From Thomas Friedmans’s editorial in the New York Times, via the Salt Lake Tribune:

The United States and Europe, argues Clyde Prestowitz*, the trade expert and author of Rogue Nation, should actually shrink their farm subsidies, even if developing countries don't immediately reciprocate.

If only the Bush team connected the dots, it would see what a nutty war on terrorism it is fighting, explains Prestowitz. Here, he says, is the Bush war on terrorism: Preach free trade, but don't deliver on it, so Pakistani farmers become more impoverished. Then ask Congress to give a tax break for any American who wants to buy a gas-guzzling Humvee for business use and also ask Congress to resist any efforts to make Detroit increase gasoline mileage in new cars. All this means more U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

So then the Saudis have more dollars to give to their Wahhabi fundamentalist evangelists, who spend it by building religious schools in Pakistan. The Pakistani farmer we've put out of business with our farm subsidies then sends his sons to the Wahhabi school because it is tuition-free and offers a hot lunch. His sons grow up getting only a Quranic education, so they are unprepared for modernity, but they are taught one thing: that America is the source of all their troubles. One of the farmer's sons joins al-Qaida and is killed in Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces, and we think we're winning the war on terrorism.

*Yet another figure from the Reagan administration critical of George W. Bush