(No) Drill, Baby, Drill
Liberia, Costa Rica
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These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.
More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.
The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.
“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.
But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”
As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydro-electric power, wind and geo-thermal, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment! What country bans oil drilling?
Rodríguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Right now, most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river — making the water no longer usable — that cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.
Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt — and that benefited dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.
To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydro-electric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — had to pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodríguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”
As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon-fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.Book Review - 'Hot, Flat, and Crowded,' by Thomas L. Friedman - Review - NYTimes.com: "Eco-nomics"
Thet environmental movement reserves a hallowed place for those books or films that have stirred people from their slumber and awoken them to the fragility of the planet: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature” and, most recently, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Thomas L. Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” may lack the soaring, elegiac qualities of those others. But it conceivably just might goad America’s wealthiest to face the threat of climate change and do something about it.
Friedman, the thrice-Pulitzered foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times, has built a following beyond readers with an interest in international relations. His last book, “The World Is Flat,” made him a best-selling author in business class, the kind of writer that those who turn left when boarding a plane feel they ought to be seen reading. Friedman does not shy away from this audience; indeed he sometimes seems to be writing especially for it. “Do half your employees use computers and half use paper, pencils and abacuses?” he asks in one passage, apparently confident that he is addressing a chief executive.
For that very reason, Friedman could perhaps touch those who have so far eluded the green movement’s reach: the hardheaded executives more worried by projections of receding profits than retreating glaciers. That constituency listened to Friedman on globalization and they might be ready to listen to him again on global warming.
The form of “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” is trademark Friedman: a series of arguments, often distilled into mnemonic formulations, some snappier than others — it’s not A.D. 2008, but “1 E.C.E.,” the first year of the “Energy-Climate Era” — all based on extensive, far-flung reporting, most of it consisting of interviews with experts, professors and, of course, C.E.O.s.
What will appeal to can-do business types is that Friedman’s book does not dwell, as, say, Gore’s movie did, on describing the problem, but concentrates most on sketching possible solutions. It is in these passages that Friedman’s argument really takes off, allowing him to give vent to his enthusiasm and unabashed idealism. Non-Americans might find his wide-eyed patriotism a touch saccharine if not naïve, but it’s hard not to be carried along by his evident passion.
To be sure, the book begins with a diagnosis of “where we are” and “how we got here” that is short on good cheer. We live, Friedman explains with reference to his previous work, in a world that is flat — a level economic playing field with fewer barriers between countries and individuals — but that is now also becoming crowded, thanks to rising population. And the problem is not just that the raw number of people is increasing, it’s that many more are gaining access to an American level of consumerism. With the world’s population of “Americans” heading toward two or three billion — all desiring the middle-class comforts of a car, a fridge and an air-conditioner — the global demand for energy is soaring to new heights. That, Friedman says, is unsustainable.
This hunger for energy is dangerous not only because it means belching more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so pushing the temperature to dangerously high levels, but also because it is robbing the world of precious, and beautiful, biodiversity, destroying a unique species every 20 minutes. It also means we’re lining the pockets of the autocrats who tend to control the world’s reserves of fossil fuel, the “petrodictators.” And we are opening an ever wider gap between the energy haves and the energy have-nots, those who cannot take part in the “flat” world because they cannot switch on a light bulb, let alone a laptop.
Friedman knows what is to be done. The United States needs to set an example for the world to follow, by starting over and constructing an entirely new Clean Energy System, one that will send “clean electrons” into its homes, offices and cars — generated not by dirty old oil or coal, but by solar, wind and nuclear power — and that will use many fewer of those electrons, thanks to greater efficiency. In the book’s most arresting passage, Friedman plays futurist and looks ahead — to “20 E.C.E.” — imagining a world where an Energy Internet puts each one of your home appliances in touch with the power company, drawing out only the minimal power it needs to function and at the cheapest, off-peak times. Even your car, by now a plug-in hybrid that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, can charge its battery with solar power, which it then sells back to the grid.
All this would, of course, require the most profound shift. As Friedman explains, utility companies were established at a time when the sources of power to generate electricity were assumed to be limitless. The utilities’ responsibility was, and remains, to supply a constant flow of electrons to every household; they have a direct financial stake in keeping demand high. These companies need to be fundamentally rewired so that their rewards come from persuading us all to use less, not more, of their product.
