I think it's a good idea to have one thread for each NY Times columnist, since they always seem to elicit multiple posts. I'll let someone else start the Paul Krugman thread.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opini ... edman.html

'Oops. I Told the Truth.'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 17, 2004

Sometimes it's useful to stand back and ask yourself: If I could vote for anyone for president other than George W. Bush or John Kerry, whom would I choose? I'd choose Bill Cosby - on the condition that he would talk as bluntly to white parents and kids about what they need to do if they want to succeed as he did to black kids and parents a few months ago.

The one thing that has gone totally missing, not only from this election, but from American politics, is national leaders who are actually ready to level with the public and even criticize their own constituencies. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that in American politics "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." We could use a few really big gaffes right now. Because we have not one, but three baby booms bearing down at us, and without a massive injection of truth-telling they could all explode on the next president's watch.

The leading edge of the American baby boom generation is now just two presidential terms away from claiming its Social Security and Medicare benefits. "With unfunded entitlement liabilities at $74 trillion in today's dollars - an amount far exceeding the net worth of our entire national economy - and with payroll taxes needing to double to cover the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare, how can any serious person not call entitlement reform the transcendent domestic policy issue of our era?" asks former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson, whose book on this subject, "Running on Empty," provides a blueprint for a bipartisan solution to this problem for any president daring to lead.

The second group of boomers barreling down the highway are the young people in India, China and Eastern Europe, who in this increasingly flat world will be able to compete with your kids and mine more directly than ever for high-value-added jobs. Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

The third group of boomers our next president will have to deal with is from the Arab world. The Arab region has had the highest rate of population growth in the world in the last half century. It has among the highest unemployment rates in the world today. And one-third of the Arab population is under the age of 15 and will soon be entering both a barren job market and its child-bearing years. There are eight Saudis under age 15 for every one between ages 45 and 60.

This is why I believed so strongly in trying to partner with the people of Iraq to establish some sort of decent government there that might serve as a beachhead for more progressive governance in the Arab world. I have not given up hope for this, but it may turn out that we made too many mistakes and that Iraqis are too divided for such a project to succeed. If so, the next president is going to need plan B - some combination of oil conservation that reduces our exposure to this region, a new military strategy and a renewed focus on promoting better government there through diplomatic and economic means. The Arab world is not even close to educating its baby boomers with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. Left untended, this trend is a prescription for humiliation and suicide terrorism.

I realize that elections are no time to expect honesty from politicians. But we're in this hole because the political season used to stop on Election Day. Now it's a permanent campaign. That is simply not a luxury our next president will have. The boomers are coming - from three directions - and we will not be able to deal with them without a president with a real penchant for gaffes of honesty.

====================================

I think the third set of boomers was the most interesting. Something I never even thought of, but it's an important issue.

This column reveals him to be the perfect idiot. Am I missing something?



Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
Wednesday, June 4, 2003 Posted: 7:02 AM EDT (1102 GMT)

The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.

Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

Maybe I'm the one missing something, but I think Friedman is right on there. I do think the real reason for the Iraq war was to cause a strategic disruption in the heart of the Middle East.

Well certainly that may be the real reason, my problem is with anybody who agrees with that reason(like Mr. Freidman).

Man in Black,

I'm not sure I follow your train of thought here. You agree that it may be the reason, but you have a problem with those that agree with it as the reason Huh.

And Thomas Friedman an idiot ? Not even close. You may not agree with him, that's your right. But the man has spent quite alot of time in the Middle East, as the bureau chief for the NYT in both Beirut and Jerusalem. He has more then just a passing knowledge of that region of the world and the people who reside there. Try picking up his book " From Beirut to Jerusalem", you may find it a learning experience.

I don't think Friedman is agreeing with that reason (and I certainly do not--I think it's an awful reason to go to war). It appears that you only clipped part of his article, so it's tough to make a conclusion.

