Monday, September 24, 2007

Evil Defeating Evil

Nothing defeats evil as decisively as evil itself. This lesson comes out clearly when we look at the decades of games that the Jewish Lobby has played with regards to the Arabs and the petroleum issue.

The Arabs have most of the petroleum that the World needs and as long as this remains the case, the Jewish Lobby will be limited in its effort to incite the likes of America to sabotage Arab economic development and prosperity. This is why the need to carry on with the fancy footwork that the Jewish Lobby has been doing inside the politico-journalistic house of smoke and mirrors in Washington and elsewhere. And it has been quite a performance.

All the while, the Arabs worked to establish price stability for their oil, maintain a predictable market for the world and forge a good relationship with their clients as would do any successful business person. The Arabs went about their business knowing that the markets are driven not only by the buyers and the sellers but also the middlemen and the speculators, all of whom are out to make a buck, which is their right, but whose agenda is different from theirs and whose capacity to complicate things can be considerable.

However, being the consummate merchants whose trade routes helped to shape the march of Civilization, the Arabs knew how to deal with complicated situations and they navigated through the intrigues of the various marketplaces with agility. But what they did not count on were the games that the Jewish Lobby was adding to the mix. These were restless games that looked meaningless at first, which they were, but then proved to be self-defeating as well.

The Jewish Lobby went from calling the Arabs price gougers and blackmailers, to calling on the American military to go in and take the oil, to calling on the American public to change their lifestyle so as to use less oil, to calling on the American President to force a change in the lifestyle of Americans through taxation and so on. Like an evil spirit, the Jewish Lobby hovered all over the American map on this issue, and when it failed to make enough of a dent in favor of its cause, it tried to link the issues of pollution and Global warming to the business of Arab oil.

But in so doing, the Lobby has inadvertently given the Arabs what had eluded them for decades, the absence of demagoguery as they went about building a good relation with their clients and ascertained continued development for their economies. This is how the episode worked itself out:

Petroleum being a non-renewable resource that is hidden underground it is hard to discover and harder to get at. If you have it, you want to see it last as long as possible which means you try to get your hand on every drop of it that your instruments manage to locate.

And when you know you have it, you want to extract as little of it as possible and you negotiate to receive the highest price for what you sell. This allows you to implement your economic plan and have enough money to explore for new reserves. For all this to work smoothly, you need the goodwill of the oil companies which are your partners, and you need the understanding of the public which is your ultimate client.

The way to earn the goodwill and the understanding is to educate the consumers on all the issues involved so as to get them used to the idea of practicing conservation while paying a relatively high price for the oil. However, educating the consumer was impossible to do because the Jewish Lobby was doing it already but doing it the only way it knows how which is to use every imaginable pretext to create fear of the Arabs, jealousy for what they have and hate for the good things they do for themselves and their families with the revenue they earn selling the oil.

But then, as someone aptly put it, you get tired of hearing the same jackass bray the same song of hate for decades and you demand that there be a change. When you hear someone put things this way, you realise that the Jewish Lobby has defeated itself and you expect to see a change. And the change came when members of the Lobby began to sing a different song. They did the right thing, to be sure, but they did it for the wrong reason.

Instead of calling the Arabs price gougers and blackmailers, the Lobby is now trying to scare the public about global warming which it claims is caused by carbon dioxide produced when oil is used. Thus the need to conserve energy and to pay a higher price for oil which is what the Arabs wanted all along.

This, of course, is not an ideal situation because the pretext used by the Jewish Lobby to pull it off is a phony one but, in the eyes of the Arabs, it must be a step up from the regime of demagoguery that the Lobby has practiced for too long in the past.

Like they say in that mythical place which is yet to be identified: it is better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than do the wrong thing for the wrong reason.