The way to do that, Friedman explains, is by “reshaping the market,” not only to make us use less electricity, but to make the power companies buy energy from cleaner sources. It will take an entirely new regime of taxes, incentives and price signals, all set by the federal government. Oh, says the ideological free marketeer, we couldn’t possibly meddle in the market like that. But guess what, Friedman replies: we already do. Washington has tilted the energy playing field for years — subsidizing oil, gas and coal and giving only puny, halting help to wind and solar power. It is, Friedman writes, “a market designed to keep fossil fuels cheap and renewables expensive and elusive.”
What’s needed is the presidential leadership of an Abraham Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt to command enough authority to face down the fossil fuel lobbies and create a single, national system that would instantly release the pent-up innovation and creativity that is ready to get to work, cleaning up America’s energy supply and reducing its demand. Once the United States has done that, and shown that there’s money to be made from the new industry of “greening,” the rest of the world will, as a matter of self-interest, follow suit. In the process, America will have discovered a national mission for itself once more.
Readers of Friedman’s earlier books may well pause at this point and wonder what has happened to their favorite evangelist for globalization. For it’s hard not to detect a slight shift leftward in this conversion to radical, government-led action to save the planet.
Friedman is at pains to insist that there’s nothing leftie about caring for the environment: it’s no longer “yoga mats, Birkenstock sandals, tofu.” Indeed, in a fascinating section, he meets United States Army officers who have gone green, converted by the realization that the need to transport oil to generators in the Iraqi desert left their men needlessly exposed to enemy attack. They understood that if they could use less energy, or even generate their own, they would be safer.
Nevertheless, Friedman inevitably finds himself making arguments — urging a muscular federal government to push aside the selfish interests of the big corporate lobbies — that were once confined to the left. It can lead him into contradictory terrain. Thus, he is committed to praising the globalizing forces that have flattened the world, but he despairs at their consequences. He mourns, for example, the burning of rain forests, quoting the noted entomologist Edward O. Wilson that it is “like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.” Yet he does not address the fact that multinational companies are able to come in and lay waste to these forests only because of the global trading rules Friedman once so admired.
He deplores the nationalization of companies, seeing privatization as an index of freedom on a par with a free press and democratic elections — yet he also looks longingly at the well-resourced mass transit systems of Europe, which keep cars off the road and emit less carbon dioxide, and which are only possible thanks either to state ownership or to enormous, taxpayer-supported subsidies. He knows that we cannot simply consume more and more from a finite planet; he understands that prosperity is threatened by the very “nature of American capitalism”; he quotes approvingly the Norwegian oil executive who warns, “Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”
But Friedman does not surrender to these dark thoughts; he pulls himself together and recovers his faith in the American economic model. The free market will be fine, he says, so long as it’s tweaked to start telling the truth, reflecting the true cost to the earth of all that we consume.
These intellectual tensions are not the only flaws in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” Scholarly types will doubtless find the first-person examples excessive: they will surely want to remind Friedman that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” General readers, too, may wish for a slightly leaner manuscript, lighter on complex technical detail, which can be overwhelming. Some of the interviewee quotations are either too baggy or too dense, as if Friedman has moved large sections of transcript into his text. The writing style, with constant new coinages and shorthand phrases — “I call this the ‘Naked Gun 2 1/2 rule’ ” — while winning in a column, can grate over the distance of a book. Whole sentences are repeated or italicized for emphasis, in the style of a spoken lecture. And there are some horribly mixed metaphors: “The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”
But these are minor infelicities when set against a book that will be accessible outside the eco-converted, is grounded in detailed research and repeatedly hits its target. It contains some killer facts — the American pet food industry spends more on research and development than the country’s power companies; Ronald Reagan stripped from the White House the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed as a symbolic step toward energy independence. Above all, it is fundamentally right on the biggest question of our age. If Friedman’s profile and verve take his message where it needs to be heard, into the boardrooms of America and beyond, that can only be good — for all our sakes.
Jonathan Freedland is a former Washington correspondent and now an editorial page columnist for The Guardian.
Call to Arms for an American-Led Green Revolution
Thomas Friedman
When the Soviet Union chucked Sputnik into space in 1957, it galvanized America to come from behind and win the space race. The federal government opened its checkbook to finance an array of projects. Students shifted to new subjects like astronautical engineering and Russian studies to help the United States understand and eclipse the Soviet Union. The moon shot inspired a patriotic nation and produced useful commercial technologies along the way. The space race was expensive, but it worked.
Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book is a plea for a new Sputnik moment. His breezy tour of America’s energy policy documents a nation that has become dangerously dependent on fossil fuels. The bulging bank accounts of oil exporters like Russia, Iran and Venezuela give them the swagger and ability to cause lots of mischief.
Even more worrisome is all the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, not just oil but also coal and, to a lesser degree, natural gas. Since carbon dioxide pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, humans are recklessly changing the climate. The United States’ record is particularly poor because we are, per capita, among the biggest gulpers of oil and belchers of carbon dioxide. The need for American leadership has never been greater.
And if all that’s not bad enough, Mr. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, shows that the economic opportunities created by a technology-driven world where the economic playing field has been leveled are making these trends a lot worse. The stunning growth of Asia’s tiger economies, especially China’s, has been a miracle for the world’s industrial output but a horror for the environment.
Asia’s growth hinges on coal, which is bad news because today’s coal technologies are particularly intense emitters of carbon dioxide. The best data show that in the last six years alone, China’s coal-fired growth has been so rapid that the country has expanded its coal production by an amount equal to the entire output of the United States coal industry. Couple that with the worldwide population shift into cities, and the result is Mr. Friedman’s title: “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.”
The litany of dangers has been told many times before, but Mr. Friedman’s voice is compelling and will be widely heard. Dependence on fossil fuels is no longer just a topic for woodsy seminars or the grist for conspiracy theories from the threat industry. Mr. Friedman shows that both energy and environmental fears are going mainstream — “green is the new red, white, and blue” — and that is a great opportunity for bipartisanship. Unfortunately, the nation’s cockpit in Washington is stuffed full of special-interest lobbyists and partisan bickerers. China and other nations, Mr. Friedman warns, will seize the opportunities to invest in new green industries and leave us in the dust.
The alarm bells ring with pithy Friedmanisms. My favorite is his broadside against cheap talk about the coming “green revolution.” A revolution is needed, to be sure, because a whole suite of new technologies — from smarter biofuels that cut our dependence on oil to better power plants and a new digital-era electric grid — are badly needed to supplant today’s dirty fuels system. But buzz is not the same as revolution, because real revolutions force new directions, not just new talk. People get hurt.
Today, Mr. Friedman says, “the adjective that most often modifies ‘green revolution’ is ‘easy.’ That’s not a revolution. That’s a party.” This costume party is more about conspicuous environmentalism than facing the hard truths essential to effective energy policy, like what it will really cost to make a change and why that investment is worth it.
Mr. Friedman’s strength is his diagnosis of our energy and environmental nightmares. But blind spots appear when he turns to remedies. One is renewable power. Like most observers, Mr. Friedman assumes that the road out of today’s mess is studded with wind turbines and solar plants. Maybe that’s true, but maybe not. Such renewable resources account for only a tiny fraction of current power supply, and when the titans of today’s energy industry think about cutting carbon dioxide, they are more likely to imagine building carbon-free nuclear power plants or advanced coal plants that safely bury their pollution underground.
These two camps — the emerging renewable-resources industry and the titans who actually have their hands on the controls in today’s energy system — are pulling in different directions. Economists will rightly have heartburn that these 412 pages never dwell much on the cost of different policy options, nor does Mr. Friedman ever question his claim that building a renewable-energy system is automatically a good idea because many new jobs will flow (at unknown expense) into these new industries.
The other blind spot is politics. The most intriguing chapter in Mr. Friedman’s book is his last, which poses the toughest challenge. Can America be like China, where a visionary government can impose a new direction on the country in the face of national emergency? Or will America devolve into a country that is so mired in red tape and local opposition that it builds absolutely nothing anywhere, near anything? Societies like that get stuck because they can’t embrace new technologies, like the cherished wind turbines and the power lines needed to carry their current.
Mr. Friedman’s lament is that the United States is becoming such a place because parochial interests have created gridlock. But most striking is that this seasoned observer of the American political scene offers not much of a blueprint for fixing the political problem except the bromide that we need new leaders who are willing to embrace better policies.
Heads will be nodding across airport lounges, as readers absorb Mr. Friedman’s common sense about how America and the world are dangerously addicted to cheap fossil fuels while we recklessly use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide. The Sputnik is heading into orbit, thanks to high energy prices, growing fear of the changing climate and pleas like Mr. Friedman’s. But whether we as a nation — and with us, the world — are really prepared to do anything to solve the problem is still in doubt.
David G. Victor, director of the energy and sustainable development program at Stanford University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a book on global warming.
