Thomas Friedman: Hooked on War
Atlantic Free Press - September 6, 2007 Thursday 7:17 AM EST
By Norman Solomon
Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Sept. 5, 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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