Ignorant Leftist Elitists

The advent of a new year is an appropriate time for resolutions, and here is one some critics of the war in Iraq should memorize, unless of course they think it is their duty instead of simply their right to be loutish and ignorant. "I promise to quit insisting that the war in Iraq was about securing oil for greedy Americans and that the prime culprits include owners of SUVs," they will repeat over and over again but only after having acquainted themselves with some facts and analyses they have so far studiously avoided. It was a laziness brought on by a sense of intellectual and moral superiority that led to their misapprehensions in the first place. We don't want more of that.

Among the points they should consider is that the United States was obtaining oil from Saddam Hussein before the war and could have made even better deals without an invasion that put the underground reserves at high risk of sabotage. It should then be brought to their pseudo-sophisticated attention that Iraq produces just 3 percent of the world's oil, despite having enormous amounts available, and that increasing that percentage substantially in a short period of time was never in the cards.

They should learn from people like Daniel Yergin, an expert on the issue who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book on oil. He pointed out to me in an interview before the war that most of America's imported oil comes from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Canada and Mexico, and that Russia will likely be a primary supplier a decade down the road. Not Iraq; that's just nonsense.

While I believe the war in Iraq was justified, I also think there were sound arguments against it, such as the prescient warning that the United States would encounter unending and violent opposition after an initial military victory. But those people seeking out ulterior political and economic motives are no more profound in their understanding than any other fringe group of conspiracy theorists and for some reason refuse to grapple with this truth:

Saddam was reckless, genocidal, had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, was kissy-face with terrorists, was a warmonger, was bribing his way out of sanctions and would remain a threat to this country, peace and Middle East stability as long as he was in power.

Now, on to this silly business about SUVs. Those who berate their owners as insensitive beasts should read up on what happened after Congress voted in 1975 to establish the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard requiring that automobiles get more miles to the gallon of gasoline. Detroit achieved the objective with smaller cars - and guess what? The fuel consumption per capita has not gone down.

Why not? There are a number of reasons, but search diligently enough, and you will find that one of them is that, when people drive small cars that use less gas for trips hither and yon than their bigger cars did, they drive more. While the small cars are more fuel-efficient, they may still consume as much gas as the eight-cylinder, roomy, high-seated sports utility vehicles per year because the SUV owners face a stern driving inhibition: high fuel costs per mile.

Although it is far from clear that the CAFE standards saved any gasoline, something else is clear. They killed people. The simple, scientifically demonstrable certitude is that the smaller the car, the more dangerous it is, other matters such as seat-belt use being equal. Because CAFE pushed more people into driving smaller cars, it was likely responsible for somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 additional highway deaths per year, according to scholars at Brookings and Harvard and a study by the National Academy of Sciences. If you are looking for right-wing crackpots, the people who came to this conclusion are hardly the usual suspects. These deaths by legislative mandate constitute a national scandal of the first magnitude but one that has not received as much media examination as you might expect. An exception was a 1999 USA Today front-page story that said that, up to then, the CAFE-promoted, small-car deaths had likely reached a total of 46,000.

Those anti-SUV, oil-was-the-cause war critics should factor that number into their ethical calculations, it seems to me. They should consider that the small-car owners are putting themselves and passengers at more risk of death than those driving larger vehicles. They should consider a great deal more as well, but let's not expect too much of them. If they had the humility to subject their prejudices to fact-finding that is both thoroughgoing and rigorous, we would not have to propose that they resolve in 2005 to start making sense.

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