Doubting Thomas

The Problem with Thomas

Thomas Friedman is without a doubt an excellent reporter and a fine writer. He is, however, beset by so many prejudices that he is seemingly incapable of intellectual honesty. If he's predisposed to oppose someone or something, he'll find a way to do it, even if all the evidence points in the other direction.
His most recent two columns have been about offshore outsourcing. Today, he writes in "What Goes Around . . .":

"How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.

Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

That is an excellent observation. Many of the jobs outsourced to India become income generators for other American businesses. Indeed, the gist of Friedman's article praises the way economics drives businesses to exploit efficiencies in ways that benefit everyone involved. It's pretty good.
But let's recall what Friedman wrote this Sunday in "Meet the Zippies":

...managing this phenomenon will require a public policy response — something more serious than the Bush mantra of let the market sort it out...

He expressed concern for those who lost their jobs and declared a need for government to take care of them. However today he demonstrates that, for the most part, the economy takes care of itself. Job losses in one industry are compensated for with jobs in another industry.
Today's column makes the sniping at the Bush administration look foolish. Friedman really is in agreement with the way the Bush administration is handling outsourcing - doing little - but he needs to take a potshot because ... it's the Bush administration.
A good columnist looks at the data and draws his conclusion accordingly. Friedman feels a need to criticize those he deems worthy of derision even if the evidence supports their view!
I've always thought that Jim Hoagland and Robert Samuelson are better columnists than Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. The Washington Post columnists follow the evidence and come to conclusions even if it means giving (grudging) credit to the administration. The NY Times columnists feel a need to score partisan points against the administration regardless of what the evidence says.
Samuelson who seems to prefer neither Republicans nor Democrats wrote the following about outsourcing in "The Specter of Outsourcing:"

Like most new trends, this one inspires hype. No one knows how many service jobs have been "outsourced" abroad, but guesses cluster around 300,000 to 500,000. Harris Miller of the ITAA estimates that 2 percent of the 10 million computer-related jobs have been sent abroad. According to ITAA's surveys, 12 percent of information technology ("IT'') companies have "outsourced" work, as have 3 percent of non-IT firms. Of course, there will be more. John McCarthy of Forrester Research projects a loss of 3.3 million jobs by 2015, including 1.7 million back-office jobs and 473,000 IT jobs. But that's still a tiny fraction of today's 138 million U.S. jobs -- nevermind future growth.

The truth is that, for most Americans, the main sources of job destruction and insecurity remain domestic: Wal-Mart battering competitors; the dot-com and telecom collapses; the business cycle. More important, job losses have been offset by job gains. Manufacturing employment peaked in mid-1979 at 19.5 million; now it's 14.5 million. But over that period, total U.S. employment grew about 40 million, and manufacturing output rose more than 80 percent. American companies became more productive and shifted to more valuable products. Cheap foreign labor has threatened individual U.S. workers but not the economy as a whole.

The reason is that imports also create gains. Despite job losses, consumers or companies gain. Lower prices boost purchasing power or profits. That creates more demand at home. Consumers can spend more; businesses can invest more.

Certainly if someone is an industry that does outsourcing there's reason for concern. But not fear. And to bash outsourcing in general is destructive.
FWIW, Samuelson also questions whether it's right to criticize the President for job losses in "A Phony Jobs Debate:"

Admitting the truth is no fun: On jobs, presidents are mostly prisoners of the business cycle. The present cycle has been particularly confusing. On the one hand, the monthly unemployment rate peaked at 6.3 percent in June 2003, much lower than in the slump of the early 1990s (7.8 percent). On the other hand, job creation has lagged badly. By the government's payroll survey, nonfarm employment is about 2.35 million below its March 2001 peak and up 366,000 from its August low.

and

We don't know. But what we can know is that policies from a President Gore or Kerry or Edwards wouldn't have improved matters much. Of course, Democrats might have discarded some Bush policies: say, tax cuts for the rich. Still, the main forces shaping the job market would have remained well beyond presidential reach: the boom-bust cycle (President Bill Clinton didn't create the boom, and the bust was unfolding even before Bush's election); weak growth in Europe, Japan and Latin America, which account for almost 40 percent of U.S. exports; and business cautiousness. Protectionism is no panacea. It barely touches job creation; America's trade problem is weak exports as much as strong imports. Even if every offshored service job had somehow been saved, the job picture wouldn't have changed much.