Here's the entire article(or actually, a clarification of the earlier one he wrote). He certainly is defending this reasoning. I must say, he does write very eloquently, but like the neo-cons, his support for this undertaking is rooted in profound naivete(in my opinion, of course).
He also supports, I might add, US military intervention in the Israel-Palestine conflict(which is an unbelievably bad idea).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Friedman
To: Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Four Reasons To Invade Iraq
Monday, Jan. 12, 2004, at 10:12 AM PT
I appreciated Ken Pollack's honest reassessment of the question of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq. The Bush team could learn a lot from it.

Since my liberal hawkishness regarding the Iraq war was never rooted in the WMD issue, I look at the postwar a little differently. The debate about the Iraq war for me was always a struggle between hope and experience: hope that we could partner with Iraqis to remove the genocidal tyranny of Saddam Hussein and replace it with some kind of decent, pluralistic, representative government in the heart of the Arab world, and my experience—particularly living in Lebanon during its civil war—which left me skeptical about ever producing a self-sustaining, multiethnic democracy in that region. It was a real struggle in my head. In the end, I let hope win. I have no regrets.

Indeed, having visited Iraq three times since April, I feel even more strongly today than I did the day the war started that, while the Bush team has made an utter mess of the diplomacy and postwar planning, it was still the right war and still has a decent chance to produce a decent outcome.

Why? I think there were four reasons for this war, and I identified with three of them: There was the stated reason, the moral reason, the right reason, and the real reason.

The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument. I didn't have any inside information. I simply assumed that whatever WMD Saddam possessed had to be, after a decade of sanctions, so limited that it was easily deterrable. There was absolutely nothing in Saddam's history to suggest that he was suicidal—that he had the capability or will to attack the United States directly and pay the price.

He was always deterrable and containable. This was always a war of choice.

The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity. They will have to answer for that.

Personally, I believed the right reason and the moral reason for the war were more than sufficient to justify it. To be sure, they would have been a hard sell as a war of choice, but not impossible—had Messrs. Bush and Blair really thrown themselves into it.

The moral reason for the war was that this was a genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of some 1 million Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians, and Kuwaitis as a result of Saddam's internal suppression and external wars with Iran and Kuwait. Saddam was 10 times worse than Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, whom NATO took on without U.N. cover.

The right reason for the war, and this was the core of my own argument, was that the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten our open society were not the hidden WMD of Saddam. Those, as I said, were always deterrable because Saddam and his sons loved life more than they hated us. No, the real WMD that threatened us, and still do, are the young people being churned out, year after year, by failed and repressive Arab states, who hate us more than they love life and therefore are undeterrable. I am talking here about the boys of 9/11. I am talking here about all the youth identified in the two U.N. Development Programme Arab Human Development reports—youth who want to run away from the Arab countries they were raised in because they are so frustrated, angry, and humiliated by how their governments and society have left them unprepared for modernity. Sept. 11, I have always believed, was produced by the poverty dignity, not the poverty money. It was the product, as Egyptian playwright Ali Salem once remarked, of young men who felt so humiliated by the world, they felt like dwarfs, and dwarfs search out tall towers to bring down in order to feel tall. Humiliated youth, ready to commit suicide using instruments from our daily life—cars, planes, tennis shoes—and inspired by religious totalitarians are the real threat to open societies today.

Therefore, the right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Unless we successfully partner with Iraqis, though, to build a new and more decent context, that terrorism bubble will eventually come back tenfold. We must get this right. Yes, I know, it may all turn out to be a fool's errand. A decent Iraq may be impossible. But I would rather go down swinging as an optimist than resign as a pessimist. Because if there is no way to produce governments that can deliver for their young people in the Arab world, get ready for a future full of Code Orange and Code Red.

Hunting the Tiger
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I'm sure that experts would tell us there are many reasons that the presidential race is too close to call, but I would argue that it all comes down to this one simple point: We still don't know which man used the debates to overcome his biggest liability.

Let me explain. I believe there are two things troubling the soul of America today. One of them is: We really do have enemies out there. The other is: We are really on the wrong track.

