WASHINGTON — One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting 75% of imports from there by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said yesterday that the president didn't mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equal to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
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"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said. He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official told Knight Ridder News Service that Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."
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