Ah yes, I can hear the critics saying, Samuelson is a shill for the government. Well he isn't.

The jobs rhetoric captures politics' casual cynicism. John Kerry and John Edwards must grasp a president's modest job-creating powers; otherwise, they wouldn't be fit for the White House. Their jobs obsession is dishonest expediency. They know President Bush is vulnerable. To be fair, the deceit is bipartisan. The Bush administration is ready to claim credit for almost any good economic news.

And of course Samuelson has scored the administration for spending in general and the Medicare expansion in particular.
The contrast between Samuelson who allows the evidence to dictate his conclusions and Friedman who feels the need to take gratuitous swipes at the administration is instructive. It is for this reason, that Friedman is not a great columnist, no matter what anyone thinks.
Donald Luskin credited me with being "an alert reader." (See the Update:)

If you make a correction get it right

Last week as I noted, Thomas Friedman asserted incorrectly:

And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.

This week he corrected his error. Sort of.
In the middle of his article "Arabs, It's Your Move," Friedman writes:

On Palestinian prisoners, Abbas asked for an Israeli commitment to release large numbers of prisoners, which would have really given Abbas street credibility. Instead, Sharon released a few hundred, none of them big-name fighters and some just criminals. So Arafat easily destroyed Abbas by portraying him as a U.S.-Israeli stooge.

and in case anyone forgot that this was not what he wrote last week, he wrote a brief correction at the end:

My Feb. 5 column erred in saying Ariel Sharon had released no Palestinian prisoners to Mahmoud Abbas. He did. It was just too limited a release to have any impact. See above.

I give him credit for at least acknowledging that he made a mistake.
The problem is that he's still wrong.
(Let me just say here, that I don't expect the public editor to act on this. What constitutes a "big name fighter is a judgment call. It doesn't mean that Friedman is not intellectually dishonest.)
First of all there was at least one "big name fighter" who was released. That was Ahmad Jabara, the "refrigerator bomber." Jabara was welcomed by many people in addition to Arafat and given a special title. The release may not have been enough for Abbas, but would any number have been? It's also wrong to claim that the release was too limited. This is from a contemporaneous account by The Media Line:

The Palestinian Authority [PA] regards this step of releasing prisoners as a positive one, since it will build trust on both sides. The PA also believes that such steps will put pressure on terror organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was reported on the Israeli news website Ynet, adding that the Palestinians claimed most of those released were ending their sentence in any case.

Crowds gathered to greet Jabara at the Qalandia checkpoint, from where Jabara headed straight for the Muqata’a, Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Jabara was greeted by Chairman Arafat with open arms. The Palestinian Al-Hayyat reported Jabara’s release as the main item on its front page, alongside a picture of Arafat holding Jabara’s hand as a demonstration of strength and solidarity.

The release of Jabara was frong page news in the official Palestinian press. That suggests that this was an excellent "confidence building" measure for those who believe that such things help. Instead of strengthening Abbas, Arafat got all the credit.
This is the problem with Israeli concessions. They are all too often underappreciated. And even if they are appreciated, they help the wrong people. In this case it was Arafat.
Additionally, Friedman's complaint that Israel didn't release any "big-name fighters" is troubling. The nature of these "big-name fighters" (and many others) is that they go back to their terrorist activities. To suggest casually that these are people that Israel should release fails to acknowledge the big risk there is to Israel in releasing them.
Another problem with the column is that it seems that Friedman has discovered that peace in the Middle East is up to the Arab world. Nice to know. Here's a proposition he makes in the name of President George W. Bush:

So, now I come to you Arab leaders. Guys, Sharon isn't the only one who didn't lift a finger to help Abbas and the Palestinian moderates. You Arabs did nothing. But in truth, so did I. So here's what I propose to make amends: You are holding an Arab summit this March. I want you guys to invite Sharon and me to attend.

