THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S CALL TO REDUCE MIDDLE EAST IMPORTS: On Tuesday, President Bush announced a "great goal": "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." But that isn't as great as it sounds. Consider that foreign imports currently make up about 65 percent of our total oil consumption, but imports from the Middle East constitute just 17 percent of total imports, about 11 percent of total oil use. In other words, President Bush's goal amounts to reducing oil consumption by just 8.25 percent over 19 years. Moreover, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said yesterday that when President Bush pledged to reduce imports from the Middle East, "he didn't mean it literally." Bodman told journalists that Bush's promise "was purely an example," acknowledging that "oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms" meaning "it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth." Indeed, according to the administration's own statistics, Bush's proposals would be highly unlikely to displace crude oil from the Middle East "because the region has the lowest costs for producing oil in the world and U.S. companies would continue to seek the cheapest source of energy." Says Energy Department analyst Anthony Radich, "Barring some (government) policy that explicitly discourages oil imports, even if we do find cheaper ways to produce cellulose ethanol, the imports from the Middle East are among the last to go."