Doubting Thomas

Isn't It Rich?

Thomas Friedman endorses President Bush for re-election. Not 43, but 41. In "The Apparent Heir" he actually gives a pretty good recapitulation of the elder Bush's career and argues (well) that the first President Bush will be treated kindly by history. He starts:

Columnists for this newspaper are not allowed to endorse presidential candidates. But I think this election is so important, I am going to break the rules. I hope I don't get fired. But here goes: I am endorsing George Bush for president. No, no - not George W. Bush. I am endorsing his father - George Herbert Walker Bush.

Um. Is there any doubt whom Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd support? For that matter is there any doubt who David Brooks and William Safire support? The first 3 (and Friedman) actually spend so much of their time bashing the president - rationally and irrationally, I hardly see the point in telling them they can't endorse someone. I mean if George W. Bush is evil incarnate doesn' that at least suggest that you support his opponent. This rule strikes me as one of those odd journalism rules that's supposed to shield the media from charges of bias or improper influence. It's just plain silly.
But getting to the meat of the endorsement:

The alliance that Mr. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James A. Baker III built to drive Saddam out of Kuwait had so many allies it virtually turned a profit for America. Mr. Bush chose not to invade Baghdad in 1991. Right or wrong, he felt that had he tried, he would have lost the coalition he had built up to evict Saddam from Kuwait. He obviously believed that the U.S. should never invade an Arab capital without a coalition that contained countries whose support mattered in that part of the world, such as France, Egypt, Syria or Saudi Arabia.

And if France was in the pay of the evil dictator, France should have veto power? And if we give $2 billion a year to Egypt we shouldn't expect some actual cooperation in return? But the fact that he didn't try deserves more discussion than simply shrugging and qualifying it "right or wrong."
Thousands of Iraqis were getting ready to finish the job. When Bush 41 stopped, they were slaughtered. There is a strong case for arguing that the decision not to finish the job undermined America's image in the region and hurt America's and the world's interests in the Middle East.

The elder Bush rightly understood that it was not in Israel's interest, or that of the U.S., for Israel to be expanding settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The Madrid peace conference convened by the elder Bush paved the way for both the Oslo peace process and the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, which ended Israel's diplomatic isolation with countries like India and China. It was also the elder Bush who laid the groundwork for the Nafta free-trade accord, completed by President Bill Clinton.

It's interesting that the elder Presiden't Bush's Middle East policy is described here as being in Israel's interest. The hostility toward Israel was quite clear from the outset.
Moshe Arens in his book, "Broken Covenant" figured that Israel was headed for tought times with the Bush administration when James Baker described relations with Israel as being comparable to a "turkey shoot:" (p 28-29) "The important thing is knowing that it's in your hands, that you can do whatever you determine is in your interest to do."
In June 1990 Baker famously told Israel:"Everybody over there should know that the telephone number [of the White House] is 1-202-456-1414. When you're serious about peace, call us." It is a line that Friedman, then diplomatic correspondent for the Times reportedly fed Baker. (If he did, it marks a more serious breach of journalistic "ethics" than endorsing a candidate as an opinion columnist.)
Later, when Israel was asking for loan guarantees to resettle Russian Jews President Bush said he was "one lonely little guy" standing up to "a thousand lobbyists."
What was the first President Bush's failing. According to Friedman he wasn't good at public diplomacy. One of the specific problems was:

He wrongly antagonized American Jews by challenging their right to lobby on behalf of Israel.

That is a reference to the 3rd quote above. And maybe if that had been the only negative comment from his administration, that's how the remark could be conceived. But it was part of a pattern of barely concealed contempt for the Jewish state that was conveyed by the first President Bush and his team. Not that Friedman found anything wrong with that.
In "Broken Covenant" (p 206-207) Arens relates how he came to Washington to speak with President Bush to try and get freedom for Israel to respond to Iraqi SCUDS. He was surprised when Secretary Baker summoned him for a meeting. The next day Thomas Friedman reported that Arens had come to ask for aid from America but that subject had been introduced by Baker. I guess I could be generous and say that Friedman did not know that he had fed a false piece of information by Baker, more likely Friedman knew it was false, but it gave him one more opportunity to put Israel in a bad light.
I realize that there are aspects of "Broken Covenant" that are score settling. (Ariel Sharon does not come off well in the book. He was a constant thorn in the side of Shamir and Arens.) But nothing I've seen in the words and behavior of James Baker suggest that Arens was off the mark in his portrayal of the Secretary.
Friedman may say that the elder Bush's actions were in Israel's interests, but I think that the record shows that overt hostility is a more apt description. (How else do you explain that after the Gulf War Bush Sr. invited King Hussein to the White House when the king helped Iraq in the war and he showed Shamir the back of his hand though Shamir sacrificed Israel's sovereignty to support the American war effort?)
Finally we have this:

So as we approach this critical election of 2004, my advice, dear readers, is this: Vote for the candidate who embodies the ethos of George H. W. Bush - the old guy. Vote for the man who you think would have the same gut feel for nurturing allies and restoring bipartisanship to foreign policy as him. Vote for the man you think understands the importance of facing up to our fiscal responsibilities for the sake of our children. And vote for the man who has the best instincts for balancing realism and idealism and the man who understands the necessity of using energetic U.S. diplomacy to make Israel more secure - by helping to bring it peace with its Arab neighbors, not just more tours from American Christian fundamentalists.

