Dominic Lawson: Bush's declaration of an America without oil shows the extent of his foreign policy failure

The dream of democracy in the Middle East is now seen in the White House as just that: a dream

The respect shown by the American House of Representatives to the Presidential State of the Union Address is always a wonder to behold. But even by those supremely sycophantic standards it was astounding that President George W Bush was able to generate thunderous applause for two statements of completely opposite meanings.

The first remark that brought the House to its feet was a predictable one. The President said of the conflict in Iraq that "We are in this fight to win, and we are winning." The second remark was the one that has garnered the headlines: "We are addicted to oil ... we must make our dependence on Middle Eastern Oil a thing of the past."

Here, without a trace of doubt, was the clearest possible admission that the neoconservative dream of democracy conquering the Middle East is now seen in the White House as just that: a dream.

I am not one of those who believe that the American invasion of Iraq was "all about oil". But there is absolutely no denying that the hugely influential Vice President Dick Cheney - who is not one of the idealistic neocons but a brutally practical man of business - saw the war as an opportunity to create in Iraq a thriving oil industry, largely run by American companies, at a time when the pro-American Saudi royal family looked increasingly vulnerable to the followers of Osama bin Laden.

Indeed , the Americans have been quietly meeting bin Laden's fundamental demand - to move all their military personnel from Saudi soil - in the hope that the Middle Eastern oil field protection force (for that is what it is) could be re-established in a number of new military bases in friendly Iraq. It is now clear that there will not be a permanent US military presence in Iraq. The only issue to be settled is just how temporary it will be.

More to the point, if President Bush really believed that America could or should be best friends with the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, why would he spit in their plate by telling the American people that it was dangerous and unhealthy to buy their only product? The frozen expression on the face of the watching Saudi Ambassador, Prince Turki al-Faisal, as he heard those Presidential remarks, was a picture worth a thousand undiplomatic words.

Prince Turki, however, was for more than two decades head of the Saudi intelligence service, so he won't have needed to be told that President Bush was hardly proposing to take America down a path it has never taken before. In the wake of Opec's ban on oil exports to the pro-Israeli United States during the Middle East war of late 1973, President Richard Nixon signed bills limiting speeds on US freeways to 55 miles per hour. The reason for that limit, of course, was that a constant 55mph is the speed at which modern cars operate most fuel-efficiently.

The Saudis quickly got the point, and led the lifting of the Arab oil embargo in March 1974. Yet more than 30 years later, the 55mph limit remains in force in most states of the Union, with some others having advanced to a scarcely extravagant 60mph. The Americans are constantly charged with wastefulness in their use of petrol, so it is, at the very least, interesting that a vast country with wide open roads has stayed with such a rigid conservationist speed limit, one which would cause revolt if imposed on the drivers of this much more densely packed country.

Meanwhile, the supposedly environmentally sound Germans have no speed limit at all on their biggest roads. One unintentional side-effect of this split between America and Europe has been the near destruction of the US car export market. General Motors and others have produced a generation of flabby, low-torque vehicles only suitable for gentle cruising, while the likes of BMW and Volkswagen have profited world-wide by designing and constructing ever more ferociously fast saloons with sports car suspensions.

The apotheosis of this is Volkswagen's launch earlier this year of the Bugatti Veyron, a car with an engine capable of generating 1,000 brake horsepower and with a fuel efficiency probably best measured in terms of gallons per mile, rather than miles per gallon. So let's remember all that the next time the Americans get criticised by EU ministers for their lack of progress on emission control.

This absolutely does not mean, however, that President Bush is telling the American people that they must lower their expectations, cut their use of energy, and take to the roads on bicycles. Yesterday he was condemned in the strongest terms for his remarks by Myron Ebell, the director of energy policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "President Bush might as well have said 'We are addicted to prosperity, comfort and mobility, and I've got the policies to do something about it.'"

Calm down, Mr Ebell, calm down. George Bush went on to say that what he wanted was not that the American people cut down their energy consumption, but that those demands should be satisfied by the exploitation of the earth's assets in different ways. For example, Bush told the Associated Press in an interview the day after his state of the Union address: "We are close to significant breakthroughs when it comes to the production of ethanol, and within six years the development of that technology will be able to produce energy on a competitive basis."

Or, in other words, the American dream of infinite mobility will be powered by corn rather than hydrocarbons. This, one must admit, is an attractive possibility: while there is obviously a finite limit to the amount of dead dinosaurs that can be turned into fossil fuel, corn can be grown in a perpetual cycle. That's not too wonderful for those of us who suffer from hay fever, but perhaps it's a small price to pay for the survival of the international travel industry.

As ever in the capitalist system, however, the key is price, not politics. It won't be George Bush telling Exxon to plough the fields and scatter that will change the way we consume energy. Exxon is already looking into that because it is aware that if and when political events in the Middle East push the oil price up to $100 a barrel, other means of getting around will have to be found - and will be found.

No one understands this better than Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister during the oil crises of the 1970s. As he told a London conference on the oil market five years ago - and he was warning producers, not consumers - "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end, but not for the lack of oil."

d.lawson@independent.co.uk