Whether they are watching the news from Iraq, where hooded men are sawing off the heads of Americans and blowing up Iraqi civilians who are standing in line to join the Iraqis' own police force, or they are contemplating the suicide bombings from Bali to Istanbul, or they are merely reflecting on 9/11 and the applause that attack still receives in certain quarters, nearly all Americans do feel in their gut that we really do have enemies out there.

John Kerry's most important challenge in this election campaign is to connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: "Does this man understand that we have real enemies?" Mr. Kerry, wrongly in my view, tried to use his heroic Vietnam War record to pass that test by implication. He did not make the sale.

In the debates, he tried to both criticize the Iraq war and to look voters in the eye and say: I know we have enemies and I will confront them, albeit in a different and wiser manner than George Bush has.

How did that go over? I believe that Mr. Kerry presented himself as an articulate, informed and credible commander in chief - but did he make the sale to the great American center? Not clear. My own free advice to Mr. Kerry is if he is unsure about this, he should drop everything else - health care, deficits and middle-class tax cuts - and focus on this issue. Everything else is secondary.

President Bush has a different problem. The threshold test that Mr. Bush had to pass was: "Does this man understand that we are on the wrong track?" Even though the situation is still salvageable, right now Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever.

Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country's attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?

Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush's senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) - that we never had enough troops to control Iraq's borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority - the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush's missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.

Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago - and gotten them.

Did the president, in the debates, answer these concerns? He barely tried. His strategy is to focus all his energy on fanning doubts about whether Mr. Kerry understands that we have real enemies, so voters will not focus on how much we are on the wrong track - with virtually no friends in the world and an Iraq that is now so insecure our own soldiers are afraid to drive certain roads.

In British politics there used to be a standard test for candidates for prime minister: Would you want to go on a tiger hunt with this person? That is, would this candidate kill the tiger or try to reason with the tiger? Graham Allison, the Harvard international relations professor who just published a book called "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe," said to me the other day that the tiger hunt is even more relevant in America today.

"The big question about Kerry is, Will he pull the trigger?" Mr. Allison said. "And the big question about Bush is, Can he aim? With Bush, we know he can pull the trigger, but it's like he shot himself in the foot - and the tiger is still out there. It's the tiger who needs to be shot, not us."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/opini ... edman.html

Iraq at the Tipping Point
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 18, 2004

CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq

Every time I visit Iraq, I leave asking myself the same question: If you total up all the positives and negatives, where does the balance come out? I'd say the score is still 4 to 4. We can still emerge with a decent outcome. And the whole thing could still end very badly. There's only one thing one can say for sure today: you won't need to wait much longer for the tipping point. Either the elections for a new governing body happen by the end of January, as scheduled, and the rout of Saddam loyalists in Falluja is consolidated and extended throughout the Sunni triangle, or not. If it's the former, there are still myriad challenges ahead, but you can be somewhat hopeful. If it's the latter, we've got a total fiasco on our hands.

I came out to the Falluja front in a small press pool accompanying the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, who flew in to inspect the toughest problems in Iraq firsthand. Most of the fighting in Falluja was over by the time we arrived at this headquarters compound, although the tom-tom beat of 155-millimeter howitzers, still pumping rounds into the city, was constant. Here are the questions I came with and the answers I took away:

How important is taking Falluja? Huge. Falluja was to the Iraqi insurgency what Afghanistan was to Osama bin Laden. It was the safe haven where militants could, with total impunity, plan operations, stockpile weapons and connect the suicide bombers from abroad with their Iraqi handlers. That's gone. One arms cache alone found here had 49,000 pieces of ordnance, ranging from mortars to ammo rounds. Another arms cache blown up last week kept exploding for 45 minutes after it was hit, a senior U.S. officer said.

What happens next in Falluja? The plan is for Iraqi Army, police and National Guard units to move in, restore order and hold the place so the insurgents can't retake it and voting can be conducted in January. Whether the Iraqi Army can do that is unclear. Don't believe any of the big numbers that people in Washington throw around about how many Iraqi security people we have trained. Those numbers are meaningless.