When Friedman puts "nurturing allies" together with "mak[ing] Israel more secure" I can't help but think of Charles Krauthammer's "Sacrificing Israel". No doubt Friedman would approve a Kerry's administration's appointment of James Baker as an envoy to the Middle East and America joining the European Union in condemnations of Israel. After all that would achieve most of his goals. But perhaps Friedman is driven less by an interest in Israel's security than he is driven by an overt hostility to the country. That is the aspect of George W. Bush's legacy for which Thomas is most nostalgic.
There is, of course, a benign explanation for the affinity that Thomas has for the first Bush administration. Daniel Pipes (in an article, "Can the Palestinians Make Peace?" he admits is slightly dated by events) argues that the Bush I administration was consumed by Palestinianism. By "Palestinianism" he means that the solution of the Palestinian issue (and creation of a Palestinian state) was taken to be the main issue in the Middle East. No peace could be achieved without it. After the failure of the Oslo accords even with the participation of pliant Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, it's pretty clear that Palestinianism was a dead end. Pipes wrote:

Yet this emphasis on the Palestinians (an outlook which I call "Palestinianism") has two important flaws: in the first place, even if Palestinians were to be satisfied, they are too weak to call off the Arabs' conflict with Israel; and in any case, available evidence suggests they cannot be satisfied by any solution short of the destruction of Israel.

What was true in 1990 is even more true now. And if Friedman favors Kerry for his approach to the Middle East he is endorsing him on the basis of a tried and failed approach. The endorsement says a lot about Kerry, it says even more about Friedman.
Oh and Tom, spare us the phony fear of being fired. Your essays are usually the most e-mailed articles any given day. You're a big bread winner for the Times. The Times really isn't bothered by dishonesty - intellectual or otherwise - just so long as it has an attractive bottom line. Despite its air of moral superiority, the Times is a big corporation whose main goal is to make money.
UPDATE: The Shark Blog has also dissected the endorsement. He shows to what degree George W. Bush is, indeed, his father's heir.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Missing the Cutoff

In his column Sunday, Thomas wrote:

But such talk is also indicative of a trend in the Arab media, after a century of Arab-Jewish strife, where if you want to brand someone as illegitimate, just call him a "Jew." Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and America," all lumped together in a single threat.

I thought that his claim that anti-Americanism and antisemitism were getting much worse in the Arab world since 9/11 was incorrect. I wasn't sure. I just found a letter I wrote (but never sent) about an opinion piece covering this topic from May, 2000. In other words, a few months before Camp David, when Ehud Barak was PM, the ugly antisemitic rhetoric of the Arab world was already quite prevelant. As David A Harris of the American Jewish Committee noted in "Peace and Poison in the Middle East.":

As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators move toward a much-awaited permanent settlement, there has been a shocking rise in vitriolic anti-Semitism across the Arab world.

This extraordinary paradox of Israeli and Arab political leaders attempting to build peace while official Arab media, schools, religious leaders, and intellectuals actively demonize the Jewish people is startling.

When the Islamic Mufti of Jerusalem made deeply painful comments repudiating the facts of the Holocaust, they received wide attention in the Western world because they came during the remarkable visit to Israel of Pope John Paul II.

Likewise, when the official Syrian government newspaper Tishreen recently asserted that “Zionists created the Holocaust myth to blackmail and terrorize the world’s intellectuals and politicians,” the editorial gained broad attention and condemnation because it appeared amid efforts to jump-start the stalled Israeli-Syrian peace talks.

Less noted was the fact that these two outrages are the rule, not the exception.

Across the Arab world the language of Holocaust denial has become common. Editorials and columns similar to the one in Tishreen can be found in Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Gumhuriya, three of the official daily newspapers in Egypt.

And that's just the start. It was nice to find a contemporaneous account with evidenc of the explosion in antisemtism prior to 9/11.
I don't believe that Friedman did his homework on this one. He thought he had an argument and bothered to check to see if reality matched his (foregone) conclusion.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

The New York Times' Nasarallah

In "Jews, Israel and America", Thomas engages in some vitriolic rhetoric. He refers to those Israeli nationalists who object to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza as "Israel's Hezbollah". The hyperbole has not gone unchallenged.
Media Backspin quotes Michael Dinowitz:

Now let me see if I understand this. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. They've attacked and killed innocent people. They've launched attacks into foreign countries. They've threatened even more attacks. They are terrorists.
Far right Jews are not terrorists. They are not dedicated to destroying anyone. They are not attacking other countries. They are not launching rockets or kidnapping people.

There is no connection between these two groups other than in Friedman's libelous mind. Why did he make this comparison?

