Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about:

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? Friedman goes on:

But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: "No" and "Maybe, sort of, we'll see."

Hmm.

Others remember a different Tom Friedman, interviewed by Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

"Now that the war is over," Rose began his question--a conclusion widely jumped to in the early days of the war. When asked if invading Iraq was worth it, Friedman responded that it was "unquestionably worth doing."

The war, back then, was an attack on the "terrorist bubble," which in Friedman's mind meant that "we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick... and there was only one way to do it."

He went on:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, 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." That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The house-to-house, "suck on this" democracy campaign. That's how it's normally done.

I guess one great thing about being a Times columnist is that you not only  get to write about the present--you can also re-write your own past.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street.

Still, he sees a common thread:

The world's two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both countries are witnessing grassroots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal--a system requiring bribes at every level of governance to get anything done. And Americans are protesting what is legal--a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress, and both political parties, and thereby resist curbs on risk-taking.

Hear, hear! Wall Street has bought the political process. But what can save us? A magical centrist internet-based third-party presidential candidate, that's who!

What has brought millions of Indians into the streets to support the India Against Corruption movement and what seems to have triggered not only the Occupy Wall Street movement but also initiatives like AmericansElect.org--a centrist group planning to use the Internet to nominate an independent presidential candidate--is a sense that both countries have democratically elected governments that are so beholden to special interests that they can no longer deliver reform. Therefore, they both need shock therapy from outside.

Huh?

Americans Elect is the brainchild of a group of hedge-fund investors--or, as a columnist named Tom Friedman once reported, it is "financed with some serious hedge-fund money."

These are the people who are going to deliver a outsider shock to the system that will curb the influence of the financial services industry. Wall Street will save us from Wall Street?

Bonus irony: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is the chief strategist for Americans Elect--the same Doug Schoen who was very recently proclaiming that Democrats should distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As Jedd Legum pointed out, Schoen misrepresented that polling in a column for (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.

Republican New Jersey Gov.  Chris Christie isn't running for president after all. This is bad news for the journalists who seemed so eager to promote his candidacy, but also for establishment pundits like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who thought a Christie/Obama contest would have been a victory for.... wait for it... centrism!

He writes today (10/5/11):

Had Christie--a moderate on gun control, climate change and immigration who has also backed Simpson/Bowles--run and won significant support, he would have forced Obama back to the center.

Then, instead of a race between the Democratic left and the Republican right--in which the whole country would lose because the winner would not have had a mandate for the real change we need--we would have had a race between the Democratic center, independents and the Republican center. Then the whole country would win.

Apparently Barack Obama has been veering too far to the left, mostly because he rejected some sort of  Simpson/Bowles "Grand Bargain" fiscal reform plan. Friedman quotes economist Tyler Cowen saying that the plan Obama has proposed "seems to be an extreme Democratic response" because it "is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy."

Friedman agrees--Obama decided to "shift back to his base with a weak fiscal plan." What he should have  proposed was something that "shares the burden of cutbacks fairly--takes from defense programs and entitlements and asks the wealthy to pay more but everyone to pay something."

This criticism is bizarre.  Most people should know that the Affordable Care Act included significant Medicare savings--contrary to the media messages about the failure to rein in spending. (Those cost controls are in large part what gave us a Republican House of Representatives in 2010.) And as Friedman's paper reported, Obama's new fiscal plan includes another round of rather serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid:

Obama Proposes $320 Billion in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years

Perhaps Friedman wants deeper cuts, or cuts to Social Security. To him, that is "centrism." But most people in the country don't support these policies--making it strange to call them "centrist."

Friedman has been making a habit of late of wishing that Obama would propose some economic policies that he's already proposed--some mix of cuts and tax increases. This is exactly what Obama has been offering--and none of it resembles what the "Democratic left" is calling for.

The discussion on the economy in the media and among political elites is basically between the far-right Republicans and Obama--whose policy ideas might be considered center or center-right. Tom Friedman wants that debate to move even further to the right.

Politicians beware: Thomas Friedman is still threatening to launch a third party.

In his New York Times column today (9/21/11), Friedman moans:

One would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we're getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent third party candidate in the 2012 campaign.

Hmm, spending cuts, revenue increases, investments that are supposed to help us win the future.... Does that remind you of any politician you know? Poor Barack Obama--he's trying his hardest to be President Tom Friedman, and he still can't get any love from the original.

It needs to be said that the columnist the president seems to be trying most hard to please (especially now that David Brooks has jilted him) is absolutely bonkers when it comes to economics.  His column begins: "It becomes clearer every week that our country faces a big choice: We can either have a hard decade or a bad century." By "hard" he presumably means like we've been having--and somehow keeping 9 percent of our workforce out of productive employment for a decade is going to make things better up through 2111? What this is really is sadism masquerading as masochism.