Yes, you heard me. And I want you to present Sharon, face to face, with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace plan, which you've already adopted as an Arab League initiative: full normalization with Israel in return for full withdrawal from the territories.

No doubt this is another effort by Friedman to put pressure on Israel. He's hoping that his good friend, Crown Prince Abdullah will invite Sharon to the Arab League summit and that Sharon will refuse.
The problem is that the Saudi "peace" initiative was always a fraud. That's what I thought from the beginning. I know that Friedman believes that it was a real offer but it wasn't.
First of all it took the form of an ultimatum. The offer was along the lines of "Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines and we'll make peace. Until Israel does that there's nothing to talk about."
Second of all, when Crown Prince Abdullah went to Syria to get approval for his plan, he got it. Sort of. President Bashar Assad insisted that Israel still had to withdraw from Lebanon even though two years earlier Israel had done so and had its withdrawal certified complete by the UN.
At issue is the area called Shebaa Farms that is part of Syria and subject to negotiations between Syria and Israel. Syria instead prefers to say that it is part of (Syrian occupied) Lebanon so that it is justified in continuing to support Hezbollah's war against Israel.
Friedman didn't bat an eyelash when Syria added this demand. You'd think he would have because this Syrian (and Saudi) dishonesty calls into question what Israeli concessions will accomplish if the Arab world simply denies that they take place.
Indeed Friedman predicted that an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would render Hezbullah ineffective. In a column titled "How Bibi got Re-elected" (reproduced here, probably illegally, by Holocaust deniers)
In the hypothetical scenario produced by Friedman, Bibi wins re-election by withdrawing Israel from Lebanon and ...

The Israeli move has totally unnerved the Syrians, the Hezbollah guerrillas and Iran. "They are all now in a quandary," said the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. "The Hezbollah guerrillas are saying to themselves: 'Now that we have liberated Lebanon, do we want to use that as leverage to rule Lebanon? Or do we want to use that as a springboard to move on to Jerusalem?' If they want to do the latter, now they're really going to have to pay for it."

As we see that hasn't happened. If anything, the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon appears to have emboldened Hezbollah ( they've been launching different attacks across the international border ever since the Israeli withdrawal) and some say that Israel's withdrawal under fire emboldened Arafat to reject Camp David because he didn't get as much as he wanted from Barak.
Friedman worships at the altar of Israeli withdrawal and concession that has done nothing but encourage extremism. And yes the withdrawal from Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah, it would be nice if Friedman had the guts to admit this.
One of the fundamental problems with the past ten+ years of peace processing is that Israel's concessions and risks are consistently minimized not only by the Arab world, but by many in the West. Those who minimize the magnitude of what has happened in Israel give cover to the Arab world for whom no concession is ever enough.
The position of Ariel Sharon now, is the position of Peace Now ten years ago. Ideologically, for better or for worse, Israel has come quite far in ten years. The problem is that the Arab world remains static. It is just as hostile to Israel's existence as it was ten years ago. The Israeli concessions have only strengthened the extremists. The irony of Friedman's concerns is that Sharon's fight against the PA has weakened the extremists including Arafat, but people like him who have never appreciated Israeli concessions have emboldened them.
Daniel Pipes in a recent column notes:

Such schemas, admittedly, sound like cloud-cuckoo land at present. But when Palestinian Arabs finally undergo a change of heart, when they accept Israel's existence and renounce the use of force against it, all sorts of positive developments can take place to sweep aside today's seemingly intractable issues.

And to the question, "How will we know when that change of heart takes place," my reply is: When Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel).

