Thomas Friedman (New York Times): Worried Optimism

[Jack Rabbit]

From the New York Times
Dated Sunday September 21

Worried Optimism
By Thomas Friedman

I am an optimist by nature, and last week in Tel Aviv an Israeli friend told me he knew why. He said it was because I was short — and short people tend to be optimists because they can only see the part of the glass that is half full, not half empty.
These days, though, even someone at my eye level is having a hard time seeing the part of the glass in Iraq that is half full. I am still an optimist on Iraq, but a "worried optimist." My optimism is based on one big thing that has happened — and my worrying is based on two smaller things that have not.
The big thing that has happened in Iraq, which you can really feel when you're there, is that there is a 100 percent correlation of interests between America's aspirations for Iraq and the aspirations of Iraq's silent majority. We both want the same thing for Iraq — that it not become Iran, that it not become Saddam, but that it become a decent, modern-looking Iraqi alternative. This overlap of aspirations is hugely important. This is not Vietnam.
This also explains why the remnants of Saddam's order, who want all their old privileges and powers back, have had to go to such incredible lengths — bombing the U.N. office and the most holy mosque in Shiite Islam. It is not easy to break apart the overlap of interests between America and the Iraqi silent majority. It has real weight and inertia: the Iraqi Governing Council has appointed ministers, the ministers are getting the government running, normality is returning to many streets . . . .
But here's what's worrying. The resistance from the Saddamists is getting stronger, not weaker. It is becoming so strong, I would argue, that a new war needs to be mounted against the Saddamist forces in the Sunni triangle near Baghdad. Two Republican Guard divisions just melted away in this area and they still have to be defeated. The war has to be finished, but we can't be the ones to finish it. This is a purely urban fight, and if we try to finish it alone what will happen is more of what's happened in the past two weeks — fatal blunders. We just accidentally killed 10 Iraqi policemen in one town and gunned down a 14-year-old Iraqi boy in another who was part of a wedding party firing guns in celebration. Non-Arabic-speaking Americans cannot fight an urban war in Iraq. Forget it. We must get off this course immediately.

Read more.

There are days Friedman seems to make a little sense and tell a little truth. This isn't one of them.

The Iraq invasion had nothing to do with any of the noble motivations Friedman ascribed to it. Everyone knows by now that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks and that he had no association with al Qaida at all. The Bushies are only disputing this last point now, and before long they'll concede that the al Qaida connection, too, was a misconception (or, to use a simpler and more accurate term, a lie). Bush may have incidently overthrown a brutal dicatator, but bringing democracy to Iraq is not in the cards, no matter he or any of his aides say or even what Tom Friedman says. Bush has undermined democracy in the US, there is no reason to believe that he will do anything to encourage it anywhere else. This is especially true considering that contracts were handed out to Bush's cronies without bid, which should tell everyone a lot about what the war was really about. Friedman said reasons like oil and colonialism were ignoble, and, because he could think of more noble reasons the war was a noble cause.

It still has not occurred to Friedman that Bush invaded Iraq for all the reasons that he gave as ignoble. For that reason, this war was opposed by intelligent and well-meaning people everywhere.

In this piece, Friedman stretches it further. It is in the interest of the Iraqi people to develop a modern society, which he defines as a privatized economy with government determined by only nominally free and fair elections. This is the Friedman who wrote a perfectly awful book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, in which he amkes sweeping assertions about the benefits of globalized multinational corporate McCulture and supports it strained analogies and anecdotal evidence.

What globalization is really about is power. The strong will coerce the weak into trade agreements into which they would not enter if they could deal as equals. These deals burden the poor nations of the global South with debt and, in order to service the debt, force the poor nation to sell their resources to multinational interests in the global North and to allow interests in the global North to run public services through a process called privatization. We who live in California know how privatization works: Deregulate the power grid and a bunch of pirates jack the price of elctricity through the roof.

However, Friedman would like us to believe that this is what the "silent majority" of Iraqis want: to be ripped off by the global North. He would further have us believe that the only force in Iraq that stand between the Iraqi people and their American benfactors on the one hand and this laudable goal of a neo-liberal utopia on the other is resistance from the remants of Saddam's regime.

Why do I have so much trouble believing that?

If I were an Iraqi, I would want to run the Americans out of my country on a rail. That doesn't mean I would want Saddam back in power. To raise the spectre of Saddam's return as the only or even most likely alternative to US colonial occupation is to raise a false dichotomy.

