That Friedman is considered a respected voice in the marketplace of ideas while people like Greg Palast labor in relative obscurity should give some indication of the truth value of most of the product excreted by the mainstream US media.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/frie-s20.shtml<edit>
For those who were most convinced that US military might would suffice in imposing Washington’s will upon the Middle East—the administration’s journalistic toadies—the crisis in Iraq has created extreme frustration and belligerence.
Such is the case with Thomas Friedman, the chief foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times. Those familiar with his writings will hardly be surprised that his latest piece consists of smug lies in service of a bellicose US foreign policy. That is his specialty. The title of his column, “Our War with France” does merit attention, however.
Friedman is a thug with a laptop. He has used his column to advocate the “pulverizing” of Belgrade, the smashing of Iraq and has proudly advanced the slogan “give war a chance.” Now, it would seem, he is pushing for the sacking of Paris. Having supported a war against a relatively defenseless Iraq, Friedman now uses the language of aggression against a major European power and erstwhile US ally.
The catastrophe in Iraq, according to Friedman, is the fault of the French. This is the case because, having opposed the US war, the French government has had the temerity of seeing its warnings about the calamity it would produce richly confirmed.
Not only that, Paris has balked at US demands that it and other countries fork over tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops, no questions asked, to bolster a US-run exercise in neocolonialism.
“If you watch how France is behaving today ... then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq,” Friedman writes. “France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened US will pave the way for France to assume its ‘rightful’ place as America’s equal...”
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