The New York Time's Thomas
Friedman
The Geraldo Rivera of the
New York Times
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, November 2003
The principal diplomatic correspondents
for the New York Times, from Cyrus Sulzberger through Flora Lewis,
James Reston, and Leslie Gelb to Thomas Friedman, have always
and necessarily been apologists for U. S. foreign policy. The
NYT is a self-acknowledged establishment paper and hardly makes
any bones about its close connections with policy-makers. James
Reston was greatly honored for his intimacy with high officials
and even co-wrote one of his NYT opinion columns with Henry Kissinger.
Another Friedman predecessor, Leslie Gelb, had stints in the State
Department and Pentagon interspersed with his position as diplomatic
correspondent.
Thomas Friedman has served consistently
in this apologetic tradition. He differs from his predecessors
mainly in his brashness, name-dropping, and self-promotion, and
with his aggressive, bullying tone; e.g., WTO protesters are "ridiculous...a
Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions
and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix." In these respects
he brings a now fashionable, Geraldo Rivera in-your-face touch
to the NYT, which has borne his effusions stoically for the last
three decades. Of course, Friedman has also brought honors to
the NYT with his three Pulitzer Prizes-which some argue have done
for the reputation of Pulitzer what the Nobel Peace Prize award
to Henry Kissinger has done for the reputation of the peace prize.
Friedman made his reputation and received
two of his Pulitzers for his reporting on the Middle East. Given
the U.S. policy of underwriting Israeli ethnic cleansing over
a half century and, adding to this the consistently strong NYT
support of that policy, Friedman has necessarily followed an Israel-apologetic
course. For Friedman, Israel only retaliates whereas the Palestinians
engage in terror, which is the causal force in the conflict-not
Israel's "redeeming the land" and ethnic cleansing,
nor its occupation policies in general, which have been in gross
violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (which he never discusses).
Just a few months after Arafat called for mutual recognition and
negotiations with Israel in 1984, Friedman wrote, "By refusing
to recognize Israel and negotiate with it directly, the Arabs
have only strengthened Israel fanatics..."
As Noam Chomsky has noted, the NYT refused
to publish a word about Arafat's offer, but there can be no question
that Friedman knew the facts (even if the NYT suppressed this
information for its readers) and that he ignored them in favor
of the oft-repeated lie of the time (and Times), that Israel couldn't
find a negotiating partner (see Chomsky's Necessary Illusions
and Pirates and Emperors for more on this case and on Friedman's
bias).
Friedman has been a long-standing apologist
for Israeli state terror and ethnic cleansing. His expressed doubts
never reach beyond the pragmatics of Israeli state violence-does
it work or is it counterproductive? He has periodically berated
the Palestinians for failing to recognize that they have been
defeated and should humbly surrender and accept large-scale expropriation
and de facto transfer. Friedman has also lauded Israel's sponsorship
of terrorism-one of his recommendations for bringing security
to Israel (he has never recognized the need for security for Palestinians)
has been that Israel use more widely the tactic it employed in
South Lebanon of sponsoring a proxy force, the South Lebanese
Army, to pacify the local population and fight any indigenous
groups hostile to Israel ("The Man Who Foresaw the Uprising,"
Yediot Ahronot, April 7, 1988). This arrangement fits precisely
the definition of terror organization and terror sponsorship,
but as Israel was the sponsor those terms are not applied here.
Instead, Friedman applauds their use and presents this as a model.
Friedman is also a racist, regularly denigrating
Arabs for their qualities of emotionalism, unreason, and hostility
to democracy and modernization. His classic remark, in the same
interview in which he lauds the proxy terrorism model, was that
we mustn't go too far in forcing Palestinian concessions because,
"I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he
will limit his demands." As always, the implicit assumption
is that the problem is excessive Palestinian demands, not any
unreasonable actions or demands by the Israelis. But the racist
language is telling. A remark about "Hymie" made Jesse
Jackson a moral outcast for the NYT and media establishment; but
Friedman's "Ahmed" remark is not reported or criticized
in the mainstream, which reflects the normalization of anti-Arab
racism in the United States. All this is consistent with Pulitzer
Prizes for "balanced and informed" reporting.
Friedman has been an enthusiastic supporter
of "free trade" and corporate globalization, serving
effectively as a media-based ideologue for corporate expansion
abroad. In the course of this service, he has presented a simplified
and idealized model of how the market operates, ignoring or downplaying
market power and the interplay of corporate power and politics,
the growth of inequality at home and abroad, the effects of imperial
power on the development options of poor countries, and externalities
(including environmental damage). In assailing WTO and globalization
protestors, Friedman claims that they hurt the interests of the
global poor ("The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor,"
NYT, April 24, 2001), suggesting that he, the IMF-WB-WTO, and
Western corporate elite are really serving those interests. But
Friedman never confronts the facts on the growing inequality,
the disproportionate gains of Western corporate elites, the slackened
growth of the poor countries, the admissions of surprised "disappointment"
by IMF and WB officials that their pro-corporate policies have
done so little to help poor people. It is not hard to understand
why, in a letter of March 31, 1999, former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay
recommended a Friedman article on globalization to his friend
George Bush as "an excellent account of most of the basic
issues. "
In a widely quoted line from his book
The Lexis and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman says, "The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer
of the U. S. Air Force F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the
world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called
the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." This is
not said with any hint that it might be wrong to use force to
impose the market on people who don't seem to want it. It recalls
Kissinger's famous line justifying the U.S. intervention in support
of the Chilean coup and follow-up terror and mass murder, that
the Chilean people had been irresponsible in voting in Allende.
