Critic's Notebook
Many Friends Help Open New Orleans Fest

By JON PARELES

NEW ORLEANS, April 28 -- Of course Bob Dylan had the appropriate songs when he headlined the first day of the 37th New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, a celebration of New Orleans culture where Hurricane Katrina was on everyone's mind.

He didn't say a word beyond introducing his band. But he sang the baleful "High Water" and the not-so-carefree "Watching the River Flow"; he sang "Lonesome Day Blues," with lines like "The road's washed out -- weather not fit for man or beast." When he sang "Positively Fourth Street," it sounded like an indictment of the government's response to the hurricane; when he closed his set with "All Along the Watchtower," his band played power chords like warnings of the apocalypse.

Mr. Dylan, who recorded his album "Oh Mercy" in New Orleans in 1989, wrote about the city in "Chronicles, Volume One," his autobiographical book. "There are a lot of places I like," he wrote, "but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment." He added that it was "a great place to really hit on things."

Op-Ed Columnist
Gas Pump Geopolitics

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In recent days critics have accused President Bush and his new chief of staff of doing nothing more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the Titanic, as they shift, hire and fire senior White House officials while the president's popularity continues to plummet. Personally, I think that is a totally unfair charge -- unfair to the captain of the Titanic.

After all, he knew where he was going. His lookouts just couldn't see the iceberg spar lurking beneath the surface in their path until it was too late. This administration, and its captain, have been staring the iceberg right in the face for years -- it's called dependence on foreign crude oil. It has been totally visible, for miles and miles. And yet the Bush team has just kept sailing right into it, refusing to ask the American people to do anything hard to put America on a different energy course.

What is this iceberg staring us in the face? It is the fact that energy, broadly defined, has become the most important geostrategic and geoeconomic challenge of our time -- much as the Soviet Union was during the cold war -- for four reasons:

First, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars, and Islamist radicals and states with our energy purchases.

Second, continued dependence on fossil fuels is going to bring on climate change so much faster in an age when millions of new consumers in India and China are driving cars and buying homes. And that's why renewable fuels and energy-efficient cars, buildings and appliances are going to be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. The tougher the energy-efficiency standards we impose on our own companies, the more likely it is that they will dominate this new industry.

Third, because of the steady climb in oil prices, the seemingly unstoppable wave of free markets and free peoples that we thought was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now being stymied by a counterwave of petro-authoritarian states -- like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria and Sudan -- which now have more petro-dollars than ever to do the worst things for the longest time. They will poison the post-cold-war world unless we bring down the price of crude.

Fourth, we will never plant the seeds of democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world if we don't also bring down the price of oil. These Arab oil regimes will not change unless they have to, and as long as oil prices are soaring they won't have to. Iraq will become just another Arab state that taps oil wells instead of developing its people.

The beginning of leadership for the president is to tell the American people the truth: This is not your parents' energy crisis. The price of oil is not soaring just because of greedy oil companies. It is soaring because of structural changes in the global energy market that could have vast consequences for America and the world if we do not respond in a comprehensive manner.

Toward that end, we need a tax on gasoline at the pump that will keep prices around $4 a gallon (still roughly $1 less than most Europeans pay), or we need a tax on vehicles that will make gas guzzlers prohibitively costly and hybrids and smaller cars enormously attractive. The sooner and the more we take the price of gasoline up -- and keep it there -- the sooner we can bring it down forever. If we want to make wind, solar and biomass more competitive, gasoline has to cost more, not less.

The president can start by pushing the bipartisan Fuel Choices for American Security Act, now wending its way through Congress. This bill would mandate that every car sold in America would not just have seat belts, but would also be flex-fuel capable so it could run on ethanol, methanol or gasoline. It would also pave the way for the rapid commercialization of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which would combine electricity and gasoline to get 100 miles out of every gallon of gasoline consumed.

Finally, the bill would offer Detroit loan guarantees for transforming its fleets in this direction. "We're going to have to bail out Detroit anyway, so let's at least get some public benefit," the energy expert Anne Korin said.

Yes, the president has wasted so much time, but if he finally rises to this challenge, Democrats -- who should have taken the lead on this issue a long time ago -- have got to work with him. If the Democrats shirk this energy challenge, as the Republicans have, I'm certain there is going to be a third party in the 2008 election. It is going to be called the Geo-Green Party, and it is going to win a lot of centrist voters. The next Ross Perot will be green.

Op-Ed Columnist
Go West, Old Men

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

San Francisco -- As any loyal N.F.L. fan knows, there is something called the "West Coast offense" -- a freewheeling style of play invented by Coach Bill Walsh. Watching the recent visit of China's president, Hu Jintao, left me wondering if America wouldn't benefit from a "West Coast foreign policy."

