Recently returned from covering the news of revolution spreading across the Middle East, New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas Friedman told the audience at the O’rena Monday night that he was going to “wing it” and talk about his trip.

“For those who think they were baited and switched” — “Hot, Flat and Crowded” was the title of the lecture — he said he would talk about that, too.

The lecture, originally scheduled for Feb. 8, had to be postponed. Friedman told the audience that he was in Egypt for the final nine days of the revolt that culminated in the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.

“Nine days at Tahrir Square was the most amazing story I’ve ever covered,” Friedman said.

On Feb. 8 he posted from Cairo:

” … In 40 years of writing about the Middle East I have never seen anything like what is happening…”

During the talk, he explained that the incident in Egypt will not be isolated.

“Egypt is not Las Vegas,” he said. “What happens there will not stay there.”

Friedman, who was thrice-awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Middle East, told an audience  of students, faculty and members of the community that for the last 50 years, “America, Europe and Asia have treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations.”

He said that what we’re seeing today in the Middle East is a result of what was going on behind those “gas stations.”

He said the people in the region were no longer willing to put up with the corrupt governments and the impoverished conditions under which they were forced to live.

He pointed out that Egypt had a huge population of educated young people who couldn’t find jobs and that there was “no more dangerous, frustrated group than the educated unemployed.”

He said that social media like Facebook and Twitter for the first time allowed youth to communicate, where before they could only gather in mosques.

Friedman said the people took down the regime, “not for us, but for themselves.”

He said the election of President Obama inspired them.

He said we should help them. He has suggested that if we change our energy policy — if, for example, you put a $1-a-gallon tax on gasoline we would buy more alternatively fueled cars — it would free Americans to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying about our oil interests.

Iraq War

Friedman was an early supporter of the Iraq war as a means to promote democracy in the Middle East.

Paul Kubicek, professor of political science at OU, said, “I think that he’s one of, sort of, these liberal hawks  who, for human rights … got involved in Iraq so Iraq could at least have a chance at a better future in terms of our engagement.”

“Of course,” Kubicek said, “people disagree with him.”

Kubicek said that while Friedman had been a cheerleader early on, he had tempered his enthusiasm.

“He did not exactly repudiate his views. I did not see him say that the war in Iraq was 100 percent a mistake … Maybe he had a change of heart,” Kubicek said.

Friedman said Monday night that he supported the Iraq war for democracy reasons.  He said the saddest thing about Iraq was how many people wanted the U.S. to get it right.

“Do you think they like living under these regimes?” he asked.  He said he never did the “I sinned, I’m sorry” (about promoting the war), but that “we made a god-awful mess of it.”

Friedman said he was wary of the U.S. attacks on Libya.

“If I learned anything about Iraq from that experience, (it is) don’t go to war unless you are really 100 percent committed,” Friedman said.

Hot, Flat and Crowded

Friedman said the world is getting hot.

“We’re caught right now, as a world, in two feedback loops,” he said.

An inner loop, he explained, where higher energy prices lead to higher food prices lead to political instability leads to higher energy prices, and an outer loop, where small changes in temperature have huge climate effects.

He said the world is getting flat. There are more and more people who can see how we live and want to live like we do.

And the world is getting crowded.  He said that there are 6.8 billion people on the planet today and that there will be 9.2 billion by 2050.

“The energy and resource implications will be staggering,” he said.

Friedman said that the United States has no energy policy, that we need a new feedback loop, new policy.

Friedman said we need a mass emphasis on energy and efficiency.

We need pricing that will drive industry to produce the products and consumers to use them and mass investment to create clean technology.