The reality is this: Where you have individual Iraqi police, National Guard and Army commanders who have bravely stepped forward to serve the new Iraq and are willing to lead - despite intimidation efforts by insurgents - you have effective units. Where you don't have committed Iraqi leaders, all you have are Iraqi men collecting paychecks who will flee at the first sign of danger. The good news: there are pockets of Iraqi leaders emerging throughout the Army and police. The bad news: there are still way too few of them.

Then do we have enough U.S. troops? No way. U.S. commanders are constantly having to make hard choices between deploying troops to quell a firefight in one place or using them to prevent one from breaking out in another. With two months before elections and the campaign about to start, Iraq remains highly insecure. And with most aid workers having pulled out, U.S. forces have to do everything. Units of the First Cavalry in Baghdad might be fighting militants in Sadr City in the morning, dealing with sewage problems in the afternoon and teaching democracy in the evening. Some of these young soldiers already have three Purple Hearts from having survived that many grenade attacks in Baghdad.

What have we learned from the many insurgents captured in Falluja? A vast majority are Iraqi Sunnis, with only a few foreign fighters. This is an Iraqi Sunni rebellion, but a senior Iraqi official told me that they had discovered Saddam loyalists who were using Aleppo, Syria, to regroup and plan operations.

Bottom line? Iraq is a country still on life support, and U.S. troops are the artificial lungs and heart. At the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Babil Province, which I visited, 211 marines have been injured in fighting in the past few months. But 180 of them insisted on returning to duty after being injured. U.S. forces still have a strong will to win.

But another thing remains impressively strong: The insurgents will go to any lengths to intimidate Iraqis away from joining the new government. Too many people, from cleaning women to deputy ministers, are being shot. The insurgents' strategy is intimidation. The U.S. strategy is Iraqification. This is the struggle - and the intimidators are doing way too well. Without a secure environment in which its new leadership can be elected and comfortably operate, Iraq will never be able to breathe on its own, and U.S. troops will have to be here forever.

In My Next Life
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 25, 2004


In my next life, I want to be Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge - something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.

But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.

If I can't be Tom DeLay, then I want to be one of the gutless Republican House members who voted to twist the rules for DeLay out of fear that "the Hammer," as they call him, might retaliate by taking away a coveted committee position or maybe a parking place.

Yes, I want to be a Republican House member. At a time when 180 of the 211 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq who have been wounded in combat have insisted on returning to duty, I want to look my constituents and my kids in the eye and tell them that I voted to empty the House ethics rules because I was afraid of Tom DeLay.

If I can't be a Republican House member, I want to be Latrell Sprewell, the guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves. I want to say with a straight face that if my owner will only give me a three-year contract extension for a meager $21 million, then he's not worth working for, because "I've got my family to feed."

Yes, I want to be Latrell Sprewell. At a time when N.B.A. games are priced beyond the reach of most American families, when half the country can't afford health care, when some reservists in Iraq are separated from their families for a year, including this Thanksgiving, I want to be like Latrell. I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm looking out for my family - and no one else's.

If I can't be Latrell Sprewell, I want to be any American college or professional athlete. For a mere dunk of the basketball or first-down run, I want to be able to dance a jig, as if I'd just broken every record by Michael Jordan or Johnny Unitas. For the smallest, most routine bit of success in my sport, I want to be able to get in your face - I want to know who's your daddy, I want to be able to high-five, low-five, thump my chest and dance on your grave. You talkin' to me?

I want to be able to fight on the court, off the court, in the stands and on the sidelines. I want to respect no boundaries and no norms. And when I make your kids cry, I want to be able to tell you to just "chill" - that my coach says "stuff happens" and that my union rep is appealing my punishment in the name of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Yes, in my next life, I want to be The Man.

If I can't be The Man, then I at least want to be the owner of a Hummer - with American flag decals all over the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more patriotic than you and me.

Yes, I want to drive the mother of all gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities that transfer money to madrassas that teach children intolerance, antipluralism and how to hate the infidels.

