NYT's Tom Friedman and the Pundits Will Blame Us for Iraq

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 7, 2007.

"Secretary of State Rice said it was like Germany after World War II. I would say it was like Germany, but Germany of 1648, before it was a modern state, rather than Germany in 1948... We were able to rebuild Germany and Japan after WWII, but there are real differences with Iraq. We defeated them with large numbers of troops and we imposed an effective occupation. We never defeated the Sunnis of Iraq and we never imposed an effective occupation controlling the country. Moreover, Germany and Japan had a tradition of democracy and free markets that we could build on. Iraq had very little." -- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman has been subdued lately. I get the feeling that he's taken some of the criticism of his nutty metaphors (I'm only one of a great many people who've been on him about this) to heart and decided to chill out, which in a way is kind of a shame. He's still an arrogant, wrong-headed prick, but he's no longer a walking literary time bomb like he used to be. I often feel now, like I did on the day Red Auerbach died, that the world has lost one of its leading lights.

I had high hopes a few weeks back when Friedman officially penned his five hundredth "Russia is finally turning the corner, because the middle class is really emerging there" piece. Russia and its middle class first started turning the corner during Clinton's first term. Anyway, the piece began it with the sentence, "Russia today is a country that takes three hands to describe. ..."

For three short paragraphs after that, the old magic came back. It was like watching Nolan Ryan's last no-hitter -- for one glorious day, the fastball went back up to 99 again. On the one hand, Friedman said, Putin's Russia can no longer be called democratic. On the other hand, Boris Yeltsin's version of democracy was a failure. This is the sentence that came next -- emphasis is mine:

And on the third hand, while today's Russia may be a crazy quilt of capitalist czars, mobsters, nationalists and aspiring democrats, it is not the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Even in remission, genius is genius. How do you get around the natural mathematical limitations of the construction, "On the one hand ... but on the other hand ..."? After all, we humans only have two hands. You or I would never have thought of it, but Friedman knew instinctively -- just add another hand!

But aside from that, the pickings have been slim in Friedman-land. That doesn't mean, of course, that he hasn't been wrong and stupid lately -- it just means he's been avoiding figures of speech. Most of what he's been doing since he got back from Russia is write columns complaining about the various unpredictable annoyances that are preventing the war in Iraq from being the smashing success it by all rights ought to have been. Last week, for instance, he wrote a piece called "The Silence The Kills" bemoaning the widespread failure of Arab cultures to condemn suicide bombers. The rhetorical crux of the piece rests upon the curious moral calculus that has defined the Bush presidency, a calculus I think is most easily expressed in haiku form:

The war in Iraq
A problem of perception
Terrorists are worse!

Friedman's haiku didn't scan -- it read like this: "Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to people who blow up emergency wards. Europeans are mute, lost in their delusion that this is all George Bush's and Tony Blair's fault."

What's amazing to me is that conservatives have been pushing this line of reasoning for five, six years now, and some people are apparently still buying it. Okay, yes, I jammed my own head up my ass -- but I didn't really, because look at how despicable the terrorists are! Why, they blew up a children's hospital! How could my own head be up my ass if terrorists can blow up a children's hospital? And the headless body points, gesticulates, etc.

See more stories tagged with: tom friedman, iraq

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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