It was surely no accident that President Hu made his first stop in the U.S. in Washington State -- not Washington, D.C. -- to dine with Bill Gates, who gave him the "state dinner" that the Bush White House refused to extend. Why the Bush team was unwilling to host the Chinese president for a state dinner is beyond me. If I owed someone $1 trillion, I'd give him a state dinner. I'd also give him breakfast, lunch and Chinese takeout.

But, more important than the meal, why the rush visit? Are there any two leaders in the world with more to talk about than Presidents Bush and Hu? How about hammering out a joint position on Iran, since the only way that Iran is likely to back down on its nuclear arms program is if China stands up to it? How about forging a joint Manhattan Project on alternative energy between the U.S. and China, or a real plan to get Chinese consumers to spend more and Americans to save more to help balance our trade?

Since none of those issues got a meaningful airing, it's no wonder President Hu went to Seattle first. At least with Microsoft or Boeing, he can do deals. Washington, D.C., has nothing to talk to China about because it is unwilling to impose anything hard on itself and therefore cannot demand anything hard from China.

My only regret is that President Hu didn't go home via California -- a state that has demanded something hard of itself and therefore could demand something hard of China.

China and California have a lot to talk about. California's air pollution is increasingly made in China, and China's environmental solutions are increasingly made in California.

Here's how: Lately scientists have tracked pollutants from fossil-fuel-burning cars and factories in China all the way over to California, where they are transported via winds. On any given day, particulates in the smog choking big California cities can be traced to dust storms in China, which have been exacerbated by rapid deforestation there. (China is making our cheap goods at a steep environmental price.)

But while the Bush team is in no position to lecture China on the environment, California is. Thanks to the energy efficiency standards that California has imposed on its own power industry, buildings and appliances over the last 30 years -- and its increasing reliance on renewable energy sources -- California today consumes a little more than half as many kilowatt-hours of energy per capita each year as the rest of America. This has helped California avoid having to build a whole slew of power plants.

This summer the California Legislature can push ahead even further when it votes on the Global Warming Solutions Act, which would set a statewide cap on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that cause global warming. The limits would be phased in by 2020 and require suppliers of electricity and fuels to dramatically reduce their use of fossil fuels through more efficiency and renewable energy -- so much so that the law, if passed, would probably spark a boom in green technologies in California and help California companies become leaders in this 21st-century industry.

"Our strategy is to put California in a leadership position and help the Chinese copy our regulations and incentives," said Bob Epstein, co-founder of a business-environmental coalition, Environmental Entrepreneurs.

We can't tell China not to use so much energy, especially given what energy gluttons Americans are. We can lead only by example. The Bush team, though, can't do that because it won't ask Americans to do anything hard on energy or the environment.

But California can. If China could be persuaded to follow California's model -- strong energy standards and supportive government policies to nurture the widespread deployment of clean technologies -- everyone could benefit, said Rob Watson, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Council's international energy programs. Imagine if China started making low-cost green appliances and cars the way it does cheap shoes and shirts?

So here's hoping that the next time China's president comes to America, he doesn't even bother to go to Washington, D.C. Why waste the gas? China's business is with America's West Coast foreign policy team, which can offer China's president inspiration, examples and dinner.

Op-Ed Columnist
China and Sudan, Blood and Oil

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Americans make a habit of bashing China for all the wrong reasons.

It's hypocritical of us to scream at President Hu Jintao, as we did during his visit last week, about China's undervalued currency. Sure, that's a problem for the world economy -- but not nearly as much as our own budget deficits, caused by tax cuts we couldn't afford.

We're now addicted to capital from China and other foreign countries, and that should be a concern. But our deficits aren't China's fault, and junkies like us don't have any basis to complain about the moral turpitude of those who supply cheap capital or other narcotics.

But there are two good reasons to complain to President Hu. First, he has presided over a broad clampdown on freedom of expression in China, including the imprisonment for 19 months of my colleague Zhao Yan, an employee of The New York Times.

Second, China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan's pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47's have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far, and China has protected Sudan in the U.N. Security Council.

Indeed, it's because of China's support that Sudan felt it could get away this month with sending a proxy army to invade neighboring Chad.

For more than two years now, I've been holding President Bush's feet to the fire over his refusal to make the Darfur genocide a priority for his administration. But Mr. Bush has taken half-steps in the right direction -- including pushing President Hu to cooperate on Darfur -- and that's more than can be said of the leaders of most other countries. Europe has snored through this genocide. Then there's the Arab League, which met last month in Sudan, in effect legitimizing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims (almost all the victims in Darfur are Muslim).

