Op-Ed Column: Tom Friedman Inc. Desperate to Retain Brand Equity

Editor’s Note: Last year, I finally brought myself to write about my 9/11 experience. A rare personal post. I welcome you to read it if you haven’t. It was extremely difficult to write but helped me come to terms with that day (as much as one can). Today, on this anniversary of 9/11, I’m responding to Tom Friedman’s latest op-ed because his arguments within it continue to promote a worldview that helped create the environment for the senseless invasion of Iraq after 9/11, have been leveraged to sustain this war ever since, and could easily be applied as justification for invading other countries unprovoked in the future.

(updated below)

It should surprise no one that the day before Gen. David Petraeus was set to testify before Congress on the “surge” in Iraq, Tom Friedman published the op-ed “What’s Missing in Baghdad” in The New York Times.

Friedman, a well-deserved punching bag for the alternative media since the lead-up to the war in Iraq, is back with his “the world is flat” logic. At this point, one might understandably take that eponymous title of Friedman’s book and conclude he does indeed believe the world is flat. Or (as suggested here before), since Tom Friedman Inc. is built on this worldview, it behooves Mr. Friedman to remain steadfast to his brand's theories, which inform his products and keeps him a household name, i.e., his books viable, his presence on TV in demand, his speaking engagements lucrative or high profile.

Consequently, expecting honesty from Tom Friedman on our misadventure in Iraq is like asking Jim Perdue (the chicken giant’s current chairman and spokesman who took over for his legendary father) if his chickens - pumped full of hormones and administered antibiotics to counter diseases, which in part stem from those hormone injections - are healthy to eat.

Here’s how Friedman opens his column: “One of the most troubling lessons of the Iraq invasion is just how empty the Arab dictatorships are.”

Where to begin? For the sake of our sanity and blood pressure, let’s stick to the necessary narrow focus of Friedman’s article. Let’s not, for example, go down other roads that Friedman’s arrogant, reductive, historically myopic and intellectually dishonest premise begs in response, such as: What current and past dictatorships weren’t “empty”? Or, what do you even mean by “empty” – slow to take to invasion, occupation and an imposed “democracy” that almost solely benefits the corporate elite of the occupiers and their puppets in the newly formed occupied country’s government? Moreover, hasn’t every aspect of this administration’s purported desire to “spread democracy” been exposed as patently empty, a rotten-to-the-core fraud, the coarsest of propaganda, underscored by this White House’s systematic efforts to dismantle the most basic democratic principles of our own constitution? 

No, please, let’s not go there.

Such inquiries might distract us from what is most glaringly offensive about Friedman’s opening line.

That he believes, or is simply promoting, this idea – the emptiness of Arab dictatorships is one of the “most troubling lessons of the Iraq invasion” - is not only chilling in both its inhumanity and disregard for the rule of domestic and international law (does he forget we illegally invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses?), but also, contextually, all the more stunning in its willful obliviousness to what is undeniably one of the worst - if not the worst - American foreign policy decisions in our nation’s history.

Yet this characteristically disingenuous Friedman narrative serves as the perfect moral blank check for the Bush administration, a timely tonic that encourages us to continue to shove “democracy” down the Iraqis’ throats at the barrel of a gun while it simultaneously provides a rhetorical exit strategy if that just refuses to take: if only those Iraqis really wanted democracy, our illegal, unprovoked invasion of their country – which now accounts for nearly 4,000 deaths of American servicemen and women and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – would be a success.

It’s their fault. Not ours. We’re Moses and the Iraqis are simply rejecting the Promised Land. The ingrates. Barbarians. Savages helpless to their own impulses. If only they would embrace the peaceful example with which we’ve so humanely provided them through “shock and awe” and unleashing the Pandora’s box that every honest and knowledgeable person predicted (even Dick Cheney himself). And with such competence and attentiveness to their most basic needs - security, clean water, electricity - how could they doubt our intentions and our ability to help them forge a genuinely democratic state? From human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, still ongoing at Guantanamo Bay, to secret prisons abroad, to the sustained dismantling of democracy here at home in the guise of defending The Homeland, what would give Iraqis the idea the U.S. government wasn’t serious about liberty and justice?

