As Atrios notes, today is the five year anniversary of Tom Friedman’s appearance on the Charlie Rose show, where he justified the invasion of Iraq as an opportunity for American soldiers to burst the bubble of Arabs’ delusional thinking by busting down their doors and committing forcible rape:
Here’s Atrios’ commemoration:
You would think that advocating indiscriminate killing of people in some Middle Eastern country – any country will do! – just “because we could” would be the kind of thing which would cause people to respond with disgust and revlusion, and perhaps revoke your NYT columnist card. But, as we’ve learned so many times over the years, there’s really nothing you can say or write about the awesomeness of killing Arabs for random reasons which will stop your cocktail party invitations from coming. Friedman, I suppose, was at least not quite as narcissistic as Richard Cohen, who thought killing people in Iraq was a good idea because it would be “therapeutic” for our country. Dead innocent people so Cohen could save a bit on his shrink bill.
But the problem with Tom Friedman is that he’s very serious and taken very seriously. Unlike Maureen Dowd whose gibberish has lost its influence over the years, Tommy “Suck On This” Friedman is still The Most Serious Foreign Affairs Man In America. When Tom Friedman speaks, people listen, even as his metaphors become as bad as his advice.
So on Suck On This Day we should do our part to convince as many people as we can that Tom Friedman is a blithering idiot and a moral monster. Suck On This Tommy!
Getting people to understand that Tom Friedman is a ‘moral monster’, as Atrios calls him, is one of hardest things to accomplish. Unlike with the Bush administration, which has run through half a dozen justifications for the war, we are certain why Friedman supported the invasion. He supported it for the simple reason that he wanted U.S. soldiers and marines to go into some Arab country (not really important which Arab country) and knock down some doors and force the inhabitants to perform fellatio on them. This was actually done in at least one famous case.
Investigators believe American soldiers spent nearly a week plotting an attack in which they raped an Iraqi woman, then killed her and her family in an insurgent-ridden area south of Baghdad, a U.S. military official said Saturday.
According to the official, the Sunni Arab family had just moved into a new home in the religiously mixed area about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The Americans entered the home, separated three family members from the woman, then raped her and set fire to her body, the official said. The three others were also slain…
One of the officials familiar with details of the investigation told The Associated Press that a flammable liquid was used to burn the woman’s body in a cover-up attempt. It was unclear if it was gasoline or lighter fluid.
These soldiers showed slightly too much enthusiasm in carrying out Tom Friedman’s fantasy for Iraq, but they got the basics right. And, in fairness to George W. Bush, he has never advocated the use of such tactics or suggested that inflicting forcible rape on Arabs is a key part of the rationale for his decision to invade Iraq. Nonetheless, Bush gets much less respect from decent people than Tom Friedman. People even assume that Friedman has a more informed and nuanced view of foreign policy than our president. And that is one contest that it may be hard to arbitrate. What’s worse? This:
“F___ Saddam. we’re taking him out.” Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America’s Middle East allies. Bush wasn’t interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.
Or this:
“We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it…
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.”
As I said earlier, advocating war for these reasons (or lack of reasons) is indicative of a moral monstrosity. But too many Americans felt this way at the time and now…well, now people can’t admit that Tom Friedman is a monster without admitting much the same about themselves.
Maybe you think I am being unfair to Mr. Friedman. After all, his advocacy of forced entry forcible rape as a foreign policy was just an unfortunate turn of phrase, meant in a strictly metaphorical way. Well, okay, here’s how Friedman put it in another setting.
“This [terrorism] bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic—it’s not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.”
There’s nothing in this about raping people, just killing them and smashing their infrastructure ‘because we could-period’. That’s the level of thinking and casualness with which our elites led us into war. Happy Suck.On.This Day everybody. Nothing to see here…move along.
