Once upon a time, Thomas Friedman wrote articles that demonstrated a knowledge of the Middle East in its frustrating complexity. For over a year, though, he's bought into a vision of a US role in Iraq that he feels is "liberal" and "liberating" but doesn't pass the smell test as anything other than rapacious and colonial.
Just exactly when did Thomas Friedman jump the shark?
When did Friedman Jump the Shark?
In a recent column, Thomas Friedman writes:
I stood on the sidewalk in London the other day and watched thousands of antiwar, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair protesters pass by. They chanted every antiwar slogan you could imagine and many you couldn't print. It was entertaining -- but also depressing, because it was so disconnected from the day's other news.
Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading, "Osama, How Many Innocents Did You Kill Today?" or "Baathists -- Hands Off the U.N. and the Red Cross in Iraq." Hey, I would have settled for "Bush and Blair Equal Bin Laden and Saddam" -- something, anything, that acknowledged that the threats to global peace today weren't just coming from the White House and Downing Street.
Let me explain something, Mr. Friedman. Tony Blair is a democratically elected leader, and therefore is supposed to be accountable to the will of his consituency. The same is purportedly true of George Bush.
When the consituency of a republic is in violent disagreement with the policies of its leaders, public protest is a way of getting the attention of that leader and demonstrating the popularity and intensity of that dissent. It is hoped that such action will affect the future decision making of these elected officials, who are supposed to be govern by the consent of their people.
By contrast, Saddam is a deposed dictator and Osama is a leader of a decentralized terrorist organization. There is no reason for a British protestor to believe that anything at all is to be gained by vociferously objecting to their atrocities by a public demonstration, regardless of how heinous they clearly are.
Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding an antiwar rally on a day when your own people have been murdered -- and not even mentioning it or those who perpetrated it. Watching this scene, I couldn't help but wonder whether George Bush had made the liberal left crazy. It can't see anything else in the world today, other than the Bush-Blair original sin of launching the Iraq war, without U.N. approval or proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Dismissing the legitimate interests of the anti-Blair/Bush protesters with conjecture about the sanity of the aggregate of individuals that Friedman refers to as the "liberal left" is an evasion from the fact that those people who have been murdered - who Friedman is so indignant about - perhaps could have been saved if the vast resources of the west had been united and focused on the pursuit of international terror rather than divided and distracted by his pet project, namely the war in Iraq.
Mr. Friedman, going to war in the face of UN disapproval ostensibly because Saddam was in violation of U.N. resolutions appears absurd to many thinking persons.
Furthermore, a policy of waging pre-emptive war requires a high standard of evidence if it is to have any moral basis whatsoever, if then. Bush and Blair expressed certitude of a threat was later found to be inflated.
Believe me, being a liberal on every issue other than this war, I have great sympathy for where the left is coming from.
I can't believe him when everything else he writes contradicts this.
And if I didn't, my wife would remind me. It would be a lot easier for the left to engage in a little postwar reconsideration if it saw even an ounce of reflection, contrition or self-criticism coming from the conservatives, such as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who drove this war, yet so bungled its aftermath and so misjudged the complexity of postwar Iraq.
Why are the anti-war protesters required to re-examine Iraq when they predicted a disaster... and that's what occured. When they said it was a diversion from the war on terror... and it was? When they didn't trust President Bush... and they shouldn't have?
What obliges "the left" to answer for "the right's" mistakes?
Moreover, the Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out -- which is what the Howard Dean phenomenon is all about.
I agree with Friedman's assessment of the Bush team... but I believe that my support of Howard Dean has to do with the fact that he seems to be a strong and credible advocate for the interests of most of my fellow citizens.
Whereas George Bush appears focused on crony capitalism and destroying the Bill of Rights. His diplomacy is based on intimidation and his foreign policy doctrine of preemptive war may just scare 2 out of the 3 "Axis of Evil" nations (the ones we didn't invade) into going nuclear.
I don't want to punch Bush's lights out. I just want to live in a country that feels like America again.