As Fatema Abdul Rasul wrote in The Daily Star of Lebanon this month: "For the entire Muslim and Arab world to remain silent when thousands of people in Darfur continue to be killed is shameful and hypocritical." Do you hear that, Hosni?

And where's the Arab press? Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?

The biggest obstacle to forceful action is China. The latest outrage came a few days ago when the U.S. and Britain tried to impose the most feeble possible sanctions -- targeting just four people, including a midlevel Sudanese official. China and Russia blocked even that pathetic action.

Why is China soft on genocide?

The essential reason is oil. China traditionally was self-sufficient in oil, but since 1993 it has been a net oil importer and it is increasingly worried about this vulnerability.

So China has been bustling around the globe trying to ensure oil supplies from as many sources as possible. And partly because most of the major oil fields are already taken, China has ended up with the world's thugs: Sudan, Iran and Myanmar. China has been particularly active in Africa.

About 60 percent of Sudan's oil flows to China, and Beijing has a close economic and even military relationship with Khartoum. A recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Africa notes that China has supplied Sudan with small arms, anti-personnel mines, howitzers, tanks, helicopters and ammunition. China has even established three arms factories in Sudan, and you see Chinese-made AK-47's, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns all over Darfur.

Last month in a village on the Chad-Sudan border, I interviewed a man who told how a Sudanese militia had grabbed his baby boy, Ahmed Haroun, thrown Ahmed to the ground and shot him in the chest. The odds are overwhelming that that gun and those bullets came from China.

Likewise, the women and children I've seen torn apart by bullets in Darfur and Chad -- that lead and steel was molded in Chinese factories. When women are raped and mutilated in Darfur, the gun barrels pointed at their heads are Made in China.

Let's hope China's 13 million bloggers take up this issue, for this has received very little attention in China but it is not so sensitive that discussion of it will get anyone arrested.

One of the central questions for the 21st century will be whether China's rise will be accompanied by increasingly responsible behavior in its international relations. Darfur is a test, and for now China is failing.

Op-Ed Columnist
35 Years Later

By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 24, 2006

Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or losing votes, or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives.
-- John Kerry on Iraq

Boston

Saturday was the 35th anniversary of John Kerry's appearance as a young Vietnam veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his testimony, Mr. Kerry called for an end to the war in Vietnam and famously inquired: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He marked the occasion Saturday with an important and moving speech before an audience crammed into historic Faneuil Hall. The speech took on even more poignancy as it became known over the weekend that at least eight more American G.I.'s had been killed in Iraq.

I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.

In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.

"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles."

He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans -- including retired generals -- to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.

"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."

He described the war as "rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception." And in a comparison with Vietnam, he said it is time now to get past "the blindness and cynicism" of political leaders who would continue to send "brave young Americans to be killed or maimed" in a war that the country had come to realize was a mistake.

By the time he testified in 1971, he said, "it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen -- disproportionately poor and minority Americans -- were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men who kept sending them there."

(In a private discussion, Mr. Kerry and I talked about the many thousands of American G.I.'s who were killed in Vietnam after it had become widely known that victory would not be achieved. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for U.S. forces in Vietnam in the mid-1960's, has noted that American losses nearly doubled between 1969 and the end of the war. He was never convinced, he said, that "those last 25,000 casualties were justified.")

Mr. Kerry also warned against allowing the war and the fear of terror to change the character of the United States. He received a standing ovation when he said, "The most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford."

In an interview after the speech, I asked Mr. Kerry about the secret prisons being run by the C.I.A. and the practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are abducted by the U.S. and sent off to regimes skilled in the art of torture.

He said he believed these policies were violations of the Geneva Conventions, then added: "But the more important thing is that they are violations of our values, violations of our principles. Who are we to run around the world saying protect the Falun Gong or somebody else's right to speak out, and then we're willing to take people without knowledge of [guilt or] innocence and throw them into torture situations. I think that's reprehensible."

The Long China View
How to manage an emerging power without a crisis.

We're often told that Chinese politicians take "the long view." True to form, when Chinese President Hu Jintao meets President Bush today, he'll reportedly give him a copy of Sun Tzu's "Art of War," the centuries-old classic of how to conquer an enemy through craft and cunning. How ironic a gesture that would be, given that the U.S.-China relationship is as friendly as it's been in years, and that America's policy toward China is itself a long-run strategic calculation worthy of Sun Tzu.

Managing the rise of any great power is an enormous foreign-policy challenge that can easily go awry, as the world learned with Germany and Japan. China's transition is complicated by decades of isolation and poverty wrought by Mao, and now by rapid economic growth amid a still authoritarian one-party state. While China's emergence is creating a solid economic partner, it's also empowering a leadership that doesn't always share America's values or interests.