Friedman is an enemy of democracy at home
as well as abroad. The Lexis and the Olive Tree is a celebration
of corporate globalization, which he sees as bringing the triumph
of market ideology and market domination of both the economic
and political world. Money and capital flows will prevent any
policy deviations from "the core golden rules" of the
market; "political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke"
and any government trying to serve its poor people or protect
the environment in opposition to the consensus of capital will
be brought to its senses by capital flight. For Friedman these
are admirable developments and he lauds Maggie Thatcher, who "should
be remembered as 'the Seamstress of the Golden Straitjacket"'
("All About Maggie, NYT, May 5, 1997).
The weakening of labor also pleases Friedman,
who mentions this as one of Thatcher's accomplishments. He regards
Reagan's breaking the air controllers strike in 1981 as his finest
achievement, "helping break the hold of organized labor on
the U.S. economy." Friedman rhapsodizes over the prospects
of a "flexible labor market" where employers will someday
be able "to hire and fire workers with relative ease."
The weakening of labor's countervailing power and ability to oppose
full-scale domination by capital doesn't faze him at all. Only
oppositional groups like the WTO protesters arouse his ire. Democratic
theorists have long stressed the importance of intermediate groups
like labor unions in making for effective pluralism and a genuine
democracy. But for Friedman, nothing should stand in the way of
market power, which he has idealized with a cover of a laissez-faire
model that begs all the difficult questions (see Thomas Frank's
dissection in One Market Under God). Thomas Friedman's ideal is
plutocracy, not democracy.
Friedman has also been an open proponent
of the commission of war crimes abroad. He is aghast at the crimes
of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban-at least during the periods
when we were not allied with them-and when the leadership makes
them an official target, he would hit them hard. During the bombing
war against Yugoslavia, Friedman recommended telling the Serbs,
"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." Of course, pulverizing
a country to force its surrender is calling for the commission
of war crimes, but here Friedman, Fox's Bill O'Reilly, and the
Clinton-Albright team were as one. Friedman was also gung-ho for
the B-52 bombing of Afghanistan. In another classic he asserted,
"It turns out many of those Afghan 'civilians' were praying
for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties
or not." Note that he can't resist putting "civilians"
in quote marks, even while he suggests that they were good guys
eager for obliteration. He doesn't explain where he gets this
information on what those Afghan "civilians" were praying
for.
For Iraq, too, Friedman has urged the
commission of war crimes. He had not a word of criticism for the
"sanctions of mass destruction" that killed vast numbers
of Iraqi civilians in one of the great cases in history of the
terrorist use of hostages-23 million hostages, as compared to
the 53 U.S. citizens held by the Iranians in 1979-1980, and those
53 were not starved. In 1998 Friedman urged "bombing Iraq,
over and over again," and a year later advised that policy-makers
"blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so
no one knows when the lights will go off or who is in charge."
Writing recently on Iraq, Friedman has
outdone himself in ennobling the invasion-occupation. We came
there "with the sole intention of liberating its people"
and we are fighting for Iraq's "sovereignty" ("Worried
Optimism On Iraq," NYT, September 21, 2003). We, along with
Iraq's "silent majority," want Iraq to "become
a decent, modern-looking Iraqi alternative," not another
"Iran." The people resisting us are "Saddamistas,"
not people who want to see us gone and Iraq independent. There
is a Shiite majority who might favor Iran, but Friedman knows
what the "silent majority" thinks, just as he knew that
those Afghans wanted more B-52 bombings.
Isn't it wonderful that the seemingly
reactionary Bush administration, so miserly with money for its
own civilian population, has invaded Iraq and is spending these
huge sums for the liberation of the Iraqi people? All those pre-war
documents by the Bushies that talked about geostrategic advantages
to the United States in regime change in Iraq; all the evidence
of Bushie officials' and advisers' links to Likud and eager service
to Israel; the long Clinton-Bush sanctions policy that killed
so many civilians and actually served to consolidate Saddam Hussein's
power. These all disappear for a Friedman, wallowing in crude
apologetics.