The reason that, if I were an Iraqi, that I would want to drive the Americans home is because I would be very much aware of why they came: to liberate me from my mineral rights. Whatever Friedman may believe the war should have been about, the war was directed by G. W. Bush and his advisors from PNAC. The war was about oil and business opportunities for US multinational corporations. Saddam's murderous thugs have been replaced by Bush's corporate pirates. As far as the Iraqi people are concerned, they still come up on the short end.

This colonial arrangement can only be maintained by force. If there were any real democracy allowed in Iraq, the people would vote in a government that throw the Americans out.

I suppose Mr. Friedman believes that the WTO could overturn the election.

After that nonsense he wrote about being at war with France he wrote Tuesday and now this, it seems that Friedman had as bad a week as Bush, who had to admit that Saddam was not involved with the September 11 attacks.

[KoKo]

1. "They" assumed that Americans have a short memory and don't know why we

went into Iraq....their polling tells them we are not interested.......and when they stole the election and there wasn't a public outcry.......they knew they "had us."

People are getting VERY interested....and they are getting worried......Friedman is a big spin doctor.....for "powers " behind the Throne.......He's the media's darling......and they often take their cue's in writing from him.....so we will see this spin all this week on the Tweety, Faux, CNN, MSNBC,CNBC shows......The Spin......set by one of their most powerful "spin setters."

[thebigidea]

2. what a fucking lunatic

I hope he's enjoying whatever discrete checks he's cashing on the side to pay for all this blatant propaganda.

ugh...

[Flying_Pig]

3. Why it's PNAC-Tom Friedman .....again

Fuck Friedman. Stupid asswipe is nothing more than a PNAC/AIPAC/Likud boot licker and propagandist. In this article, he states that the only reason we invaded Iraq was to free the people. Come on Tom, what about Israel's urging? What about the oil? What about Helliburton? Friedman wouldn't make a pimple on a good journalist's ass. Did Herr Goering, err, Perle, write this one for you too Tom??

[Warren Stuart]

4. Here's a gem from the article

"In part, this is because America is so radioactive in the Arab-Muslim world that even an America that has come to Iraq with the sole intention of liberating its people cannot be openly embraced".

"Sole intention of liberating"? What about the Weapons? the threat that Saddam posed? Osama's bin forgotten, so to are the real reasons for going to war in the first place.

Back in March Friedman was singing the Battle "Hymn of the Republic", now it's changed to "John Browns body lies a mouldering in the grave". Un-effing-real.

[KG]

5. the shithead is covering his ass after being a war cheerleader,

but is only embarassing himself in the process. what a smary little fuck.

[lanlady]

6. Friedman is too emotionally wrapped up

in these issues to be even a half-way decent ME reporter. What good does it do to write a dozen articles describing how happy the Iraqi people are to be rid of Hussein and how much they want to live in a modern, prosperous country. Double duuuuuh, Tom, who wouldn't be? But where does it get you? Where are the political parties or credible leaders who will speak for the "silent majority"? How long will Shia and Sunni coexist in peace? Friedman's paper should be addressed these overriding issues instead of printing useless emotion-wrapped bon bons by Tom.

[Classical_Liberal]

7. Letter I sent to the NY Times

Tom needs to make up his mind about the "real reasons" for the Iraq
war.


In his most recent column Tom Friedman said.
this is because America is so radioactive in the Arab-Muslim world
> that even an America that has come to Iraq with the sole intention of
> liberating its people cannot be openly embraced.

A couple of months ago on June 4 2003, in an column called "Because
We Could" Tom said,

"The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that
after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.
Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up
over there"

Now if the real reason we went was because America needed to hit
someone in the Arab-Muslim world, how can he claim we went in with
the "sole purpose of liberating the Iraqi people"? I don't get it.

[Jack Rabbit]

9. Excellent

That column (Because We Could) was another piece of work. In that one, Friedman employed the logic of a schoolyard bully.

[Lexingtonian]

8. delusion and denial

Sometimes I think Tom Friedman, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of that crowd exist in order to painfully illustrate Hannah Arendt's nasty little dictum that Diaspora Jews will almost invariably be dilettantes and stooges in the real politics of Gentile societies. (And yes, she said it in an article about Disraeli and Rathenau, iirc.)

TF is being a dope here in imagining that the interests of 'the silent majority' of Iraqis is going to prevail over all other forces at work within a timeframe of months. But Iraq in 2003 is not the Nixon era United States, where every moron felt entitled. Iraq in 2003 is where every moron sees an opportunity to engage in chaotic destruction and 'the silent majority' is silent because it has no power.

He imagines he understands and is talking causes, but in fact he is talking analogy. Where analogy is famously the last word of science and the first word of belief in imaginary things.