- You would think that by now we would have "supp'd
full with horrors" on the New York Times op-ed pages. What could be
worse than the atrocities that have filled those gray columns in the past
few years, the loud brays for war, the convoluted excuses for presidential
tyranny, the steady murmur of chin-stroking bullshit meant to comfort the
comfortable elite and confirm them-at all times, at any cost-in their well-wadded
self-righteousness? Surely, you would think, we have seen the worst.
-
- If this was your thought, then alas, alas, alack the
day, you were bitterly mistaken, my friend. Comes now before us the portly,
fur-lipped figure of Thomas Friedman, Esq., who today has penned what must
be the most morally hideous and deeply racist column ever to appear in
those rarefied journalistic precincts: "Ten
Months or Ten Years."
-
- It seems that this very enthusiastic promoter of the
unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq - which he proudly called "a
war of choice," apparently not realizing that he was parroting the
propagandists of the Nazi regime that killed millions of his ethnic kindred-has
now discovered that Iraqi Arabs are hopeless, worthless barbarians, broken
by "1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism" and can only
be held together by an "iron fist." (He got all this from reading
a new book, apparently. Well, a little literacy, like a little learning,
is a dangerous thing, I reckon-and as anyone who has ever exposed themselves
to the dull, flat buzz of Friedman's prose can attest, his literacy is
little indeed.)
-
- In fact, the only thing America did wrong in its "effort
to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region" was not
coming down hard enough on this darky riff-raff: "Had we properly
occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American
iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new
course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops."
Instead, we took it easy on them-I mean, Jesus H. Jiminy Cricket Walker
Christ, we only killed 600,000 of them; what kind of pussyfooting around
is that?-and look what happened. A Sunni insurgency sprang up, whose only
goal-whose ONLY goal, mind you-was to make America look bad: "America
must fail in its effort to bring progressive, etc., etc. America must fail-no
matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail." What
was their "only one goal" again, Tom? Oh yeah: America must fail.
Not a single ding-dang one of them ornery critters ever had any other motive
whatsoever to take up arms against an army of foreigners who had invaded
and occupied their country.
-
- Actually, I think there was at least one other goal of
the insurgency, and it hangs over Friedman's piece like a bad smell he
is loath to acknowledge in polite company: they wantedThomas Friedman to
fail. Here we come to the corroded heart of the matter. Friedman, like
all the pro-war "liberal hawks" who see aggressive war as the
very best method of implanting "progressive politics or democracy"
in benighted lands, is personally affronted by the Iraqis' ingratitude.
They will not and cannot accept even the slightest implication that there
was ever any flaw in their philosophy of benign bloodlust. (Bloodlust by
proxy, of course, always by proxy! Goodness gracious granny me, you'd never
see one of these paladins so much as muss their cuticles in the service
of their noble ideals. That's what God made Mexicans and Salvadorans and
white trash crackers for.)
-
- In his column, Friedman makes much of his pre-war enthusiasm,
and proudly claims that he was the first to come up with the "Pottery
Barn rule" of international diplomacy-"You break it, you own
it"-which he further claims Colin Powell copped from him. Perhaps
he's right; certainly, it's hard to believe that two separate lifelong
chewers of conventional wisdom cud could have come up with such a banal
and suburban-brained observation independently! But the fact that Tom Friedman's
war has failed-that these dastardly, dumb-ass Arabs (and Tom, swoopstake,
includes the entire "Sunni Muslim world" in his condemnation
for "tolerating and tacitly support[ing]" the insurgency; he
has obviously gone and polled every single Sunni Muslim on earth to procure
this knowledge)-is the unspoken leitmotiv of the entire piece. This was
my war-and the Arabs ruined it! They didn't want the "progressive
politics or democracy" that I wanted to give them at gunpoint-or with
an "iron fist"-and now the whole thing's just a hopeless mess.
Hell, the Arabs are so goddamned stupid, says Tom, that they "can't
even have a proper civil war. There are so many people killing so many
other people for so many different reasons - religion, crime, politics
- that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable."
-
- Ah, but wise old Tom has a proposal to settle this problem-a
most condign punishment for the Arab trash who have so bitterly disappointed
him. Friedman proposes-seriously, one assumes, for surely nothing is more
serious than Tom Friedman in full cry-that we "re-invade" Iraq
with 150,000 more troops...and this time really do a number on those recalcitrant
tribes, do whatever "is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq"
and pound some sense into them, or at least some obedience, with our big
"iron fist." (This is, after all, the only thing that Arabs understand,
right? No doubt Tom has read "The Arab Mind," Raphael Pataki's
reduction of fellow human beings to abstract ciphers bound up in a hive
mentality-an outdated, outmoded, outlandish spasm of hidebound "Orientalism"
that has long been required reading not only for war-of-choicemongers like
Friedman but also for Pentagon brass and officers in the field.)