From his introductory sentence to his closing, Friedman spins the kind of achingly fraudulent pronouncements on which Tom Friedman, Inc. depends if it’s to retain its market share, this time using the Kurds to prove how the rest of Iraq is responsible for its failure to democratize. It’s riddled with contextually deficient deductions that demand ignoring a central fact: we knew Iraq would be a cauldron of warring factions left in the wake of a power vacuum if Saddam was toppled, yet we went in, anyway (and, again, did so illegally, falsifying intelligence to justify the illegal invasion):

The United States played a critical role in Kurdistan. In 1998, we helped to resolve the Kurdish civil war — the power struggle between two rival clans — which created the possibility of a stable, power-sharing election in 2005. And by removing Saddam, we triggered a flood of foreign investment here.

But that is all we did. Today, there are almost no U.S. soldiers or diplomats in Kurdistan. Yet politics here is flourishing, as is the economy, because the Kurds want it that way. Down south, we’ve spent billions trying to democratize the Sunni and Shiite zones and have little to show for it.

Of course, we did considerably more than trigger “a flood of foreign investment” in Kurdistan; we unleashed the hell on earth that is the rest of Iraq. We “have little to show for” spending “billions trying to democratize the Sunni and Shiite zones” because our government had no regard, nor apparently does Friedman, for what history and credible foreign policy and intelligence experts, not to mention millions of everyday Americans and citizens worldwide, could plainly see would happen. 

Next, Friedman the Sage dispenses some lessons, the first two of which so mind-numbingly obvious, condescending and tone deaf it’s as if his goal is to break the Guinness World Record for cognitive dissonance:

1) Until the power struggle between Sunnis and Shiites is resolved, you can’t establish any stable politics in southern Iraq. 2) When people want to move down a progressive path, there is no stopping them. When they don’t, there is no helping them.

What part of “you break it, you bought it” did Friedman not understand?

He then goes on to quote liberally from “my friend Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign affairs expert at Johns Hopkins University,” who wrote “a timely new book, ‘Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government.’” What a surprise: Friedman’s worldview aligns with his buddy’s, whom he decides to quote liberally for this column. In fact, he says of Mandelbaum’s book, “It is highly relevant to America’s democracy project in Iraq and beyond.”

Leave it to Friedman to call naked American imperialism, its unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a “democracy project.” And with the administration constantly threatening to attack Iran, how telling and, potentially, unwittingly ominous that he includes the words “and beyond.” 

Predictably, Mandelbaum promotes the same Iraqis Don’t Want Democracy justification, whereby he ignores the U.S. government’s central role in the rampant death and destruction that continues to engulf the country.

Mr. Mandelbaum argues that democracy is made up of two elements: liberty and popular sovereignty. “Liberty involves what governments do” — the rule of law, the protection of people from abuses of state power and the regulations by which government institutions operate, he explains. Popular sovereignty involves how the people determine who governs them — through free elections.

What Baghdad exemplifies, Mr. Mandelbaum says, is what happens when you have elections without liberty. You end up with a tyranny of the majority, or what Fareed Zakaria has labeled “illiberal democracy.”

But this kind of argument, though nominally more complex than Friedman’s breathless militaristic McWorldview ("The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist"), is really more of the same – as applied here, a theory that omits catastrophic causality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by reframing imperial plundering as altruistic democracy promotion.

If you kick over a bee’s nest, whose fault is it that you got stung, or that the bees won’t orderly return to their nest? The bees? Or yours? Though you may not want a bee’s nest on your property, unless you are a rash imbecile, have a penchant for extreme pain or have a potential death wish, you wouldn’t just walk up to it and kick it with all your might. First, you would consider the most sensible approach for dealing with the situation.

Mandelbaum’s theory, like Friedman’s, discards both a priori and a posteriori knowledge pertaining to Iraq as a whole. Whatever positive or negative consequences follow a tragically ill-considered act - and, inarguably, what’s happened because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been almost universally and horrifically negative - the act itself cannot be ignored. It’s intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick the one part of Iraq where the U.S. invasion might have helped (though, because of the Iraq War, the Turkish government has been threatening to invade Kurdistan, something Mandelbaum and Friedman conveniently leave out of their rosy example of the invasion’s success).

Of course, “more than anything else, what Baghdad exemplifies” is what happens when, through invasion and occupation, you try to ram a false democracy, run by a puppet government obedient to American oil interests, down the throats of a proud people with an especially fractious history, whose country has known nothing but monarchical, colonial and despotic rule throughout its history.

