toledoblade.com --

THE negative response from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to President Bush's request for increased production to help the United States meet the problem of rising gas prices follows from its member countries' overall judgment of Mr. Bush's foreign and domestic policies.

Rising fuel prices in the United States are contributing mightily to the general problems of the U.S. economy. Consumers, already squeezed by the falling value of their housing, inflation, and stagnant wages and salaries, are seeing their situation further gnawed away by $50 tanks of gas.

Saudi Arabia, the leading member of OPEC and the world's top oil exporter, used to be America's ace in the hole in petroleum-prompted economic crunches. The American president would ask the Saudi king if Saudi Arabia couldn't just increase production a little to cut America a break. The Saudis would agree and pressure would ease.

But not now. Mr. Bush has poisoned the well with the Saudis in two policy areas. The first is that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who became king in 2005, stuck his neck out in 2002 with a proposal that could have led to peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Arabs. His idea was consistent with the land-for-peace, two-state settlement that Mr. Bush himself put forward, in coordination with the quartet of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations, and the United States. The problem was that, having encouraged King Abdullah to walk out on the limb, Mr. Bush then did not follow through when the Israelis balked, letting the king's initiative sink like a stone, to his embarrassment.

The second area of Saudi disappointment lay in the Iraq war. The Saudis never liked Saddam Hussein much, but Iraq under his leadership always lined up firmly alongside Saudi Arabia with the Sunni Muslim states in opposition to Shiite Iran. The United States then knocked over Sunni Iraq and replaced it with a Shiite government. The royal victory lap that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just completed in Baghdad was viewed with substantial pain by the Saudis and their king.

Thus, when Mr. Bush asked OPEC for help, its current president, from Algeria, another Sunni Muslim state, said there was no need for the cartel to increase production and added that America's problems were due to "mismanagement" of its economy, not to a world shortage of oil. American businessman Warren Buffett, just assessed by Forbes magazine to be the richest person in the world, says that America is now in recession, in spite of what Mr. Bush says and the formal rules for such an attribution.

A look at the American economy suggests that Mr. Buffett is right. There will also likely be no help in dealing with the fuel situation from OPEC's oil exporters. They include Iran and Venezuela as well as Saudi Arabia. It is worth wondering whether Mr. Bush thought about any of this before putting the Middle East peace process in hibernation and attacking Iraq. If he did think about it, how did he get it so wrong?

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