In the debt ceiling debate, Republicans and corporate media have somewhat similar strategies: The GOP can't reach an agreement with the Democrats, because that would be a win for Obama. The media, meanwhile, can't say that the Democrats are doing the right thing, even when they're doing exactly what media pundits demand that they do because that would make the media seem like they were on the Democrats' side.

Thomas Friedman's column today (7/27/11) is a great example of this. Aside from what sounds like a call for a series of Tom Friedman impersonation festivals (i.e., "a series of hearings under the heading: 'What world are we living in?'"), what he's asking for is basically just what Obama's done:

For starters, two years ago Congress and the Obama administration would have collaborated on a series of hearings.... Then we would have put together "The National Commission for 21st Century America."... We then sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, "OK, given our current fiscal predicament, where should we cut spending and where must we raise new tax revenues so that we can bring our government back to solvency and, at the same time, reinvigorate our formula for growth and success."...

"Such a plan requires cutting, taxing and spending. It requires cutting because we have made promises to ourselves on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that we cannot keep without reforming each of them."

But we cannot possibly generate the savings--or the new investments we need in our formula for success--by just taking funds from these social programs and shredding the social safety nets.... That is why we need to raise new tax revenues as well--so we can simultaneously shrink the entitlements programs, but still keep them viable, and generate the funds needed to strengthen all five parts of our growth formula. Anyone who says that either entitlement reform or tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

It's hard to deny that this outline closely resembles the general policy approach, as well as the rhetoric and decision-making process, of the actually existing Obama administration. But Friedman can't write a column saying he thinks the president has got basically the right idea; where's the fun, or the bestselling book, in that? Instead, the columnist pretends that he's making a brilliantly original proposal that is only likely to be carried out by his longstanding dream of a  "radical centrist" third party:

Personally, I'll support anyone with a real plan to cut spending, raise revenues and boost investment in the five pillars of our success--be they Democrats or Republicans. But if neither Republicans nor Democrats can see that we need a hybrid politics today--one that requires cutting, taxing and investing as part of a single nation-building strategy (phased in over time)--then I'll hope for a third party that does get it and can take us where we need to go.

Hear that, Democrats? When you start talking about cutting spending, raising revenues and investing in the future, Tom Friedman is ready to support you. If he hears about it, that is.

The recent New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the development of Barack Obama's foreign policy includes this memorable line:

Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.

The magazine's cartoons never make me laugh, but that  is hilarious.

Tom Friedman, writing today about the Arab Spring (4/13/11--the same column Jim Naureckas critiqued for FAIR Blog here):

Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states.

It's been a while since I've played an organized sport, but if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail.

That analogy sounded familiar, though. Turns out he's used it before:

Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other's power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist. --3/23/11

The U.S. military is still needed as referee. It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist. It’s still not clear that its government is anything more than a collection of sectarian fiefs. --6/18/08

It's time to blow the whistle on Friedman for abusive use of analogy.

One thing Thomas Friedman demonstrates over and over is that you don't need to know much to be an expert. Take today's column (New York Times, 4/13/11), which is based around a contrast between the European wave of democratization in 1989 and the current "Arab spring":

Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia. The Arab world is exactly the opposite. There, virtually every state is like Yugoslavia--except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of Communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government--except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.

In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers--except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.

Does Friedman remember 1989? Not just Yugoslavia, but also the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia ended up dividing along ethnic lines. In fact, of the 20 formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe, only five--Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Albania--are not the result of these ethnic splits. And the countries that remain are far from homogeneous, either ethnically or religiously: Latvia is only 59 percent Latvian, Ukraine is 78 percent Ukrainian, Russia is 80 percent Russian, Moldova is 78 percent Moldovan (and involved in a secession battle with the other 22 percent). And so on. (I get these figures from the CIA World Fact Book--handily available online for use by columnists and media critics alike!) Even Germany, which is Friedman's model of homogeneity, is just 92 percent German.

As an example of the lack of homogeneity of the Middle East, Friedman cites Saudi Arabia as being 90 percent Sunni and 10 percent Shi'ite Muslim. Compare that with supposedly monolithic Bulgaria--83 percent Bulgarian Orthodox, 12 percent Muslim. Or, for that matter, with Egypt, which Friedman says had an easy transition from authoritarianism because it's an exception to the region's multiculturalism--yet has a Christian Coptic minority that makes up 9 percent of the population.