And when one day one of those madrassa graduates goes off and joins the jihad in Falluja and kills my neighbor's son, who is in the U.S. Army Rangers, I want to drive to his funeral in my Hummer. Yes, I want to curse his killers in front of his mother and wail aloud, "If there was only something I could do ..." And then I want to drive home in my Hummer, stopping at two gas stations along the way.

If I can't be any of these, then I want to be just a simple blue-state red-state American. I want to take time on this Thanksgiving to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own. And I want to thank them for doing this, even though on so many days in so many ways we really don't deserve them.

That was fucking awesome!

Thomas Friedman is always so cool-headed. He's even better when he's pissed off, though. I've never seen something like this before. Are we sure this wasn't written by Maureen Dowd and submitted under Friedman's name?

--PunkDavid

Another good reason why rushing to war is a bad, bad idea:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/opini ... edman.html

The Suicide Supply Chain
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 9, 2004

From what I can tell from the new organizational flow chart for U.S. intelligence that Congress adopted yesterday, it is a god-awful combination of new titles and jobs at the top, without clear lines of authority to the people on the ground. One thing I've learned from 25 years in the newspaper business (which is just another form of intelligence gathering) is this: Whenever you add a new layer of editors on top of reporters, and don't get rid of some of the old layer of editors, all you get is trouble. You get less intelligent.

The right way to improve U.S. intelligence is to get more people on the ground who speak the languages we need and who can think unconventionally. If that sounds blindingly obvious to you, it is, but it is precisely the shortage of such people that explains to me America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq - a failure we are paying for dearly right now. You see, we didn't invade Iraq too soon. We actually invaded 10 years too late.

Let me explain: America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq was not the W.M.D. we thought were there, but weren't. It was the P.M.D. we thought weren't there, but were. P.M.D., in my lexicon, stands for "people of mass destruction." And there were far more of them in Iraq than anyone realized. The failure of U.S. intelligence to understand what was happening inside Iraqi society during the decade-plus of U.N. sanctions that preceded our invasion is the key to many of the problems we've encountered in post-Saddam Iraq.

The U.N. sanctions pulverized Iraqi society - a society already beaten down by an eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the war over Kuwait and some 30 years of Saddam's tyranny. As Saddamism and sanctions chewed up the Iraqi people during the 1990's, many people of talent left. Before the war, the Bush team told anyone who would listen that Iraq had the most talented secular elite in the Arab world. And it was right. The only problem was that during the 1990's many in that elite moved to Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Cairo, where they worked as professors, music teachers and engineers.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, those who had no access to Baath Party privileges got steadily ground down. Many Iraqi youth, unable to connect with the outside world and unable to find jobs at home, turned to religion. Saddam encouraged this with a mosque-building program. By wrapping himself in an aura of Islam, Saddam also hoped to buttress his own waning legitimacy. So Wahhabi religious influence flowed into the Sunni areas from Saudi Arabia, as Iranian religious influence flowed into Shiite regions.

You know all those masked Iraqi youth you see in the Al Jazeera videos, brandishing weapons and standing over some foreigner whose head they are about saw off? They are the product of the last decade of Saddamism and sanctions. Those youth were 10 years old when the U.N. sanctions began. They are the mushrooms that Saddam and the sanctions were growing in the dark. The Bush team had no clue they were there.

These deracinated, unemployed, humiliated Sunni Iraqi youth are our biggest problem today. Some clearly have become suicide bombers. We can't say what percentage, because, unlike the Palestinians, the Iraqi suicide bombers don't even bother to tell us their names or do a farewell video for mom. They not only are ready to commit suicide on demand, but they are ready to do it anonymously. That bespeaks a very high level of commitment or psychosis, or both.

I would estimate that U.S. forces have been hit with over 200 of these human missiles, and we still are not sure how they are recruited and deployed. What we are facing, I think, is a crude underground suicide supply chain - a mutant combination of Wal-Mart and Wahhabism.