Of course "liberation" must
proceed slowly and Friedman agrees with Bush, rather than those
traitorous French and an awful lot of Iraqis, that self-rule must
not be bestowed too hastily. It doesn't seem to cross Friedman's
mind that the Bush desire for a slow pace might be based on the
desire to restructure Iraq in accord with Bush-Cheney-related
economic interests and to make sure that control remains in friendly
Iraqi hands. Those words "decent" and "modern-looking"
are perhaps a giveaway on the Friedman-Bush approach. To be "modern-looking"
requires privatization and entry into the global market, with
foreign investment and free trade. To be "decent" means
that respectable people who can win the trust of Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, and the IMF should be in power. This might require a
period of non-democracy that will keep out radicals and Islamists
who have not seen the light, oppose privatization and U.S. bases
on Iraqi soil, and want closer relations with Iran. We must keep
in mind that Musharaff, Karimov, and Putin are apparently sufficiently
decent and modern-looking to deserve support, and so was Suharto
for 32 years. Once decency and the modern look prevail, the market
will rule and, if there are elections, they will offer that choice
of only "Pepsi or Coke" that Friedman finds quite acceptable.
"Liberation"-for subservience to the market, at best.
On Tim Russert's CNBC program of September
13, Friedman gave a different version of U.S. motivation. It turns
out that WMDs and the "moral reason" were not the "real
reason," which Friedman explained as follows: "There
were three great bubbles _ in the 1990s: the Nasdaq bubble, the
Enron bubble...and the terrorism bubble." The terrorism bubble
is illustrated by the 9/11 event and "blowing up Israelis
in pizza-parlors"-not the "sanctions of mass destruction"
or Sharon's policies that were killing three Palestinians for
each dead Israeli. Lots of Arabs believed in this bubble and,
"We need to go into the heart of their world and beat their
brains out, in order to burst this bubble." We've done that
with the invasion of Iraq and "the people in the neighborhood
got it, all right. "
So the Bush war was not for liberation
after all and certainly not to control Iraqi oil and project U.S.
power for U.S. (and Israeli) interests. It was to "stop terrorism."
This is occasionally claimed by the Bush team and its supporters,
but no credible analyst accepts it as a motive and the non-Bush-affiliated
analysts almost uniformly argue that the Iraq war will stimulate
anti-U. S. feeling and terrorism.
Friedman reached what might be a new low
in chauvinist apologetics for the invasion-occupation in his "Our
War With France" (NYT, September 18, 2003). France, he tells
us, is not just "annoying," it is "becoming our
enemy." They made it "impossible for the Security Council
to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided
a war" and they seem to want us to fail in the hope that
France "will assume its rightful place as America's equal."
What they should have done is agree to help rebuild Iraq, while
asking for "a real seat at the management table." But
this intransigence is also to be expected because "France
has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern
Arab world..."
The implication that the United States
has been promoting democracy in the Middle East is almost too
funny for words, given the U.S. record of support of the Shah
of Iran, the Saudis, the Gulf emirates, and even Saddam Hussein
when he was in a serviceable mode. Friedman's further implication
that that is what the Bush administration is aiming at in Iraq
is also straightforward official propaganda, as noted above. The
business about a "real ultimatum" and avoidance of war
fails to take account of the fact that there were no WMDs and
that the Bushies were using all those tricks as an excuse to invade
and occupy. The "real ultimatum" would only have accelerated
and put a UN gloss on the invasion that was going to happen no
matter what. Friedman's assertion that France just wanted to enhance
its status in opposing the Bush program omits several facts and
possibilities: one fact is that the French people and most people
of the world opposed the Bush policy; the other fact is that the
Bush invasion-occupation plan was a planned aggression in violation
of the UN Charter. The French were speaking for many governments,
most of the world's people, and for the rule of law. These considerations
are of no interest to Friedman, whose suggestion that the French
should have joined in to rebuild and asked for a seat at the management
table fails to recognize that such cooperation would be sanctioning
an unprovoked aggression-occupation. It is also hypocritical in
that the Bush team has already shown that, while it might let
somebody sit at a management table, they intend to run the show
(see Peter Slevin, "Reluctance to Share Control in Iraq Leaves
U.S. on Its Own," Washington Post, September 28, 2003).
In sum, the diplomatic correspondent for
the NYT supports ethnic cleansing and terrorism, but only when
done by the United States or one of its clients; he repeatedly
supports policies that involve the commission of war crimes, again
only when the United States or one of its clients engages in them;
he is hostile to real democracy at home or abroad, preferring
a plutocracy and sharp market restrictions on popular sovereignty;_
he assails countries like France for failing to support the United
States, always attributing dubious motives to the U.S. opponent,
while putting a benevolent and chauvinistic gloss on the objectives
and actions of his own country. His analyses of matters such as
globalization and the current Iraq crisis are full of rhetoric,
contradictions, ideological assumptions, and intellectually they
barely make it into the featherweight class. That he is an institution
at the NYT, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and is well-regarded
elsewhere reflects the degraded state of U.S. mainstream commentary
and intellectual life.
Edward S. Herman is an economist, author,
and media analyst. His most recent book is Degraded Capability:
The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press).
Edward S. Herman page
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