-
- Whatever is necessary. Whatever it takes. This is, I
believe, what is technically known as the "Close Your Hearts to Pity"
strategy, in honor of that great war-of-choicer who thus exhorted his officers
as they stood poised on the Polish frontier back in the glorious days when
men were men and an iron fist was an iron fist.
-
- Nowadays, of course, we hollow men, headpieces filled
with straw, obviously lack the will to power. And so even while Tom adjures his
great hero, the Commander-in-Chief, to unleash the re-invasion force
(where Tom proposes to get 150,000 more fighting troops from remains a
mystery; maybe China will loan us some), thereby "crushing the Sunni
and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq's institutions
and political culture from scratch," it's clear that he believes that
the sissy-mary American public lacks the proper martial spirit to carry
through the necessary 10 years of fisting that the Iraqis so clearly deserve.
And so, more in anger than in sorrow, he proposes the only other possible
alternative to a brand-new blitzkrieg: bugging out in 10 months time and
forgetting the whole shebang ever happened. Otherwise, "it will only
mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper
hole filled with more and more broken pieces."
-
- Yes, yes, the "Pottery Barn Rule" says that
if we are responsible for those broken pieces, then we own them. But never
let it be said that Friedman lacks the moral courage and mental elasticity
to admit that he is wrong. Not about his advocacy of the war, of course.
Nor about the idea that murdering 600,000 civilians (and counting) is a
jim-dandy way to advance "progressive politics or democracy."
Heavens to Betsy my word, no. All of that still goes, and we can only hope
to see this course followed again elsewhere, and soon-and done right this
time. No, what Tom manfully admits is wrong is his "Pottery Barn Rule"
itself. It turns out that "Iraq was already pretty broken before we
got there." So none of what has happened is our fault. The blame lies
with those "1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism." (So
much more corrosive than the European authoritarianism that overlaid the
White-Folk homeland for, oh, say 3,000 years or so.) The blame lies with
"three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule"-that would be the
Sunni Baathist rule that was put in place
by means of not one but two CIA-assisted coups, and maintained with lavish
help from Ronald Reagan and George Humpty Dumpty Bush. The blame also
lies, it seems, with a "crippling decade of UN sanctions," screwed
on ever tighter by those champions of humanitarian intervention, Bill Clinton
and Tony Blair.
-
- In fact, who can forget Tom's giddy cheerleading for
the Clinton-Blair air war against the civilian population of Serbia? Who
can forget his bone-chilling warning to the unruly Slavs
in his classic 1999 column, "Give War a Chance," when he wrote:
"Let's at least have a real war. It should be lights out in Belgrade:
every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has
to be targeted...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." In a column the year before, as
Norman Solomon notes, Friedman called for "bombing Iraq, over and
over and over again."
-
- So there you go. Iraq was already ruined before we got
there. We didn't have a blessed thing to do with it. Certainly, the "war
of choice" launched by the knowing lies of Bush and Blair ("the
intelligence is being fixed around the policy") has no connection
whatsoever to the deep hole filled with broken pieces that is Iraq today.
And if it turns out that we reallyare too wimpy to close our hearts to
pity and put these ragheads in their place once and for all, we can still
leave behind the hellhole-and those 600,000 dead-with a clear conscience.
For we have not failed. (Thomas Friedman has not failed.) We were not wrong.
(Thomas Friedman was not wrong.) It was all the fault of those "progress-resistant,"
broken-down, hive-minded, barbaric Arabs. We can either slaughter them
by the millions, or flush them down the toilet. There is no other way.
-
- This, ladies and gentleman, is what passes for Establishment
thought on the most respected newspaper in the land. This complete and
utter moral perversion-like unto an act of sexual congress with the beasts
of the field-is now the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes,
the "public intellectuals," and the powerful elites whom they
so cravenly serve. This blood-flecked drivel-a precise echo of the genocidal
fury being voiced on what once was once considered the lunatic fringes
of the far right-is now at the heart of American political life.
-
- How many more people will have to die to keep the warmongers
from colliding with the enormity of their crimes? What
child will be ripped to shreds tonight-and tomorrow night-and every
night afterward, for "ten months or ten years," to keep Thomas
Friedman snug and cozy in the gilded palace of his endless self-regard?
-
-
- Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared
in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation,
CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor,
Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire
Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder
and editor of the "Empire Burlesque"
political blog. He can be reached atcfloyd72@gmail.com.
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