we spend billions of dollars fighting terrorists and insurgents to protect ourselves. On the other, we are funding those same terrorists and insurgents with the billions of petrodollars we send to the Middle East.

America's addiction to oil is like an addiction to drugs. The drug makes us feel good in the short run, but in the long run there are problems. First, we can't get off it easily; we keep having to buy more. Second, it causes widespread damage to our body — the earth — which we discovered from having to deal with air pollution and toxic waste, and are now realizing an even greater danger in global warming. Third, the dollars we pay for it fund a criminal element — terrorists and insurgents.

Which brings us to Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his opposition to raising the gas tax.

In his article Friedman concludes that everything we do that does not help wean us from our petroleum addiction only worsens that addiction, creating more danger for our own safety. Thus, it makes sense that the higher the price of gasoline, the less we use; the less we use, the closer we come to breaking our addiction; the closer we come to breaking our addiction, the safer we are.

Higher gas taxes raise the price of gasoline.

Gov. Pawlenty says he is anti-terrorist and anti-drug, and yet by refusing to allow a modest — and 10 cents is modest by world standards — increase in the gas tax he is advocating just the opposite.

On April 15 the The Star Tribune wrote, "Today the state's gasoline levy, at 20 cents a gallon, is not only lower than it was in the beginning [in 1925], adjusted for inflation, but also lower than it has ever been in the intervening 82 years."

This is a strong point, but just one of the many strong points that supporters of the gas tax increase have put forward. The most compelling argument, however, is Friedman's conclusion in "The Power of Green":

If we don't take measures now to reduce our dependence upon oil, we only increase our vulnerability to the whims of terrorists and the anger of Mother Earth.