In Iraq, on convoys, I drove in a Humvee. The truck had four-wheel drive, the ability to ford about three feet of water and to tow a substantial load. It was reinforced with steel and Kevlar to protect me from IEDs, shrapnel, and small-arms fire.

In New York City, everyday some guy parks his H2 Humvee in front of the building where I attend graduate school. In many ways it resembles my Humvee in Iraq. Although it has no ballistic windows cracked open to allow rifle muzzles access to range freely, it could easily.

Driving Humvees in New York, LA, and in between keeps people like me driving Humvees through Iraq, waiting to get blown up. Yes, it’s about oil. But it goes beyond oil and beyond Humvees. It’s about the necessity of luxury in our oil-based marketplace that keeps us in the Gulf.

Look at this objectively: There are two reasons terrorists want to kill us and have substantial popular support to do so:

(1) We support Israel in the most universally infuriating crisis in the Arab world: the perceived persecution of Palestine. When we see AK-47s, we think of Russia and the third world. When Arabs see Israeli Apache helicopters shooting up Gaza “safe houses”, they see America.

(2) With a history of exploitation, America now partners with non-democratic governments to secure oil access. We keep troops stationed in the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia- home to Mecca. The governments we make oil deals with are tiny, elite monarchies or autocratic regimes reaping massive oil revenue which they do not share proportionally with their people, and instead allow or encourage extremist ideologues to distract the population.

You may disagree with some of these particulars, but I submit as fact that at the core of most Arab extremists’ arguments about America are Israel, trespassing on the holy land, the exploitation of Arab resources, and the hypocrisy in fighting for “democracy” while facilitating its antithesis. All but one of these leads to oil.



Think about that guy’s Humvee in New York. It’s an absurdity, an offense to American veterans, and depressingly, the result of extensive market research. But it’s not just that a Hummer gets 11 miles per gallon and that therefore America needs oil. The gas that Humvee uses is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the unmistakable white plastic housing on your iPod, the water bottle next to your computer, the toolbox at your feet, or the fleece on your shoulders. All of these things are made from petroleum. We exist in a market that is dependent on oil. War runs on it. Companies that create profit and build GDP sell it and make things out of it, and Americans, unwittingly, demand it constantly, in nearly every purchase.

It doesn’t take a Beltway think-tanker to figure out that the world’s environmental crisis is closely tied to the oil problem, and that our oil problem is intrinsically linked to, if not the root of, our problems with terrorism and Arab extremism.

The next president should make the following promises: “I will get the US out of the Middle East. I will stop supporting autocratic regimes for oil. I will do this by leading a national effort to find clean, alternative energy sources and materials for manufacturing that are safe for people and the environment. And simultaneously, I’m going to broker a peace deal in Israel.”

Could you imagine the ramifications of those actions? Terrorism has its raisons d’être cut out entirely. Iran and other state-sponsors of terrorism lose all bargaining power, and their cash flows dry up. America secures first-mover advantage and becomes the world leader in sustainable technology, while restoring international leadership as the foremost steward of the environment.

Impossible right? No. Inevitable. Economically, the question is, do we want to play catch up, or be on the crest of the wave in the race to sustainability? We are heading towards a known strategic inflection point. It might be when the oil runs out, or maybe in two years when we’ve left Iraq and widespread Sunni-Shiite war catastrophically disrupts oil exports throughout the region. Militarily the question is easier to answer: do we want to get the troops out of the Gulf and reorient on other threats or not?



At the end of the day, most Americans write off preserving the environment as something incomprehensible, a scientist’s problem, a liberal hoax, or corrective action that will be so cost-prohibitive as to create financial ruin.

These are excuses. A real American leader would rally the country and demand personal sacrifice alongside market innovation. I submit that environmentalism is intrinsically patriotic, absolutely essential, and far more justified than preemptive war.

If you want Humvees off the streets of Iraq, you have to get them off the streets of America.


Further Reading: The Greening of Geopolitics by Tom Friedman (NYT) Friedman This Week (NYT)

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