the addict won't confront the pusher

[The U.S. won't remonstrate against the Saudi government.]

Are we "Drowning Freedom In Oil"? The Muslim world does not hate the West. They quite reasonably hate what the West is doing to their world.

[An Indian Muslim community leader insists,] They hate that you are monopolizing all the nonrenewable resources (oil). And because you want to do that, you need to keep in power all your collaborators. As a consequence, you support feudal elements who are trying to stave off the march of democracy."

The more I've traveled in the Muslim world since 9/11, the more it has struck me how true this statement is: Nothing has subverted Middle East democracy more than the Arab world's and Iran's dependence on oil, and nothing will restrict America's ability to tell the truth in the Middle East and promote democracy there more than our continued dependence on oil.

Yet, since Sept. 11, the Bush-Cheney team has not lifted a finger to make us, or the Arab-Islamic world, less dependent on oil. Too bad. Because politics in countries dependent on oil becomes totally focused on who controls the oil revenues — rather than on how to improve the skills and education of both their men and women, how to build a rule of law and a legitimate state in which people feel some ownership, and how to build an honest economy that is open and attractive to investors.

The Saudi ruling family stays in power not through the support of the progressives, the secularized, U.S.-educated, pro-American elite and middle class.

It stays in power through a bargain with the conservative Wahhabi Muslim religious establishment. The Wahhabi clerics bless the regime and give it legitimacy — in the absence of any democratic elections. In return, the regime gives the Wahhabis oil money, which they use to propagate a puritanical version of Islam that is hostile to the West, to women, to modernity and to all non-Muslim faiths.

That money also finds its way into the hands of the terrorists with whom we insist we are at war.

And it is our oil addiction that keeps us from ever confronting the Saudis on this. Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.