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Special Investigation:
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Now
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 wanted Thomas 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 really are 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 a frequent contributor to CounterPunch.
He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy
in the Bush Imperium, and editor of the website of that same
name (at www.chris-floyd.com).
He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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