A Call to Action, for Earth and Profit
IN his role as a cheerleader for globalization, Thomas L. Friedman has always been aware that there are environmental consequences. But now, with “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95), he embraces going green not just as a national security imperative but also as an economic El Dorado.
Lacerating the ubiquitous, feel-good, magaziney “205 easy ways to save the earth,” Mr. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, exhorts sacrifice to stem rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss. He wants a green revolution as part of nothing less than “nation building” in America.
He also says that renewable energy driven by technology plays to American strengths: great laboratories and entrepreneurs, a start-up culture of risk and reward. If the United States gets serious, it will dominate, creating not just jobs but also whole new industries.
Mr. Friedman’s first book on globalization, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” (1999), was translated into 27 languages; his second, “The World Is Flat” (2005), has sold more than two million copies. So “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” raises outsized expectations. Admirers and critics will have a field day with his take-no-prisoners punditry. Either you agree with him or you wear a dunce cap.
Our planet is becoming hot because flat (globalization, in Mr. Friedman’s lingo) is meeting crowded (ever more people are joining the resource-consuming middle class). As of 1950, all world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion, he says, but now that much in new growth takes place each decade. He quotes scientists and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, as well as some corporate executives, urgently warning of the need to avoid a doubling of carbon in the atmosphere over the next few decades — the course we are on.
Mr. Friedman has an unabashedly American-centric solution: the United States can regain its national purpose and save the world via green innovation. This can happen, he says, if Americans recognize — in the words of John Gardner, founder of Common Cause — “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” Overflowing landfills? Devise products with materials that are more easily reusable, and rack up profits.
The book opens self-referentially, quoting a reader commenting to the author about one of his columns. The content and method will be familiar to Mr. Friedman’s legions of readers: source, anecdote, pop metaphor. Repeat point. In italics. The unfamiliar reader should prepare for hyperbole, neologisms and aphorisms. “Affluenza.” “Code Green.” “The new Energy Climate Era (E.C.E.).” “We’ve already hit the iceberg.” We’re “the proverbial frog in the pail on the stove” (boiled to death after failing to jump out because the temperature rose only incrementally). “We are the flood, we are the asteroid. We had better learn how to be the ark.”
Relentless, the text can also be trenchant. “Our addiction to oil,” he writes, “makes global warming warmer, petrodictators stronger, clean air dirtier, poor people poorer, democratic countries weaker, and radical terrorists richer.” The magnitude of the challenge requires government action, he argues, but government should act so as to spur the greater power of the marketplace. He notes that government shapes the market all the time — think home-mortgage tax breaks — and has long underwritten profligate oil consumption.
Instead, he argues, Washington should shift current incentives by making the cost of hydrocarbons higher, with new taxes (and a price floor), and by making the cost of alternative fuels lower, with tax breaks, until clean industries achieve scale and can compete without subsidies. To Americans who abhor talk of higher taxes, Mr. Friedman asks, would you rather shell out to the Saudi, Russian and Venezuelan treasuries, as you now do, or to the United States Treasury?
Mr. Friedman assures us that if America spends to get clean, others will follow suit — and not claim a license to continue polluting. In a chapter dedicated to China, he writes that a still-unclean United States would give China an excuse to repeat America’s dirty-fuels economic growth, and that if China does not go green, its “emissions and appetites will nullify everything everyone else does to save the earth.”
Finally, Mr. Friedman slams the climate-change skeptics, but also slyly observes that “if climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America.” By responding, America would become immensely more efficient, cleaner and leaner.
When the book tries to explain why this is not already happening, it is less compelling. “If the right things to do are so obvious to the people who know the most about the energy business,” Mr. Friedman asks, “why can’t we put them in place?” His too-pat answer: omnipotent old-industry lobbies and dumb political leaders.
“I am convinced,” he writes in populist guise, “that the public is ready; they’re ahead of the politicians.” So special interests and venal politicos make consumers live in supersized homes and drive gas guzzlers? Who’s reading all those easy-ways-to-go-green articles that he seems to regard as self-indulgent?
One up-and-running energy alternative supported by the government, corn-based ethanol, has costs that may exceed its benefits. But instead of confronting this apparent cautionary tale head on, Mr. Friedman questions biofuels in a mere footnote.
A few anecdotes are long enough to qualify as illuminating case studies, like one about GE Transportation’s energy-efficient locomotives, a hit in emerging markets. The book’s best example may be First Solar Inc., which was founded in Ohio and invented thin-film solar technology, which is cheaper to use and works in more varied climates than regular silicon solar panels. But First Solar found a more hospitable public-policy environment and built its new factory abroad, in the former East Germany.
