Doubting Thomas

Thomas "L Qaeda" Friedman

Earlier this week, Powerline made an excellent observation about Thomas L. Friedman:

As we've said before, Friedman is knowledgeable about the Middle East, but his overriding loyalty to the Democratic Party prevents him from drawing the conclusions that flow from his own premises, and thereby being a useful commentator. So, instead of acknowledging that the policy he advocates is the one being pursued by the Bush administration, Friedman takes his obligatory partisan shots at the President, implicitly contradicting the rest of his column:

The Bush team is certainly not fostering all this when it mismanages a war it launched to liberate the people of Iraq. Its performance has been pathetic, and I understand anyone on the right or the left who wants to wash his hands of the whole thing.

Democrats accuse the Bush team of "mismanaging" the Iraqi war in their sleep, but, as usual, Friedman offers no specifics as to wherein the "mismanagement" lies. For a considerable time, the standard liberal criticism was that the administration should not have disbanded the Iraqi army. Knowing what we now know about the number of former Iraqi soldiers who were (and are) committed to preventing the formation of a freely elected government, and knowing that the Iraqi army was dominated by the very Sunni Baathists who are now leading the terrorist "insurgency," no one could now make this argument with a straight face. And almost no one does.

Today's column, "An American in Paris" has little to do with substance, and everything to do with smearing the Bush administration. But what really got me was a statement Friedman repeats approvingly:

"Europeans were convinced that Kerry had won on election night and were telling themselves that they knew all along that Americans were not all that bad - and then suddenly, as the truth emerged, there was a feeling of slow resignation: 'Oh well, we've been dreaming,' " said Dominique Moisi, one of France's top foreign policy analysts. "In fact, real America is moving away from us. We don't share the same values. ... In France it was a very emotional issue. It was as if Americans were voting for the president of France as much as for president of the United States."

The arrogance of the statement reminded of something before the election.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al-Qa'ida. Your security is in your own hands, and any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

That is the translation by MEMRI of a communique from Osama bin Laden prior to the American election. While the malign intent of the bin Laden statement is absent from Dominique Moisi's statement, they both reek of the same arrogance. Bin Laden said in essence, "Don't vote for the wrong guy." Moisi's message was "Americans voted for the wrong guy."
But is it fair for me to equate Thomas Friedman with an Islamofascist terrorist? I think so. Consider the set of charges Friedman makes against the Bush administration:

There are Euro-conservatives, but, aside from, maybe, the ruling party in Italy, there is nothing here that quite corresponds to the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-tax, anti-national-health-care, anti-Kyoto, openly religious, pro-Iraq-war Bush Republican Party.

Never mind the validity of the particulars here, there's a theme: the Republican Party of George W. Bush is heartless and intolerant.
At the end of his screed, Friedman tells us:

Funnily enough, the one country on this side of the ocean that would have elected Mr. Bush is not in Europe, but the Middle East: it's Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.

An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were "loving anything their government hates," such as Mr. Bush, "and hating anything their government loves." Tehran is festooned in "Down With America" graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.

Iran, he said, is the ultimate "red state." Go figure.

No doubt the student's intent and Friedman's are not the same. But Friedman uses the quote about Iran being a "red state" because it fits his mindset. Friedman of course means to equate Iran's intolerant Isalmofascist leaders with Bush supporters. The student means, of course, that the subjects of Iran's leaders understand Bush's language of freedom and hope that he will give them that gift.

Hindrocket is right. Friedman cannot be an effective analyst because he is too driven by his need to toe the Democratic party line. And that's the problem, Friedman was a successful reporter because he was (and is) an excellent observer. However he was always too partisan to be a good analyst. (Friedman's fans act as if he is particularly profound. He's not. His views on the Middle East are identical to those of Peace Now. Nothing original at all.) In essence he was rewarded for his reporterial skills by given a job as an analyst. That is the Peter principle. Or perhaps, in this case, the Thomas principle.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 20, 2005 08:16 PM