Letters to the Editor
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Frankly, I'd say...
... he's six months from changing his mind on this issue.
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Friedman assumes we are a nation of idiots...
When I read Friedman's op ed piece in the NYT this morning I was left shaking my head. He's obviously scared that the American people might buy into Obama's idea of using diplomacy to deal with our so-called enemies in the Middle East. He and his fellow pundits did a con job on the American people back in 2002...hopefully we'll be smart enough not to be fooled by these same NeoCon arguments again.
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friedman is a great disappointment
Dear Glenn,
Tom Friedman has been one of the great disappointments in punditry over the past 6 years. I think it was he who wrote that the US needs to "smash the Arab world in the face" for Sept. 11 and, even now, I am often amazed at how shallow his analyses are on most issues - not just Iraq and Iran, but his unremitting promotion of economic globalization, for example. Economic globalization is a complex phenomenon, but Friedman's description of the "golden straitjacket" idea is ridiculously simple-minded.
What is most disturbing about Friedman is that he is a representative of the American mainstream political class. The received wisdom of this class is that Iran must be humbled and controlled. The fact that the idea of an "Iranian threat" is so overblown that it barely makes sense is not something that these people can - or want - to accommodate. Friedman articulates what many believe - Iran must be coerced. Dealing with it as an equal, trying to understand that Iran wants regional respect and can be negotiated with, or even appreciating the real limits of US military power are - disturbingly - apparently beyond the political class' ability to comprehend.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine
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Everybody loves Cheney! Right?
So the "Serious" Friedman thinks that the American people, who have long shown themselves to have an overwhelmingly high disapproval rating of Dick Cheney, aren't sure if they like guys who think and act and react like guys like Dick Cheney, but Obama would be wise if he had a guy like Dick Cheney - if not the actual Dick Cheney - as his nominee in waiting for Vice President. Does Friedman have a sense of humor, or is he just clearly demented.
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Tom Knows Best
I think Glenn missed an important part of Friedman's op-ed that debunks Glenn's entire post:
Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously.
If Glenn and his readers would just trust Tom, then it will all work out. Clearly Tom has been talking to the "mad mullahs" and knows what he's talking about. Let's trust Tom one more time. This can be his third strike...
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Wouldn't Joe Pesci Be Better?
If Obama wanted to follow the generally dumb, unintelligent, mysteriously & vastly over-rated rants of the eternal cliche-spouter Thomas Friedman, and have a 'tough crazy guy' on hand to balance out his own wacky dirty fringe hippie peace loving surrender monkey ways, how about hiring Joe Pesci to play "Goodfellas" all over the world? "Funny? Funny how? I'm funny like I'm a clown? Do I amuse you?" and so on.
In the meantime, maybe someone can buy little Tommy Friedman some Sgt Rock comic books and some GI Joe action figures for him to play at, alone in a safe room, instead of insisting that his brain -- which is better for stealing vapic anecdotes about economics from random third world service personnel -- be used to drive the real world to carry out his idiotic fantasies.
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What Tom Friedman REALLY got wrong
Glenn Greenwald seems to have enjoyed venting about how Tom Friedman facilitated Bush's invasion of Iraq. Greenwald is right--Friedman did support the invasion, and on dubious grounds--but the critique leaves out an essential item in Friedman's pre-war rationale: Friedman's know-it-all attitude at the time (late Winter and early Spring, 2003) was glaringly myopic.
Friedman tried to attach an asterisk to his approval of the invasion. He winked at all of us as he confided that the Bush administration's stated reasons for invading (WMDs, Saddam's ties to al qaeda) were just cover stories for the actual-and-legitimate reason (the planting of a democracy in the Middle East as a warning and example). Friedman said he didn't know whether the democracy experiment would succeed, because he didn't know whether it would be done right. But we ought to give it a chance, he said. It was a project that deserved our support.
What Friedman, in his presumptuous "inside story" wisdom, got so very wrong was that there was no way he or anyone else outside the administration could know just how strong Bush's commitment to that one favored cause might be. Was Cheney committed to the successful planting of a democracy? Was Rumsfeld? Did Bush even know what that meant? If there were still OTHER agendas--settling old scores for Bush 41; testing out Rumsfeld's smaller-fighting-force hypothesis; destroying the existing, overly comfortable arrangements between Iraq and China, Russia, France, Germany, et al.; or simply securing "our" oil from under "their" sand--what assurance could Tom Friedman give us that democracy-planting would be given the highest priority? No such assurance was possible, because the administration's values were not ultimately knowable. They had fabricated the headlined "reasons" for invading. How could we believe that their "real" motive, the one Friedman advocated for, would take precedence?
Friedman's Asterisk, his qualified support of a dishonestly advocated, flagrantly illegal invasion, was as naive and absurd as his current celebration of hypersteroidal-Cheney-Soprano "diplomacy." He thinks he's a lot more savvy than he really is.
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the "new and improved" Ledeen Doctrine
“Tom Friedman -- and the rest of our media class -- are completely unchanged as compared to what they were like in 2002.”
There does seem to be one change: a much shorter shelf life for the “Ledeen Doctrine” – which seems to have changed from every ten years to every two years.
Their craving for blood and war increases when they get it – it doesn’t satisfy them at all, they just need more and more of it.
The war in Iraq just made them more insecure, so they need another war to ease their new-found insecurities; it’s sort of a perverse “mission creep” for war-loving pundits, who seem to get more insecure with every display of their awesome machismo.
So now we have the new and improved “Ledeen Doctrine”:
“Every two years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
Why didn’t the world learn that we meant business after Iraq?
The war-loving pundits don’t want to ask that question, they just want another war, so they don’t have to ask it. They’re expecting a different outcome, a different answer – after the next war then the world will learn we really mean business.
But that’s the very definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”