Its organizers appear to use word of mouth, and the Internet, to recruit suicide bombers from Iraq and the wider Muslim world. These bombers are ferried down the supply chain to bomb makers in the field, who get them wired up and deploy them against U.S. and Iraqi targets tactically.

This is not haphazard. These bombings are timed for maximum effect. That means the insurgents are quite confident about their supply of bombers. It's just like Wal-Mart's supply chain: you buy an item in a Wal-Mart in Arkansas, and another one is immediately made in China. In Iraq, you deploy a suicide bomber in Baghdad, and another one is immediately manufactured in Mosul or Riyadh.

When we have people in U.S. intelligence who can explain how that organizational flow chart works, I'll feel safer.

Boo. Friedman. Boo. Hiss. Fucking hiss. And I never hiss.

He's the one responsible for convincing "liberals" that the U.S. should go to war with Iraq. I swear he's more responsible for the war than Bush is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/opini ... edman.html

Pop-Tarts or Freedom?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: January 16, 2005

In the wake of U.S. aid to help Muslim and other victims of the recent tsunami, Colin Powell suggested that maybe, now that the Muslim world had seen "American generosity" and "American values in action," it wouldn't be so hostile to America.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a thank-you card. If the fact that American soldiers have risked their lives to save the Muslims of Bosnia, the Muslims of Kuwait, the Muslims of Somalia, the Muslims of Afghanistan and the Muslims of Iraq has earned the U.S. only the false accusation of being "anti-Muslim," trust me, U.S. troops passing out bottled water and Pop-Tarts in Indonesia are not going to erase that lie. It is not an exaggeration to say that, if you throw in the Oslo peace process, U.S. foreign policy for the last 15 years has been dominated by an effort to save Muslims - not from tsunamis, but from tyrannies, mostly their own theocratic or autocratic regimes.

It clearly has not made much of an impression. So you will pardon me if I say that I don't care whether the state media in Saudi Arabia - whose government gave far less to the Muslim tsunami victims ($30 million) than the amount spent by King Fahd's entourage on his last two vacations in Marbella (reportedly $100 million) - say nice things about us.

I believe the tensions between us and the Muslim world stem primarily from the conditions under which many Muslims live, not what we do. I believe free people, living under freely elected governments, with a free press and with economies and education systems that enable their young people to achieve their full potential, don't spend a lot of time thinking about who to hate, who to blame, and who to lash out at. Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Ah, you say, but the Europeans live in free-market democracies and they have become very anti-American. Yes, some of them. But for Europeans, anti-Americanism is a hobby. For too many in the Muslim world it has become a career.

I am sure that young Taiwanese, young Koreans, young Japanese, young Poles and young Indians have their views on America, but they are not an obsession. They want our jobs, not our lives. They live in societies that empower their young people to realize their full potential and to express any opinion - pro-American, anti-American or neutral.

So I don't want young Muslims to like us. I want them to like and respect themselves, their own countries and their own governments. I want them to have the same luxury to ignore America as young Taiwanese have - because they are too busy focusing on improving their own lives and governance, running for office, studying anything they want or finding good jobs in their own countries.

The Bush team is certainly not fostering all this when it mismanages a war it launched to liberate the people of Iraq. Its performance has been pathetic, and I understand anyone on the right or the left who wants to wash his hands of the whole thing. Speaking personally, though, I am still hoping that these Iraqi elections come off - out of respect for the Iraqis who have been ready to risk their lives for a chance to vote, out of contempt for the insurgents who want to prevent that and out of a deep conviction that something very important is at stake.

No, these elections won't change Iraq or the region overnight, and Thomas Jefferson is not on the ballot. But they will at least kick off what the Iraq expert Yitzhak Nakash calls "a real, Iraqi political process run by and for Iraqis."

That Iraqi political process "has to begin now to enable the U.S. to get out sooner rather than later," added Mr. Nakash, a Brandeis professor and currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. "The U.S. must go ahead with the elections in Iraq, accept the likelihood that Shiites and Kurds will do well, and leave the door open to Sunnis to join as partners in writing the Iraqi constitution. We want a system there that answers to the aspirations of Iraqis, not Americans. That is the key to a legitimate Iraqi government."

