Thomas Friedman: Hooked on War

Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times on Wednesday, 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."

The clenched graphic could be seen as the "hidden fist" that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without." While the cover story's patriotic fist was intended as a symbol of the globe's need for multifaceted American power, the military facet had been unleashed just as the magazine went to press. By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for 78 straight days.

Writing columns and appearing on broadcast networks to assess the war, Tom Friedman was close to gleeful. (The man was widely viewed as a liberal, whatever that meant, and "the liberal media" provided Friedman with many platforms that often seemed to double as pedestals.) Interviewers at ABC, PBS and NPR ranged from deferential to fawning as they solicited his wisdom on the latest from Yugoslavia.

Even when he lamented the political constraints on the military options of the 19-member NATO alliance, Friedman was upbeat. "While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet," he wrote after bombs had been falling for more than four weeks, "it does have one great strength -- its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that."

So, Friedman explained, "if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted."

He added: "Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too...."

The convenience marbled through such punditry is so routine that eyebrows rarely go up. The chirpy line "Let's at least have a real air war," for instance, addressed American readers for whom, with rare exceptions, the "real air war" would be no more real than a media spectacle, with all the consequences falling on others very far away. As for rock concerts and merry-go-rounds, we could recall -- if memory were to venture into unauthorized zones -- that any number of such amusements went full throttle in the United States during the Vietnam War, and also for that matter during all subsequent U.S. wars including the one that Friedman was currently engaged in cheering on.

If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was "outrageous" enough to justify inflicting "a merciless air war" -- as Friedman urged later in the same column -- would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians, children included, with weaponry including cluster bombs. Today, Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.

When righteousness moved Friedman to call for "lights out in Belgrade," he was urging a war crime. The urban power grids and water pipes he yearned to see destroyed were essential to infants, the elderly, the frail and infirm inside places like hospitals and nursing homes. Targeting such grids and pipes would seem like barbarism to Americans if the missiles were incoming. Any ambiguity of the matter would probably be dispelled by a vow to keep bombing the country until it was set back 50 years or, if necessary, six centuries. But Friedman's enthusiasm was similar to that of many other prominent American commentators who also greeted the bombing of Yugoslavia with something close to exhilaration.

The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times on April 23, 1999, began with a punchy sentence: "Give war a chance." It was a witticism that seemed to delight Friedman. He repeated it, in print and on national television, as the bombing of Yugoslavia continued. A tone of sadism could be discerned.

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This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State," which just came off the press. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

Comments

[DavLet]

It' a cool study of how pundits can get people to loose their marks toward a problem they don't know really well. While pretending he made a long story short, about Serbia, Iraq or later Iran, Friedman constructs a gross Washington-digest that pertains more to any mythology that could move american opinion (i.e. "Milosevic is like Hitler", "Saddam is Hitler", "Ahmadinejah …"), rather than to the complexities of a particular conflict.
Friedman then project any political or strategic debate on that simplified screen where the good willings and the bad, cautioning ones, are already cut out as presets.

Norman Soloman shows how much numbness is involved in the process, about the suffering of other human beings.
Thomas Friedman is one of those preposterous thinkers who dare utter garbage level formulations as if they where saying out loud what everybody think inside. They make breakthroughs into oversimplifying problems under their own ideological terms. Instead of helping people to grow out of preconceptions, the way a well educated Friedman turns even nastier than a decent soldier, allows the reader to stick even more to his stereotypes and dare again see the whole world through their blurry but reassuring lenses.

"Sadistic" is deserved for Friedman aggressive stances. But he takes cover of uttering them just here in Washington, as some kind of cheerful sport ! And is goal might be just to get people bored, uninterested and eventually numbed about foreign policy matters. Because such a lack of public care give the politicians more leeway to complete whatever other hidden agenda they are following in real geopolitical terms.

