Go Back to the B3 Home Page
Complaints, compliments, arguments? Email me.
[<< "By the way...."] [Archive Index] [>>"If you get the urge to break into song today,"]
08/20/2003 Archived Entry: "Friedman doesn't even see the wrongness."
Friedman doesn't even see the wrongness.
Tom Friedman, in my opinion, has been out in the sun too long. The man that built a rep for being an expert on the Middle East wants so badly for Bush's horrific invasion of Iraq to be The Right Thing To Do. But it isn't, and never will be.
The mounting attacks are forcing U.S. troops in Iraq to crouch more and more behind their own barricades, to mistrust more and more Iraqis, and to put up more and more roadblocks. There is now a huge cement wall being built around part of the U.S. compound in central Baghdad that is a carbon copy of the wall Israel is building in the West Bank.The same is happening on the Iraqi side. The Pentagon, with its insistence on doing nation-building in Iraq on the cheap, has been too slow in forming a provisional Iraqi government, too slow in getting the electricity on, too slow in turning security over to Iraqis. As a result, while most Iraqis are happy to be rid of Saddam, too many feel that their lives are tangibly worse in every other respect — jobs, electricity, roadblocks — because of the U.S. presence. "Saddam was paranoid, but he kept the streets open — you're closing all the arteries," Muhammad Kadhim, a Baghdad professor, said to me.
Everyone has advice now for the U.S.: bring in U.N. peacekeepers, bring in the French. They're all wrong.
Sorry, Tom - they're not wrong. Getting UN sanction and bringing in a multi-national force is the only way we will ever be able to leave Iraq with a shred of dignity. And what in the world do you mean in this paragraph?
Which is also why we need Iraqis out front — fast. They need to be seen to be solving their own problems. They need to be manning the checkpoints because only they know who the good guys and bad guys are, and they need to be increasingly running the show so attacks on Iraq's infrastructure are seen and understood as attacks on Iraqis, not on us.
Emphasis mine.
So what you're saying, Tom, is that we need to make the Iraqis the ones who get blown up at checkpoints and get RPGs fired at them, because that would make it look like it isn't the United States and PNAC who is now, and will be for the forseeable future, running the show?
Haven't the Iraqis seen enough bloodshed? Isn't that what we're supposed to be 'liberating' them from?
Good God, man. Go sit in the damn shade, your brain is melting.
Replies: 6 people speak up
How can anyone so smart be so stupid. He brings back faint memories of other so-called "experts" who, in the mid-1960's, proclaimed that the US was making significant progress in South Vietnam. Back then they spoke of "Vietnamizing" the war. Yep, that worked out real good, didn't it?
Posted by Metropolitan99 @ 08/20/2003 11:47 AM NY
c'mon this isnt viet nam, they didnt have deserts in viet nam. other than the deserts though, i think the analogy fits, fighting a hopeless war for people who dont want us there. making the world safe for capitalism, against those who want to make the world safe from capitalism. one key benefit for the bushies is the lack of jungles though, jungles make it much harder to blow up armies from outer space by pushing buttons and sdropping smart bombs. if the iraqis want to take back their country they should grow some jungles.... or do what they are doing , which is blowing themselves up at checkpoints and in front of buildings. americans dont have the stomachs for that sort of thing. to quote colonel kurtz, "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies......You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to
utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion...without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that
defeats us. "
it was the sheer horror of vietnam, shown on the news every day that truely ended that war. this war is surely horific, but it isnt being shown on the news, so public opinion has not yet turned. unfortunately many more americans have to come home in bags and in wheel chairs before any one even notices. im not advocating suicide attacks, but i understand the premise. the intestinal fortitude required to end your life for a cause you believe in is not something that americans can really comprehend, and it inflicts the purest form of horror, the belief that your enemy is completely unafraid to die, and willing to do anything to win. that is horror. the knowledge that you cant win, horror is a 12 year old girl with explosives strapped to her chest who is not afraid to die for her beliefs, and that is why america will lose this war, we just dont have the stomach for it. especially the poor soldiers out there who got into this mess believing they were doing the right thing, not realizing the real motives behind the war, and are now stuck in the desert to murder or be murdered. horror is the true enemy of imperialism.
Posted by justin @ 08/20/2003 01:38 PM NY
George Will gets it better than Friedman does. Friedman would like to believe that the U.S. can forcefully take out a regime and mold a Democracy at will. What he doesn't understand is that in the most effective and functional democracies in history, the democratic institutions existed well before the violent overthrow of the old regime...
George F. Will seems close to saying we should just get out of Iraq:
The premise that terrorism thrives where democracy doesn't may seem to generate a duty to universalize democracy. But it is axiomatic that one cannot have a duty to do something that cannot be done.
Friedman's position seems to be a little pathological, as if it were a childhood dream of his--"liberate" Iraq by force and turn it into a democracy, then move on to Syria, Iran, Pakistan and THE SAUDIS. I'll stop my rambling right there.
Posted by Memorybanker @ 08/20/2003 04:04 PM NY
Good points, Justin. The jungle made the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong almost invisible. They also turned out to be excellent, disciplined, fearless fighters for their beliefs.
However, keep in mind that the Vietnam war was very popular in the US until about 1966-67 when anti-War protestors became more prominent.. Then, after the Tet Offensive (Feb 1968), the shit really hit the fan. All those lives lost. All that money pissed away. So now we have a united, communist Vietnam and the world didn't come to an end!
Posted by Metropolitan99 @ 08/20/2003 04:26 PM NY
yeah, and just imagine if they didnt have over 2 million dead, and a country soaked in agent orange. we should go on to vietnam part 2, after we finish gulf war 2, and start korea the sequel. we won all the other wars, so theres no point attacking japan and germany again, but im sure we can find someone else to kill eventually
Posted by justin @ 08/20/2003 06:46 PM NY
"However, keep in mind that the Vietnam war was very popular in the US until about 1966-67 when anti-War protestors became more prominent.. Then, after the Tet Offensive (Feb 1968), the shit really hit the fan."
Actually, as M. Scott Peck tells it in his book People of the Lie, the protestors didn't gain real popular support until 1970, the year after the War Pigs (to adapt Ozzy's famous metaphor) ran out of volunteers to feed the War Machine and started throwing draftees into its jaws.
(The whole thing is prophetic, and not just in the sense that it foretells the current wingnut punditry. Keep in mind that the passage quoted below was written in 1983. Emphasis added because a prophet is not without honor, especially when he's right.)
"Our response to the antiwar sentiment engendered by Vietnam has been to opt for an even more thoroughly specialized military, overlooking the danger involved. Abandoning the concept of the citizen soldier in favor of the mercenary, we have placed ourselves in grave jeopardy. Twenty years from now, when Vietnam has been largely forgotten, how easy it will be, with volunteers, to once again become involved in little foreign adventures. Such adventures will keep our military on its toes, provide it with real-life war games to test its prowess, and need not hurt or involve the average American citizen at all until it is too late."
Posted by Tuxedo Slack @ 08/22/2003 05:39 PM NY