Before the war, I said of Iraq, "We break it, we own it." Today, my motto is, "If they own it, they'll fix it." America's standing in the Muslim world will improve, not when we get a better message, but when they have more control. People with the responsibility and opportunity to run their own lives focus on their own lives - not on us. More of that would be a very good thing.

I'm posting this one not so much because of Friedman, but that he mentioned Irshad Manji. She's a very sharp woman, and I recommend to read the stuff she's written.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/opini ... edman.html

Brave, Young and Muslim
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 3, 2005

The last couple of years have not been easy for anyone, myself included, who hoped that the Iraq war would produce a decent, democratizing outcome. And even in the wake of the remarkable Iraqi election, the toppling of the Lebanese cabinet and the reforms brewing in Egypt, it is too soon for anyone to declare victory. We're dealing with some very unstable chemicals. But what makes me more hopeful today is precisely what made me hopeful that the Iraq war might work out, and that is the number of Arab-Muslim youth I've encountered since 9/11 who have urged me to keep writing about the need for democracy and reform in their part of the world.

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Of course, many Americans are surprised by this. America has treated the Arab-Muslim states for 50 years as a collection of gas stations. All we cared about was that their pumps were open and their prices low, and that they be nice to the Israelis. As long as the regimes did that, we said, they could do whatever they wanted "out back." They could treat their women however they wanted, they could write about America in their newspapers however they wanted, and they could preach intolerance of other religions all they wanted - just keep their pumps open and prices low and be nice to the Israelis. On 9/11, we got hit with everything that was going on "out back."

Since then, it's been clear to me that unless we partner with Arabs and Muslims to change their context, unless we help them create the free space for a war of ideas that will allow for a new discussion out front and out back, we're just begging for another 9/11. I always knew we had partners there, but the democratic movements that have now emerged have shown me just how many young people there want to give voice to their aspirations and achieve their full potential - something their governments and spiritual leaders have been blocking.

If you want to get a taste of what they sound like, read Irshad Manji's courageous book "The Trouble With Islam Today," and the letters and debates from young Muslims on her Web site (http://www.muslim-refusenik.com). Ms. Manji is a 36-year-old Canadian Muslim feminist who has dared to write a book calling for a reformation of Islam.

"There's no bigger idea for the Muslim world today - and consequently for all of us - than reopening the gates of independent thinking, or 'ijtihad,' " she said. "That's the main point of my book - to show that Islam once had a pluralistic tradition of critical debate and dissent, and that we Muslims need to rediscover this tradition to update Islam for the 21st century. That's not being radical. That's being faithful."

Born in Uganda of an Indian-Muslim father and a mother with Egyptian roots who emigrated to Canada, Ms. Manji is a frequent lecturer about diversity on college campuses. "Even before 9/11 and my book, I noticed that after my lectures young Muslims would gather at the side of the stage, wait for everyone else to leave and then walk over and say things like, 'Irshad, we need more voices to help open up this religion of ours, because if it doesn't open up we are leaving it.' That is what the clerics don't get. We're saving Islam by showing the emerging generation how they can be part of a pluralistic world and be faithful Muslims."

To that end, Ms. Manji has just launched what she calls Project Ijtihad. "The goal," she explained, "is to create a leadership center that will attract young, reform-minded Muslims to network with one another so they see that they're not alone, to develop the confidence to openly dissent with conformity in Islam and to learn about the golden age of Islam, when Muslims, Jews, Christians worked together to preserve and expand knowledge - something we're rarely, if ever, taught in our public schools or in our Islamic religious schools."

At the urging of students, Ms. Manji recently had her book translated into Arabic and Urdu and posted on her Web site. Young Arabs and Pakistanis are now downloading it in private and discussing it. This week she was approached by a small Arabic publisher who operates in Lebanon and Germany - and has just opened in Baghdad - offering to publish her book in Iraq!

