Thomas Friedman: The End of the West?

Yeh! BBB,

So whata' think?

I am working on an opinion myself, What's yours?

JM

James Morrison
James Morrison, I respect Tom Friedman's Middle East expertise and often agree with his visions of the future and his pragmatic method to reach it. I think he often asks people to show more sense than they are capable of doing.

I agree with his proposal that NATO take over managing IRAQ as a military and political pragmatic solution.

BBB

I think that Thomas makes things easy for himself by playing the devil's advocate to his position. I allege a conflict of interest. ;-)

Perhaps the "principled position" he mentions is to not contribute to a nation's unprovoked invasion of another nation.

It'd be nice if any money were an outright donation to the Iraqi people, but it's not. It's to underwrite America's invasion of another nation. An invasion that they disagreed with.

America has some gall to expect to be able to invade nations against the will of the world community and then pass a hat around to get them to help pay for it.

Thomas has some gall in expecting opponents of unprovoked invasion whose sole legal criteria (security) has turned out to be a myth to help pay for an action they were constitutionally opposed to.

America has some gall in refusing to pay for what it initiated against the advice and will of the global community.

If we had integrity we would not loan and we would pay. Democrats and republicans alike have pissed me off by voting to be cheap about things after waging war.

This is not a US/Germany/France problem.

"Hey Adam, don't throw rocks at the window."

"Screw you Frankie and Gerard, I'm chucking this rock."

CRASH

"Hey Frankie and Gerard, wanna help pay for the window? I mean earlier you were arguing that it would be mean to break the old lady's window. If you are honest you would help my pay her for a new window."

Friedman, Brooks Peddle Bush Line
The Progressive Magazine
November 5, 2003
Editor Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day.
Friedman, Brooks Peddle Bush Line

Within the course of five days, The New York Times op-ed page has run two of its most ludicrous columns in years.

The first was by Thomas L. Friedman on October 30. Friedman, who has been all over the map on the Iraq War, now asserts that Bush has mounted a "radically liberal war." Though in previous columns he has distanced himself from the Bush Administration's rationales, in this one he simply parrots them.

"U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world," he asserts. "This is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched-a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world."

From Wolfowitz's mouth to Friedman's computer.

Friedman provides no evidence for his assertion that the war is not about oil or imperialism.

Remember, the U.S. military secured the oil fields as one of the first orders of business and then guarded only the oil ministry after the fall of Baghdad. These actions sure suggested that the war had something to do with the control of oil. So, too, did Donald Rumsfeld's decision to turn off Iraq's oil spigot to Syria within a week of conquering Iraq. With oil came power, and Rumsfeld was eager to show it off.

And the vast privatization effort Paul Bremer is supervising, which includes selling off one sector after another of Iraq's economy and allowing foreign corporations to repatriate 100 percent of their profits, is a big clue that imperialism may actually be at play here.

Friedman also becomes a part of the Bush propaganda machine when he asserts that those fighting the United States are "a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists."

While some of the resistance comes from these groups, many local Iraqis who aren't are joining the resistance who are neither Saddam hold-outs or followers of Bin Laden, according to Robert Fisk's reporting for the London Independent.

But Friedman does not allow that any sane human being could possibly resist the occupation.

Neither does his newest companion on the op-ed page, David Brooks. In his November 4 column, Brooks says that Saddam's old henchmen are behind everything. "They are the scum of the Earth," he writes. "And they are being joined in their lairs by the flotsam and jetsam of the terrorist world."

For Brooks, the United States faces "scum," "sadist bands," "murderers," "bands of mass murderers," "terrorists," "the face of evil," "killers."

Like every two-bit war propagandist, he tries to make those on the other side easier to kill.

Americans must inure ourselves to atrocities our soldiers will commit, he argues.

Here's the crucial passage: "History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause."

Bush can't allow that to happen, Brooks argues. The President must "remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway."

There it is: Describe every person who resists the occupation as an animal, and then prepare the public for a My Lai or two by exaggerating the conflict at hand.

I can't recall reading a more chilling, immoral, and disreputable argument on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

-- Matthew Rothschild

I've said it before; I'll say it again:

The NYT needs to retire this senile fool before he brings their credibility back down to the Jayson Blair level.