Friedman starts off his column with an anecdote about an Egyptian hotel worker who, when she finds out he works for the New York Times, asks him, "Are we going to be OK?" I'd advise her to ask the next guest who checks in at random--she's almost certainly going to an opinion that's at least as well-informed.

Corrected: Replaced a "Christian" that should have been "Muslim."

It might be hard for you to imagine covering the democratic uprising in Egypt as a way to reflect upon all the wise things you've written in the past.

But you're not Tom Friedman. He wrote today (New York Times, 2/11/11):

I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the aphorism that "in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car." I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either--and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them.

That wasn't the first time Egypt reminded him of something smart he'd written (NBC's Meet the Press, 1/30/11):

For the first 15 years or so of his rule, Egypt really did stagnate. I visited, gosh, back 12 years ago. I remember writing that Mubarak had more mummies in his Cabinet than King Tut, OK. Then he slowly, under our pressure, and under the pressure, really, of globalization, started to open up. And in the last few years, actually appointed a lot of reformers to his Cabinet who produced a real opening, a 6 percent growth, I believe, last year.

Appearing on Charlie Rose last night (2/10/11), Friedman said this:

We've had this conversation before where we talked about the Iraq War and the whole idea of why it's important to democratize a place like Iraq.  I think I said to you the old aphorism that in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.  And the point I made about Iraq is that no one's ever washed a rented country, either.

Is this guy wise or what?

Actually, Friedman's most memorable "conversation" about Iraq on the Charlie Rose show didn't have to do with washing cars. It was the time he explained the reason the U.S. invaded Iraq--to pop the "terrorism bubble" after 9/11. As he put it (5/30/03):

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, 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." That, Charlie, is what this war is about.

There have been some interesting, informative TV coverage of Egypt.

And then there was last night's Charlie Rose (2/3/11), with special guests Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger.

Writing from the confines of what some Palestinians call the "Ramallah bubble" (Ha'aretz, 1/1/09), Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/30/10) thinks he knows how to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: "quietly support[ing]" the Palestinian Authority while it builds a "real economy, a professional security force and an effective, transparent government bureaucracy."

Friedman has a curious definition of a Palestinian state, which according to Friedman is “in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.” Gaza is missing from this equation, and probably not by accident, as Friedman has a history of trying to dismiss Hamas-run Gaza as “undemocratic,” and therefore illegitimate--despite the fact that Hamas was democratically elected and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority is in power illegally (FAIR Blog, 6/16/10). Friedman seems to be following the “West Bank first” approach (New York Times, 6/19/07), first begun by the Bush administration and now followed by the Obama administration, that seeks to shower economic support on the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank while isolating Gaza. If the Gaza aid flotilla affair taught the world anything, though, those looking to end the violence in Palestine can’t ignore the situation in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The irony of Friedman’s column is that the same day it was published online, Al Jazeera English (6/29/10) reported that a new Save the Children UK report set to come out today paints picture of life in the West Bank, particularly the Israeli-administered zone known as Area C, that’s almost an exact opposite to Friedman’s cheery view:

"The international community has rightly focused its attention on the suffering of families in Gaza, but the plight of children in Area C must not be overlooked," Salam Kanaan, Save the Children's director in the occupied Palestinian Territories, said."

Palestinians in the West Bank are widely thought to enjoy a higher standard of living but tragically many families, particularly in Bedouin and herder communities, actually suffer significantly higher levels of malnutrition and poverty."

The organization called for Israel to immediately cease home demolitions and land confiscations in the West Bank and said the Palestinian authority should take "urgent action" to develop services and improve food security in Area C.

"Palestinian children cannot wait for the stalled peace talks between the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United States to find solutions to this crisis," Kanaan said.

Friedman’s chat with an “upbeat” Salam Fayyad, the prime minister for the Palestinian Authority, apparently didn’t touch on what Save the Children calls “grinding poverty” in the West Bank. That discussion would surely put the kibosh on any benign and happy view of life under Israeli occupation.

Thomas Friedman sure knows how to flip reality on its head.  In his New York Times op-ed column today, Friedman hops on the bandwagon (FAIR blog, 6/10/10) of bashing Turkey for "joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel."

Friedman accuses Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan of no longer promoting democracy and instead being more focused on "praising Hamas instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is actually building the foundations of a Palestinian state."  Friedman says of Erdogan:

I'd love to see him be the most popular leader on the Arab street, but not by being more radical than the Arab radicals and by catering to Hamas, but by being more of a democracy advocate than the undemocratic Arab leaders and mediating in a balanced way between all Palestinians and Israel. That is not where Erdogan is at, though, and it's troubling.

