October 1, 2005
Since well before the US invaded Iraq, Thomas Friedman, the
New York Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator,
has been the most enthusiastic proponent of US imperialism’s
neo-colonial conquest of the country.
Early on he served as a conduit for the right-wing ideologues
in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon—putting their
phony pretexts for war into print, while embellishing them with
noble aims of bringing "democracy" and "liberation"
to the Iraqi people.
That the newspaper identified with an erstwhile American liberal
establishment published Friedman’s exhortations to war played
no small role in poisoning public opinion on the eve of the US
invasion. It helped pave the way for the ongoing tragedy that
has cost the lives of over 100,000 Iraqis and nearly 2,000 American
soldiers.
As it became ever more apparent to the American people that
they had been dragged into an unprovoked war based upon lies about
non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" and phony
claims of ties between Baghdad and terrorism, Friedman brushed
off the criminal implications of the Bush administration’s
actions.
Don’t get "so tied up defending [the] phony reasons
for going to war," he counseled the White House in July 2003.
Instead, he said, it should focus on "the real and valid
reason for the war: to install a decent, tolerant, pluralistic,
multireligious government in Iraq."
By November of that year, as the Iraqi insurgency and US military
repression were claiming a growing number of victims, Friedman
was waxing ever more lyrical about the dirty war of American occupation.
It was, he said, "the most important liberal, revolutionary
US democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan... one of
the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."
By April of 2004, as the US military was unleashing bloody
attacks against both the Sunni city of Fallujah and the Shiite
slums of Baghdad, Friedman had taken to issuing exhortations to
the Iraqis. "Is there a critical mass ready to identify themselves—not
as Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis—but as Iraqis, who are ready
to fight for the chance of self-determination for the Iraqi people
as a whole?"
Self-determination in the Orwellian newspeak adopted by the
New York Times columnist meant siding with the American
military to suppress those fighting to expel the foreign occupiers
from their country.
Criticizing the Bush administration for failing to deploy sufficient
military power to crush this resistance, Friedman at that time
concluded: "I know the right thing to do now is to stay the
course, defeat the bad guys, disarm the militia and try to build
a political framework..."
As recently as last June, Friedman voiced the hope that the
US could still claim victory in Iraq, provided it used sufficient
military force. He called on the administration to "do it
right" and "double the boots on the ground."
That the US does not have an additional 145,000 active-duty
troops to send to Iraq was something Friedman didn’t even
bother to consider. The unstated implication of "doing it
right" is restoring the draft, conscripting hundreds of thousands
of American teenagers and sending them off to fight and die. If
such a prospect doesn’t faze Friedman, it is because he is
confident that any revival of the selective service system would—as
in the Vietnam era—include deferrals and safe havens for
all those in the elite financial and social circles that he inhabits.
It seems that now, however, the number one cheerleader for
the US conquest of the Persian Gulf has come to the end of his
rope. In a September 27 column published in the Times entitled
"Endgame in Iraq," he concludes that US military strategy
is secondary and that "Iraq, at the end of the day, was always
going to be what the Iraqis decided to make of it."
How the Iraqis are to decide or make anything for themselves
under a foreign occupation that dictates all essential terms of
political and social life Friedman doesn’t bother to explain.
Clearly, the implication is that either the Iraqis knuckle under
to US demands, or they can go to blazes.
In short, Friedman has concluded that the Iraqis—and specifically
the more than five million members of the country’s Sunni
minority—are not worthy of Washington’s "noble"
efforts to liberate, civilize and democratize them.
His latest column is an ultimatum to the Sunnis to vote the
right way—or else—on the draft constitution that Washington
is promoting as yet another "turning point" in extricating
itself from its Iraqi quagmire.
Having proclaimed the US intervention a war of liberation for
a "multireligious government" based on those "ready
to identify themselves—not as Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis—but
as Iraqis," Friedman now insists that the Sunnis must accept
a constitutional scheme that sanctions Iraq’s de facto partition
precisely along these ethno-religious lines.
The Sunnis are being prodded along this supposedly democratic
path not primarily by Friedman’s sermons, but rather by US
military assaults on cities in the majority Sunni provinces of
Ninewa and al-Anbar, as well as raids and arrests carried out
against Sunni representatives in Baghdad.
Most who know anything about Iraq and the surrounding region
are warning that the constitution and the US rush to impose it
through an October 15 referendum vastly increase the threat of
civil war—an explosion of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing,
leading ultimately to the country’s breakup.
While Friedman allows that the "Bush team’s incompetence"
has undermined Washington’s colonialist efforts, he directs
his main fire at the "moral vacuum in the Sunni Arab world"
and its determination to "stifle any prospect for democracy."
That the "democracy" on offer is the effective destruction
of Iraq, leaving the Sunnis trapped in a landlocked statelet without
resources, is of no interest to the Times columnist.
Who is Friedman to preach morality to anyone? Here is a man
who has made his living inventing alibis and pretexts for the
most powerful imperialist state in the world seizing control of
an oppressed and impoverished nation, killing thousands upon thousands
of men, women and children in the process, all for the purpose
of controlling the region’s strategic oil reserves.
As Iraq sank into a hellish abyss of bloodshed, poverty and
the disintegration of all essential functions of society, Friedman
invented fairy tales about it becoming a beacon of democracy that
would be emulated by peoples throughout the Arab world. As thousands
of young American soldiers came home in coffins or returned maimed
physically and shattered psychologically, he casually called for
sending twice as many. And now he has the gall to accuse others
of living in a "moral vacuum"?
Behind all of this moralistic fulminating there no doubt lie
definite political and strategic calculations. Some analysts speak
more openly about Iraq’s partition and even a protracted
civil war as possible paths to achieving US imperialism’s
main aim—hegemonic control over the oil-rich Middle East.
But there is something more going on here.
In the period leading up to the war and in the aftermath of
the US invasion, Friedman was known for his exultant colonialist
rhetoric, declaring that the occupation must proceed on the principle
of "we break it; we own it" and proclaiming that Washington
had "adopted a baby called Baghdad."
Now he is writing something very different: "Maybe cynical
Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation."
If the Sunni minority fails to support the constitution demanded
by Washington "then we are wasting our time," he declares
in his September 27 column.
"We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis
of Iraq to reap the wind," Friedman concludes. "We must
not throw more good American lives after good American lives for
people who hate others more than they love their own children."
Using the slander employed in every colonial war to justify
mass murder against those resisting foreign domination—they
don’t love their children, they are indifferent to human
life—Friedman abandons his democratizing pretenses and calls
instead for a ethno-religious bloodbath.
That this is the perspective of someone who is arguably the
most influential foreign affairs commentator in the US, writing
for America’s newspaper of record, is a measure of the profound
demoralization and disorientation within the US ruling establishment
over the course of its imperialist venture in Iraq.