But how’s this for even more reductive reasoning, completely detached from reality?

What the Kurdistan-Baghdad contrast also illustrates, notes Mr. Mandelbaum, is that “we can help create the conditions for democracy to take root, but people have to develop the skills and values that make it work themselves.”

It’s ludicrous for Mandelbaum and Friedman to suggest we helped “create the conditions for democracy to take root” for anyone in Iraq, with the possible exception of the Kurds, who might be the invasion’s only benefactors (and even that will be short-lived if Turkey decides to invade). From profligate corruption, incompetence and cronyism, to failing to provide primary necessities of security, water and electricity, to sending unmistakable signs to the Iraqis and the rest of the world that it planned on being an occupying force (most probably permanently), examples abound of the Bush administration’s failure to create such conditions.

Quite the opposite is, and has long been, painfully clear.

From the outset, what did U.S. forces secure after the “shock and awe” phase of the invasion? The hospitals? The borders? The munitions caches? The national museums? The schools? The billions of U.S. dollars in cold cash purportedly earmarked to aid the Iraqi people?

No. The oil.

Tearing down Saddam’s statue for a staged television moment was another priority, which, once revealed, only confirmed the notion that the invaders cared more about profits and propaganda than democracy and Iraqi lives. 

As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said at the time of the looting of precious national and historical artifacts from the cradle of civilization, “Stuff happens,” adding, "It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."

How’s that for winning hearts and minds, for showing respect to the Iraqi culture and people, for inspiring the conditions for democracy to take root? The root, of course, was poisoned before we went in. This whole "democracy project" a disgraceful and deadly sham.

Friedman winds down his column with more absurd and patronizing oversimplifications:

One way a country develops the software of liberty, Mr. Mandelbaum says, is by nurturing a free market. Kurdistan has one. The economy in the rest of Iraq remains a mess. “A market economy,” he argues, “gives people a stake in peace, as well as a constructive way of dealing with people who are strangers. Free markets teach the basic democratic practices of compromise and trust.”

First, I’m not sure if Mandelbaum or Friedman owns the stillborn metaphor “the software of liberty.” Since I don’t have Mandelbaum’s book in front of me, there’s no quotes around these words, and the term smacks of Friedman’s penchant for haughty, banal and dehumanizing globalization catchphrases, my bet’s on Friedman. Either way, the overall idea sounds as if it was wholly lifted from one of Friedman’s own books (hey, at least he was upfront about his friendship with Mandelbaum).

Of course, what would a classic Thomas Friedman article be without another hopeful plea to give our misadventure in Iraq more time to work? And what better timing, when so many in the mainstream media are once again lining up behind this president and his top general to attempt to sway public sentiment back in this direction?

Democracy can fail because of religious intolerance, the curse of oil, a legacy of colonialism and military dictatorship, or an aversion to Western values — the wellspring of democracy. The Middle East, notes Mr. Mandelbaum, is the one region afflicted by all of these maladies. That doesn’t mean democratization is impossible here, as the Kurds demonstrate. But it does mean it’s really hard.

You see, "surge" fans, it's not that democratization is “impossible." It's just hard work.

But the second-to-last line of this op-ed struck me as particularly, well, insane:

Above all, Iraq teaches us that democracy is possible only when people want both pillars of it — liberty and self-government — and build both themselves.

"Above all”? That’s the key takeaway Friedman’s gleaned from our tragic folly in Iraq? It’s not only insulting to our intelligence (we knew this before the invasion, not as a consequence) but also to the Iraqi people, who’ve suffered horrific loss of life as a result of such blinkered, hegemonic arrogance.

Blindly shilling his McWorldview is the edifice on which Tom Friedman Inc. rests. Take that away, and Friedman, the wizard behind this rhetorical Oz, is little more than a clunky writer and an even worse journalist - an incurious elitist and imperial apologist who, at heart, has proven through his work that he cares about the principles of democracy about as much as does George W. Bush.

UPDATE: Must-see TV: Friedman the Humanitarian from a 2003 appearance on Charlie Rose. (h/t Crooks and Liars)

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

Tom Friedman Inc. Desperate to Retain Brand Equity

[abiodun]

What a critique! Right on. Thanks.