“A vision without resources is a hallucination,” goes a Pentagon saying quoted by Mr. Friedman, who adds that “right now we are having a green hallucination.” But he remains an optimist: the money is there to be made.
First Chapter
‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMANWhere Birds Don't Fly
German engineering, Swiss innovation, American nothing. - Advertising slogan used on a billboard in South Africa by Daimler to promote its Smart "forfour" compact car
In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I nodded yes, he introduced himself: "My name is Emad Tinawi. I am a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen," the consulting firm. Tinawi said that while he disagreed with some of the columns I had written, particularly on the Middle East, there was one column he especially liked and still kept.
"Which one?" I asked with great curiosity.
"The one called 'Where Birds Don't Fly,'" he said. For a moment, I was stumped. I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember the column or the dateline. Then he reminded me: It was about the new - post-9/11 - U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
For years, the U.S. consulate in Istanbul was headquartered in the Palazzo Corpi, a grand and distinctive old building in the heart of the city's bustling business district, jammed between the bazaars, the domed mosques, and the jumble of Ottoman and modern architecture. Built in 1882, and bought by the U.S. government twenty-five years later, Palazzo Corpi was bordered on three sides by narrow streets and was thoroughly woven into the fabric of Istanbul life. It was an easy place for Turks to get a visa, to peruse the library, or to engage with an American diplomat.
But as part of the general security upgrade for U.S. embassies and consulates in the post-9/11 world, it was decided to close the consulate at Palazzo Corpi, and in June 2003 a new U.S. consulate was opened in Istinye, an outlying district about twelve miles away from the center of the city. "The new 22-acre facility - nearly 15 times as big as the old consulate - was built on a solid rock hill," a Federal Times article reported (April 25, 2005), adding that "State now requires buildings to have protective walls that are at least 100 feet away from embassies and consulates. Those walls and barriers also must protect against explosions and ramming attacks from vehicles, and they must be difficult to climb. Guard booths are placed at the perimeter of facilities, and windows and doors are bulletproof and resist forced entries. The new buildings are also strong enough to resist most earthquakes and bombs."
They are also strong enough to deter most visitors, friends, and allies. In fact, when I first set eyes on the new consulate in 2005, what struck me most was how much it looked like a maximum-security prison - without the charm. All that was missing was a moat filled with alligators and a sign that said in big red letters: "Attention! You are now approaching the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. Any sudden movements and you will be shot without warning. all visitors welcome."
They could have filmed the Turkish prison movie Midnight Express there.
But here's a hard truth: Some U.S. diplomats are probably alive today thanks to this fortress. Because on November 20, 2003, as President George W. Bush was in London meeting with then prime minister Tony Blair, and about six months after the new U.S. consulate in Istanbul had been opened, Turkish Muslim terrorists detonated truck bombs at the HSBC bank and the British consulate in Istanbul, killing thirty people, including Britain's consul general, and wounding at least four hundred others. The bomb-ravaged British mission was just a short walk from the Palazzo Corpi.
One of the terrorists captured after the attack reportedly told Turkish police that his group had wanted to blow up the new U.S. consulate, but when they checked out the facility in Istinye, they found it impregnable. A senior U.S. diplomat in Istanbul told me more of the story: According to Turkish security officials, the terrorist said the new U.S. consulate was so secure, "they don't let birds fly" there. I never forgot that image: It was so well guarded they don't even let birds fly there . . .
(That point was reinforced on July 9, 2008, when Turkish police outside the consulate killed three terrorists apparently trying to breach its walls.)
Tinawi and I swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners' perceptions of America and on America's perceptions of itself. As an Arab-American, he was clearly bothered by this, and he could tell from my column that I was too.
Because a place where birds don't fly is a place where people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, collaboration doesn't happen, trust doesn't get built, and freedom doesn't ring. That is not the kind of place we want America to be. That is not the kind of place we can afford America to be. An America living in a defensive crouch cannot fully tap the vast rivers of idealism, innovation, volunteerism, and philanthropy that still flow through our nation. And it cannot play the vital role it has long played for the rest of the world - as a beacon of hope and the country that can always be counted on to lead the world in response to whatever is the most important challenge of the day. We need that America - and we need to be that America - more than ever today.
(Continues . . .)
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