Siding with the Palestinian Authority against Hamas would be a peculiar way of advocating for democracy in the Middle East, though.  In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Hamas categorically defeated Fatah in what former President Jimmy Carter called "free and fair" elections (CNN, 5/17/09).  The U.S., EU and Israel rejected those results (New York Times, 6/8/06), and after Fatah's U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Hamas in Gaza failed (Vanity Fair, 4/08), an "emergency government" composed of members of Fatah was installed (New York Times, 6/18/07). This "emergency government," still in place to this day in the West Bank, was not democratically elected and consolidated its power illegally (Electronic Intifada, 6/18/07).

In Friedman's alternate universe, the Turkish prime minister is not advocating for democracy because...he supports the democratically elected government in Palestine that Israel has been trying to overthrow by way of "economic warfare" (FAIR Blog, 6/14/10) instead of the unelected government approved by the United States.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argued yesterday (6/13/10) that,  when it comes down to it, we're all  to blame for the BP disaster. And that's not all we're to blame for:

We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We--both parties--created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people's lives. We--both parties--created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn't have the means to sustain them. And we--both parties--sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you're drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

So apparently "we" are all in "both parties," and "we" participated in some sort of referendum that endorsed certain Wall Street practices and/or encouraged offshore drilling without meaningful oversight.

It's also telling that this far into the crisis Tom Friedman still believes that the housing bubble was mainly a problem of selling houses to poor people.

But let's not sugarcoat things.  After all,  maybe "we" decided to give him a newspaper column, too.

Thomas Friedman is upset in his New York Times column today (5/26/10) because Brazilian President Lula da Silva negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran.  Asks Friedman, "Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?" And he answers himself: "No, that's about as ugly as it gets."

Friedman quotes a source complaining that Iran had just executed "political prisoners who were tortured into confessions," but Lula "didn't mention a word about human rights."  Friedman presumably is aware that the U.S., too, has prisoners that it has tortured into confessions, and that it maintains the right to execute such captives.  Should Lula have said a word about those human rights issues as well, or would that just be an attempt to "tweak the U.S."?

Friedman has another expert who accuses Lula of "the thwarting of democracy across Latin America." Friedman's evidence: "He regularly praises Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator...while denouncing Colombia, one of the great democratic success stories, because it let U.S. planes use Colombian airfields to fight narco-traffickers."

"One of the great democratic success stories"?  Here's some excerpts from Amnesty International's latest annual report on Colombia's human rights record:

At least 296 people were extrajudicially executed by the security forces in the 12-month period ending in June 2008, compared to 287 in the previous 12-month period.... Paramilitaries continued to kill civilians and to commit other human rights violations, sometimes with the support or acquiescence of the security forces. Some 461 killings were attributed to paramilitaries in the 12-month period ending in June 2008, compared to 233 in the previous 12-month period.... At least 46 trade union members were killed in 2008, compared to 39 in 2007. Some 12 human rights defenders were killed in 2008, similar to the figure recorded in 2007.

Funny, most "democratic success stories" don't involve quite so much murdering of civilians. But then, most of them don't star a president whose brother helped organize death squads, as reported in the Washington Post on Monday (5/24/10).

So, to summarize Friedman, Lula should criticize the torture of prisoners by Iran--but presumably not by his fellow democrats in the United States. And he should promote democracy by praising  a government that continues to murder hundreds of civilians a year as a democratic success story.

No, it doesn't get much uglier than that.

In a column headlined "A Word From the Wise" (3/3/10), New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lets us know what Intel CEO Paul Otellini thinks is wrong with the U.S. economy. And there's a certain theme that runs through his critique:

"The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits."...  "If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion," because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in.... "The cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower."... If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes.... With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel's chief competitors in South Korea basically have "zero cost of money."...

You think maybe the CEO of Intel would like to not pay so much in taxes?

One thing is strikingly missing from Friedman's column: any discussion of how high U.S. corporate taxes actually are. On paper, the country has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world--but as Otellini's reference to "tax breaks" suggests, what matters to business executives is how much they actually pay.  And as a share of the total economy, U.S. corporate taxes are some of the lowest in the world: According to a Congressional Budget Office report (11/05), out of 31 industrialized countries, 28 have corporate taxes as a bigger share of the economy and only two have less.*

"'Something has to pay for' everything government is doing today," Otellini lectures the United States via Tom Friedman. But it shouldn't be corporate America, apparently.

*In the U.S., corporate taxes are 1.8 percent of GDP, vs. 2.9 percent in Britain and France, 3.1 percent in Japan, 3.4 percent in Canada, 5.3 percent in Australia and 8.2 percent in Norway. Germany is the one major country where corporate taxes are a smaller share of the economy, at 1.0 percent of GDP.