@@ Tom Friedman, Liberal Sadist @@
- From: "Arash" <A7000@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:20:56 -0400
AntiWar
July 28, 2005
Thomas Friedman, Liberal Sadist?
By Norman Solomon
The acclaimed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman) has often voiced enthusiasm for violent
destruction by the U.S. government. Hidden in plain sight, his glee about such carnage is
worth pondering.
Many people view Friedman as notably articulate, while others find him overly glib, but
there's no doubt that he is an influential commentator with inherently respectable views.
When Friedman makes his case for a shift in foreign policy, the conventional media wisdom
is that he's providing a sober assessment. Yet beneath his liberal exterior is a penchant
for remedies that rely on massive Pentagon firepower.
And so, his July 27 column in the Times ? after urging Americans "to thoughtfully plan
ahead and to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow" ? scolds the commander in chief for
being too much of a wimp and failing to demand enough human sacrifice. Friedman poses a
rhetorical question begging for a militaristic answer and then dutifully supplies one:
"If you were president, would you really say to the nation, in the face of the chaos
in Iraq, 'If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them,' but
they have not asked. It is not what the generals are asking you, Mr. President ? it is
what you are asking them, namely: 'What do you need to win?' Because it is clear we are
not winning, and we are not winning because we have never made Iraq a secure place where
normal politics could emerge".
Such a line of reasoning points to sending still more U.S. troops to Iraq. The result,
predictably, would be even more mass slaughter from various directions. But there's no
reason to believe such a result would chasten Friedman, as long as the eminent pundit
figures the Washington-backed killing is for a righteous cause. In recent years Friedman
has expressed much enthusiasm ? even relish ? for launching and continuing wars
underwritten by U.S. taxpayers.
During the last decade of the 20th century, Friedman was a vehement advocate of ? in the
words of a January 1998 column ? "bombing Iraq, over and over and over again." In early
1999, when he offered a pithy list of recommendations for Washington's policymakers, it
included: "Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the
lights will go off or who's in charge." Such disruptions of electricity would have deadly
effects, from hospitals to homes where vulnerable civilians live. Evidently, Friedman
could not let those considerations get in the way of his snappy prose.
But is it unfair to say that Friedman seems to get a charge out of urging systematic
infliction of pain and death? Well, consider his fixation on four words in particular.
During the spring of 1999, as the U.S.-led NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia went on,
Friedman recycled his witticism "Give war a chance" from one column to another.
"Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around," he wrote in early
April. "Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."
(He used the same motto in a Fox News interview.) Another column included this gleeful
taunt while vicariously threatening civilians in Yugoslavia with protracted terror: "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." As on so many other
occasions, Friedman's pronouncements gave off more than a whiff of pleasure at the
spectacle of other people's anguish.
"NATO began its second month of bombing against Yugoslavia today with new strikes against
military targets that disrupted civilian electrical and water supplies" ? the first words
of the lead article on the New York Times front page the last Sunday in April 1999 ?
promoted the remarkable concept that the bombing disrupted "civilian" electricity and
water yet the targets were "military." Never mind that such destruction of infrastructure
would predictably lead to outbreaks of disease and civilian deaths. On the newspaper's
op-ed page, Friedman made explicit his enthusiasm for destroying civilian necessities: "It
should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and
war-related factory has to be targeted."
In autumn 2001, after the bombing of Afghanistan got underway, Friedman dusted off one of
his favorite cute phrases. "My motto is very simple: Give war a chance," he told Diane
Sawyer during an Oct. 29 interview on ABC Television. In November, his column was cracking
the same rhetorical whip. "Let's all take a deep breath," he urged, "and repeat after me:
Give war a chance."
That fall, Friedman proclaimed that he was crazy about the craziness of top officials in
Washington who were capable of going a bit berserk with the USA's military might. During
an Oct. 13 appearance on CNBC, he said:
"I was a critic of [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld before, but there's one
thing ? that I do like about Rumsfeld. He's just a little bit crazy, OK? He's just a
little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy
us, and I'm glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback ? who's just a little
bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy's going to do, and I say that's
my guy".
Friedman kept writing along those lines. "There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign
policy I don't like," he wrote in mid-February 2002, "but their willingness to restore our
deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right."
Last week, when Friedman's column appeared in the New York Times on July 22, it mostly
concentrated on denouncing Muslim "hate spreaders". And the piece ended by declaring:
"Words matter".
If words truly matter, then maybe it's consequential that some of Thomas Friedman's
words ? including his flippant and zealous endorsements of mass killing ? have the odor of
sadistic cruelty.
* This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents
and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death". For information, go to http://www.warmadeeasy.com
.. Norman Solomon (http://www.normansolomon.com), is the founder and executive director of
the Institute for Public Accuracy (http://www.accuracy.org). He was in Iran for the
presidential elections 2005. http://www.antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=6772
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