Hooked on War: Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction

[marmar]

from CounterPunch, via AlterNet:


Hooked on War: Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction

By Norman Solomon, CounterPunch. Posted September 7, 2007.


Nowadays you'll read the NYT's Thomas Friedman decrying the "madness that is Iraq," but the real Friedman is the man who called invading Iraq "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."


Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times this week, you'd never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States -- "everyone loves seeing us tied down here" -- stuck in the "madness that is Iraq." And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis "if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids."

The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America's most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can't bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

On the last day of November 2003 -- eight months after the invasion -- Friedman gushed that "this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan." He lauded the Iraq war as "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."

But the assumptions built into a Friedman column are murky outside the context of his worldview. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Those words appeared in Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption "What The World Needs Now" and a smaller-type explanation: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/61853/

[BridgeTheGap]

1. So the Imperialist hack was for the war before he was against it?

He's part of the problem. How does he still have any credibility?

[bhumikag]

2. following the crowd

friedman's changing position shows a broader problem with some of the "high flying" journalists and columnists in big media. before iraq war he was swayed by the blinding enthusiasm of "security" crowd..he didn't see potential serious issues that could arise.now look at katie couric..she is in iraq..reporting based on "what the military would allow her to see" and blindly promoting propganda that the surge is working

people in big media have lost ground..they have no conscience..all they do is follow the crowd

bhumika
politics desk,the newsroom