Over several administrations, the U.S. has pursued a two-track strategy of engaging on trade and economics while pushing back on security when China muscles its neighbors or creates other trouble. There have been strains along the way, such as the ill-advised U.S. textile quotas and the occasional foreign-policy dispute. But taking the long view, this strategy has worked well for both countries.

Over the past decade, China's GDP has more than doubled, lifting millions out of poverty and creating, for the first time in centuries, hope for a better future for its 1.3 billion citizens. All of this has been helped by the mainland's steady, if uneven, embrace of international legal and trading rules, which should grease the wheels for more liberalization in the future--and especially for the steady rise of a Chinese middle class.

For America, more efficient Chinese production has slashed the price of consumer goods and created investment opportunities for U.S. companies, which poured more than $15 billion into China in 2004 alone. These U.S. companies then export their goods back to the U.S. or elsewhere around the world. This doesn't merely help China; it makes American companies more competitive. The Chinese government's purchase of U.S. securities has also kept bond yields low, extending the U.S. and world economic expansion.

The hue and cry over America's trade deficit with China is a distraction that masks this broad and beneficial economic relationship. It's also misleading. China runs a trade surplus with America, but it also has a deficit with the rest of Asia. That's because Asian companies that once exported goods directly to the U.S. now send them to Chinese factories for assembly and export. More than half of all Chinese "exports" aren't really "Chinese" at all. And here's a trade statistic you won't hear much about: China's relative share of the U.S. trade deficit is shrinking as wages rise on the mainland and American businesses source cheaper goods from other countries.

That's all news to Capitol Hill, where China bashing is as fashionable as Japan-phobia was 20 years ago. The favorite canard is to claim that China artificially depresses its currency to boost exports. But the truth is that China has merely pegged its exchange rate to the dollar, thus subcontracting its monetary policy out to the Federal Reserve. The real problem is China's retrograde financial system, which is still dominated by political controls.

Yet here, too, there's positive, incremental change. China's central bank announced last week that it would begin easing capital controls. In the long run, freer flows of money should give Chinese consumers and companies more foreign buying power, and help rebalance U.S.-Chinese trade.

The security challenge posed by China's rise is a more difficult matter. The Pentagon estimates that Beijing spends $75 billion to $100 billion annually on defense. This wouldn't be worrying if China was a democracy without larger global ambitions. But Chinese leaders are taking a larger role on the world stage, and not always responsibly. This includes their refusal to join U.S. efforts to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions, and only last week blocking sanctions against Sudan's leadership for supporting genocide in Darfur.

Some of this, as in Darfur or cutting deals with Iran, is motivated by what it perceives as economic self-interest. Beijing wants access to energy supplies to fuel continued growth. Yet over time its diplomats need to understand that promoting rogue regimes leads to instability and thus less secure energy supplies. American politicians didn't help on this score by panicking last year when a Chinese company sought to buy one of the smaller American oil companies.

More dangerous are the nationalist passions that sometimes erupt, and which the Communists sometimes pander to as a substitute for their own lack of democratic legitimacy. Talking up "reunification" with Taiwan or posturing menacingly toward Japan are both politically popular in China.

The Clinton Administration did too little to resist these impulses, and it once had to resort to sending a carrier through the Taiwan Strait as China tried to see how far it could really go. The Bush Administration has pushed back harder and more consistently, in particular imposing sanctions on Chinese companies that violate proliferation rules and calling for more transparency on defense spending (even while seeking more useful military-to-military contacts). The U.S. has also been strengthening its alliances with Japan, Australia, and most recently India, as strategic counterweights should Chinese nationalism come to a boil.

The larger strategic bet here is that sooner or later China's economic progress will create the internal conditions for a more democratic regime that will be more stable and less of a potential global rival. This may take many more years, but the seeds of political change are already evident. Rural protests numbered more than 87,000 last year, journalists are staging walkouts to protest censorship and more ordinary Chinese citizens are demanding that the Communist Party uphold their legal rights and respect their right to worship.

Mr. Bush can help that process by prodding Mr. Hu to improve China's disgraceful human rights record. But the changes aren't taking place because the U.S. demands it. China's burgeoning middle class, created and buoyed by economic growth, will drive internal change.

That's why Congressional threats to impose tariffs or brand China a "currency manipulator" are so dangerous. They damage American business interests, and they could also endanger the prosperity that will drive China's political change. For their part, China's leaders believe they can maintain one-party political control even amid all of this dynamic economic growth. History, as Sun Tzu might argue, would suggest they are wrong.