"I can't help but appreciate the symbolism," she said. "Baghdad was the seat of the Islamic enlightenment from the eighth to 12th centuries. It was a crossroads of goods, services, big ideas."

This will take time to play out, and a decent outcome is not assured. But the good news is that young Arabs and Muslims are starting to have a very different conversation "out back," and more and more of them are demanding to have it out front.

I think Friedman is great, and he hit the nail on the head with most of the articles posted. I tend to shy away from editorials, because they are typically overly vicious, and are rarely about solutions, and mirror the partisan politics we see with the vast majority of politicians. Friedman is one of the good guys though.

His articles are not only good for constructive debate, but he also has a knack for pointing out the good and bad of most issues and people, while offering very even handed and reasonable solutions. He gets to the meat of an idea, and doesn't stick to that standard of throwing other peoples talking points back at them with another talking point of his own. While he definetly strays more to the left of my ideology, he is able to make a point without alienating those with differing opinions, at least much better then most. The problem with many of the strong voices on the left right now, is that they don't have the ability to present ideas that may be quite reasonable, wihtout pissing off the people they are trying to convert. It becomes an us versus them mentality while the moderates are stuck twisting in the wind thinking they are alone on an island.

I think that Samuel P. Huntington gets a lot closer to an adaptable, realistic vision of the now and future world than Friedman. Among other reasons, I find it not insignificant that all of Friedman's visions and theories seem to fit pretty well into Huntington's thoughts, but Huntington's larger ideas have matched actual events much closer.

I've been trying to find something from Huntington to post on here, and I'm having a hell of a time. The original essay "Clash of Civilizations" doesn't elaborate or defend itself in a way that makes it stand alone very well, but the completed book by the same name is hundreds of pages. I thought I'd try and do some summarizing, but if it turns out loopy then just read the damn book, especially if you haven't and are a big fan of Friedman. It isn't an opposing viewpoint, per se, but it will certainly influence perception.

Huntington's main point is that people are becoming more and more apt to identify themselves by their civilization, at its broadest level. Western, Sinic, Islamic, etc. Not on a conscious level, per se, but in the way they approach their lifestyles.

He gives numerous examples and statistics, but the one that really struck me was that the number of mosques open and functioning in the Middle East has increased from a few hundred to over 10,000 in a period of several decades. Huntington discusses modernization as coinciding with this growing sense of cultural self....

The West, being the first to modernize, has associated modernization with its unique subset of values, and thus often assumed that modernization of other cultures would ultimately lead to them adapting culturally as well. This notion was supported by the fact that Westernism was popularized by many nations who were modernizing. In fact, statistics show that as cultures modernize and become more and more a part of the global community, they at first embrace the culture that is currently dominant, and then reject it. Seeking a sense of identity, they are more likely to be intensely religious (religion being a key factor in defining culture), and express distaste for the dominant culture. Embracing of the product does not tend to correlate with the embracing of the culture, in the long run.

"'Foreign imports are nice as shiny or high-tech things. But intangible social and political institutions imported from elsewhere can be deadly. Islam is for us not just a religion, but a way of life. We Saudi's want to modernize, but not necessarily Westernize." - Bandar bin Sultan, New York Times interview

Cultures experience phases, and the West recently left its warring phase, where-in nations within a culture experience continuous conflict. Currently, Western culture is dominant, and will remain for some time (though it is technically in decline, in terms of the percentage of the world's economy, military, and population that it contains). More and more, one should expect to see conflict appear between cultures (interestingly enough, the book came out in 1996, before the intensifying of the struggles between the West and Islam).

That's about as far as I'm going, in terms of an overview, because it's impossible to shrink down a book that never wastes words into an online post, but, as I said, it's an interesting read for anybody who reads a lot of Friedman.

An interview with Friedman about the environment and the US dependence on energy. It's a great read.

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005 ... urce=daily

(I'd post it here but it has a lot of formatting and links.)