Friedman is a good believer. He is "not going to excuse" himself "for believing in Iraq war" in the first place. Like Tony Blair's, his beliefs must come from holly land. To avoid criticism, he pretends now he was as naive as he wanted his readers to be. Nice try …

And he can add that his ways are "in progress" as much as public unawareness is.

[altohone]

I'm not in the mood for another rant against the F'er, so I'm just going to agree with BeyondPopper, wldnswmmr, Noelle, and LittleBrother.

I've got to disagree with emerywood though.
There's nothing human about the neoliberal disease that justifies our actions. In my opinion, the opposite is true. It's really a remnant of the pre-tribal species... perhaps even reptilian left-overs from evolution... and contradicts the very notion of civilization we ostensibly strive for.

[LittleBrother]

You may be aware that Glenn Greenwald has been writing a lot lately about the macho rhetoric and posturing employed by the pro-war, and generally pro-maladm­inistratio­n, commentariat.

Friedman's right in the thick of that gamy huddle. These characters would have us admire them for both their ostensible intellectual acumen and sophistication, AND for their manly manliness, expressed in the form of tough-guy, simplistic, and chauvinistic pronouncements. They style themselves as Men for All Seasons.

Friedman and his ilk may still be coasting in the ascendancy at the moment, but no one buys into their lame and tired shtick much any more except their co-dependent fellow elites, sycophants, and aspiring thinkers insufficiently advanced to see Friedman's pompous overwriting as the shallow dreck it is.

Don't get me started.

[emerywood]

It is hard to justify mixing up the evil passion of destroying our enemies and the ideal of spreading democracy to them. Nevertheless, history has shown that that is simply human nature.

[Noelle]

I have never been able to understand why so many people have taken this man so seriously, and for so long.

I would like nothing more than for Thomas "Give War A Chance" Friedman to go to the edge of his "Flat" world and leap right off the side.

[wldnswmmr]

An excellent dismantling of the Friedman myth. Friedman is sui generis, I suppose, a kind of columnist without any principled views other than his own self-promotion. He's clearly a neo-con passing for a liberal, and he cultivates the latter impersonation by his ill-informed but hip and trendy advocacy for "geo-green," his latest neologism strongly suggesting he's got another book in the works. When his war in Iraq didn't work out, even after he gave Bush 10 or 15 six-month extensions, he turned on the Bush Administration and blamed the failure on their execution of Friedman's concept. What is particularly galling about Friedman, now that he's jumped on the anti-Bush bandwagon, is that he never acknowledges the incredible destruction which his pro-war cheerleading brought about. He feigns the idea that he's always been right and that he bears no responsibility for giving Bush the cover he needed to get America bogged down hopelessly in a Muslim sectarian war. And he writes some of the clumsiest, unreadable prose in the English language. When you consider his irresponsibility and his inarticulate delivery, you can begin to see why he found Bush such a special leader.

[BeyondPopper]

What Friedman inadvertently points out is the clear truth that the corporate media and political class don't want us to know: unlimited, unregulated free enterprise does not work.

Of course, the reliance on violence to solve all problems is only a presage of the childish, boorish bullying that is Bush administration foreign policy, but we can take from this the fact that even the right understands that their religion of untrammeled greed as a substitute for understanding economics is a false idol.

Those among us who have found rationality, however, need to understand this point, as well, and make it a point to bring it up as often and as loudly as possible. There is a valid economic reason for government regulation. We learned this in 1929; we -- or at least the corporate shills in the Republican party and their enablers in the Democratic party and the "liberal" media -- have done our best to forget it.

Real criticism of the neoclassical economic dogma has, ironically, emerged from some corporate think tanks, most notably in the book, /The Origin of Wealth/, by Eric Beinhocker.

Worth a read. Worth getting our heads around. Worth repeating.

Government regulations and actions to protect the common welfare are not sacrifices we make for the sake of the unfortunate that damage the overall efficiency of the economy. They, and much more, are essential to maintaining a healthy economy.