Until that happy day arrives, the issue of Jews living in the territories is perhaps the least significant one facing strategists and would-be diplomats. Instead of focusing on this political triviality, they should devise ways to induce the Palestinian Arabs to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state called Israel. Until that happens, no other initiatives will do any good.

He is quite right. Why does Friedman only require words from the Arabs? Why not ask them to
1) Disarm Hezbollah by force.
2) Insist that Assad finally abide by the Taif Accord that calls for a complete withdrawal of Syrian troops from occupied Lebanon.
3) Return the body of Eli Cohen to Israel.
4) Drop their objection to the certification of the Magen David Adom by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
These actions would certainly show a change of heart in the Arab world and in no way do they play any role in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He doesn't ask it, because he knows he would be rebuffed.
For people like Friedman, there's no Palestinian complaint too insignificant to ignore; no Arab concern too trivial to discount and no Israeli concession too significant to recognize. This makes Friedman incapable of fairly evaluating the Middle East. Thomas Friedman is simply a mean spirited cynic when it comes to Israel.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Still Asleep

Today, in "A Rude Awakening," Thomas Friedman argues that there is a real danger that the Bush administration's policies will lead to the Islamic Republic of Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Palestine. Friedman's point is that President Bush's inattention to the problems in Iraq and "Palestine" is a liability to his re-election.
The problem with his argument is that the strength of Hamas, that he allegedly fears, is not that great. In fact, just a few months ago, Friedman dismissed Hamas as a "ragtag terrorist group." Now I'm not saying that Hamas isn't dangerous; it is. But it hardly has the manpower to run a government. The problem is that the PA whose authority he promotes is not the least bit moderate.
And of course there's the problem of accuracy.
Friedman asserts that:

And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.

Well actually, PM Sharon did release about 100 prisoners including the "refrigerator bomber" Ahmad Jubarah in advance of the Sharm El-Sheikh summit last June as a goodwill gesture. It was expected to, but didn't, strengthen then PA PM Abbas. Not only didn't it do what is supposed to do, it didn't make the Arab world any friendlier to Israel as no Arab country was willing to make any concilliatory gesture toward Israel in advance of the summit.
His claim that:

Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year — all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.

is truly quite offensive. But it isn't even substantiated.
The ZOA recently released the results of a poll that showed little support for a Palestinian state in America. Is it that those evil Jewish lobbyists (he throws in "Christian" because he doesn't want to be called an antisemite) are preventing Bush and Cheney from acting? Or is it that what is clear to a majority of Americans - that a Palestinian state is good neither for Israel nor for the United States - is also clear to President Bush and VP Cheney? Is it possible that they are not in thrall to some sort of mind numbing narcotic but have reached the conclusion that a Palestinian state is a bad idea on their own?
Maybe it's Thomas Friedman and his friends at Peace Now who need to wake up. Americans know that honoring Yasser Arafat with more trips to the White House than any other foreign leader is wrong. They understand that, despite Friedman's claims and the claims of his allies, Israel is our friend and that Israel's enemies are America's enemies. Wake up and smell the coffee.
UPDATE:James Taranto at OpinionJournal.com's "Best of the Web Today" uses but a few words to deflate Friedman:

Meanwhile, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman has uncovered a new Jewish conspiracy: "Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year--all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing."

Brevity IS the soul of wit.
Horsefeathers calls Friedman's characterization of PM Sharon's influence on President Bush

"a clever Dowdism--Sharon as the all powerful Jew, manipulating the U.S. govt., imprisoning the President, as he has so harshly done to Arafat and his fellow Palestinian peace seekers. Sharon is thus to blame for the depradations of the Palestinians and their refusal to halt the suicide bombers.

Read what else he has to say.
Finally, I received an e-mail back from the public editor of the Times saying that Friedman has been apprised of the criticisms of his article and will address them on Thursday. Do you think he'll address the factual error? Or just call people like Taranto and Horsefeathers "know nothing Zionist extremists?"
UPDATE 2: More on the column from Elliott Chodoff and Honest Reporting.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.