Since its creation in 1975, in the aftermath of the oil embargo and price shocks, the SPR, located in underground caverns in Texas and Louisiana, has never been at its capacity of 700 million barrels. Today it is at 545 million barrels, an amount the nation uses in 53 days. The SPR is insurance against major interruptions of imports.
But the SPR was last in the news when it was used for minor management of gasoline and heating-oil prices. In the autumn of 2000, for two banal reasons (one was supply, the other demand), the prices of gasoline and heating oil rose a bit. So President Clinton felt the nation’s pain and tapped 5 percent of the SPR–30 million barrels–to nudge the price down. This was, in effect (as NEWSWEEK’s Robert J. Samuelson wrote at the time), a $1 billion election-eve contribution to Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Times, and the president, are different now.
Bush entered office at a time when political conflict between the parties (about the modalities of delivering a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare, and the nuances of involving “faith-based” institutions in the delivery of social services, and so on) was both bitter and little. It was well characterized as the narcissism of small differences. But there was nothing small about events last week.
Last week German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder forced, and won, 336-326, a vote of confidence on his decision to deploy 3,900 troops in Afghanistan. It is the first post-1945 deployment of armed German forces outside the NATO area. Sixty years ago last week the Wehrmacht was pushing toward Moscow.
Last week Vladimir Putin, visiting the United States, gave additional evidence that the force of the explosions at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have blown Russia into Europe. Of course, when one studies European literature, one studies Pushkin and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. However, most Russians have resisted identifying with Europe, clinging to an often surly sense of otherness. They still do. But Putin evidently will not accommodate that impulse. His refusal to do so is the most important success of Bush’s insistence that (in the words of James Russell Lowell’s very American hymn) “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide/In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.” Given a remarkably stark choice, Putin has decided that Russia is a Western nation after all.
Last week Bush made a decision that in almost any other week would have eclipsed all other news–the decision unilaterally to slash America’s strategic nuclear arsenal more than two thirds, from about 7,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 in 10 years. A few hours later Putin said Russia would cut two thirds of its arsenal of 6,000. Even though this was somewhat of a choreographed minuet, there still is significance in the fact that the United States went first and was going to go in that direction in any case.
Liberal critics have faulted Bush for unilateralism in foreign policy–principally, rejecting the Kyoto global-warming accord and some other heavily negotiated pieces of paper. This time many of those critics think his unilateralism is dandy. Some incorrigible American arms controllers seemed to want a reprise of Cold War negotiations, culminating in a treaty-signing ceremony. Not Bush, who breezily said: “If we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I’ll be glad to do that. But that’s what our government is going to do over the next 10 years.” Similarly, Bush made it clear to Putin that the United States is going to pursue ballistic-missile defenses, with or without Russia’s cooperation in amending or ending the 1972 treaty aimed at preventing such defenses. So there.
So where do we go from here? Until last week the Pattons of the punditocracy were saying that the war to collapse the Taliban regime was not going well–why, it was already all of five weeks old. (Never mind that it was not until four months after Pearl Harbor that the Doolittle raid took the war to Tokyo, and then only for a few minutes.) Now there is a danger of the opposite tendency, of thinking that the war on terrorism is now a mere mopping-up operation.
However, in Germany last week, in an unusual public meeting of senior officials from German and U.S. investigative and intelligence agencies, Ulrich Kersten, head of the Bundeskriminalamt, which is akin to the FBI, reported that at least 70,000 Islamic fundamentalists have passed through Al Qaeda’s terrorist-training camps in the last few years. And Michael Rolince, head of the FBI’s antiterrorism section, warned: “These people do not retire. We will find them, or we will hear from them again.”
The terrorists are the objects of a full-court press, by military forces in Afghanistan and police forces in many other nations. By the end of last week it was possible to imagine that even Osama bin Laden would be “found.” That is a judicious choice of verb, permitting agnosticism about whether such leaders should be taken alive, at the risk that there might be a reunion of Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the “O.J. dream team” for another courtroom circus.
However, the crumbling of Taliban resistance hastens the day when the Bush administration can–must–confront a much larger question, which is: Next?
The short answer is: Iraq. A longer answer may be: Begin to partition Iraq by bringing the Iraqi opposition leaders from London to the portion of Iraq under the no-flight zone. Saddam Hussein may already feel what bin Laden surely feels–fear, a step on the way to terror.