Josh Harvey also weighs in:

Friedman steps over the line into Guardian territory when he compares Israel’s extreme right wing with the Hezbollah. (”[Sharon] is being opposed by the Israeli far right—the Jewish Hezbollah.”) The ill-defined group he’s talking about certainly includes some unsavory individuals, but the death and destruction carried out by its members boils down to an act of butchery by one crazed loner, a political assassination by another, and random thuggery that would embarrass a street gang in its tameness.

This group is hardly comparable to one of the world’s foremost terrorist groups, an organization with the blood of hundreds of innocents on its hands.

Clearly Friedman is over the top by comparing a group of people who demonstrate their dislike for their government's actions by forming a human chain to a terrorist group. But he also has the opposite problem: whitewashing that terrorist group. He has written on many occasions that once Israel withdrew from Lebanon, Hezbollah, no longer having a pretext for striking at Israel, would stop attacking. That's not what happened at all. (I detailed this at "Instant Obsolesence".) Not only has Hezbollah continued attacking Israel accross the border with impunity (I don't believe that Friedman has ever criticized Hezbollah's continuing violence against Israel) but it claims to have a grievance in that Israel has not withdrawn from Shebaa farms and it reportedly has been strengthening terror networks in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Hezbollah was a sideshow to Friedman's column though. His thesis was that something had to be done to reverse the tide of the anti Americanism and anti semitism of the Arab world. Strangely, he places little of the blame on the Arab world.

Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and America," all lumped together in a single threat.

This wider trend has been fanned by Arab satellite TV stations, which deliberately show split-screen images of Israelis bashing Palestinians and U.S. forces bashing the Iraqi insurgents. The trend has also been encouraged by some mosque preachers looking to explain away all the Arab world's ills by wrapping all the Satans together into JIA. This trend has been helped by the Bush team's failed approach to the Arab-Israel problem, which is to tell the truth only to Yasir Arafat, while embracing Ariel Sharon so tightly that it's impossible to know anymore where U.S. policy stops and Mr. Sharon's begins.

This trend of JIA is now metastasizing from the core of the Arab-Israel conflict, across the Muslim world and into Europe. There is no quick fix.

"Some" preachers? Does this guy read MEMRI or Palestinian Media Watch? It hardly seems that this is an isolated phenomenon.
Nor do I believe that this problem has intensified since 9/11. It was pretty pervasive before. Using 9/11 as a cutoff is useful if your goal is to blame the administration for the outbreak of hatred. (Perhaps the rhetoric has intensified since 9/11, I doubt it though.)

What really infects the column though, is a mindset:

One thing that Israel can do is push harder to defuse the conflict with the Palestinians in order to deprive the Arab media of the raw images that help to feed this phenomenon, not because the continuing conflict is all Israel's fault - it is not - but because Israel has such an overriding interest in forging a partnership with a legitimate Palestinian Authority, and getting this poisonous show off the air. A generation of Muslims raised on these images on the Internet is enormously dangerous for Jews, Israel and America.

Israel must do something. What exactly will Israel do to stop this hatred? It was going on even when Rabin and Barak were prime ministers. Politician, Diplomats and pundits just ignored it. As long as "peace" was being achieved they overlooked the overt hostility directed toward Israel even if it violated the letter of the Oslo accords. What was important? That Israel would cede territory to its "former" enemy. That was the essence of the the peace process. Get Israel to give away its land in the face of unremitting hostility. People like Friedman simply looked away and declared their program a success (unless ruined by the likes of Netanyahu or Hamas.)
After all this time Friedman still refuses to admit his mistakes. To admit that he should have objected to the violations of the Palestinians. Nope the problem still is the West Bank.

Mr. Rabin knew that no peace deal would resonate in the Arab-Muslim world if it did not have a legitimate Palestinian partner. Mr. Sharon seems to want to get out of Gaza to make peace with the Jews. His aides have made clear that he is getting out of Gaza in order to entrench Israel even more deeply in the West Bank and the Jewish settlements there.

In the face of this plan, the Bush team is silent. This is partly because the Palestinians continue to stick with Arafat as their leader, even though this bum has led them to ruin - so the U.S. has nothing to offer Israel. And it's partly because the Bush team, which is so inept at diplomacy, has never had the energy or creativity to shape a better Palestinian alternative to Arafat. As a result, the Sharon vision of getting out of Gaza in order to take over the West Bank will probably win by default. If that happens, "Jews, Israel and America" will be bound together more tightly than ever as the enemies of Arabs and Muslims.

Friedman never was ahead of the curve in exposing Arafat as an irredentist. Even after Arafat refused Barak's offer in Camp David this is what Friedman wrote ("Yasir Arafat's Moment", July 28, 2004), :

The reason President Clinton was so frustrated with Mr. Arafat at Camp David was not because he refused to accept every aspect of Ehud Barak's offer for how to share Jerusalem. No one could have, or should have, expected that. The Palestinian-Muslim claim to Jerusalem is authentic, deep-rooted and heartfelt. The reason the Americans were frustrated with Mr. Arafat was that he played rope-a-dope. He came with no compromise ideas of his own on Jerusalem. He simply absorbed Mr. Barak's proposals and repeated Palestinian mantras about recovering all of East Jerusalem.

What should Mr. Arafat have said? He should have told Mr. Barak that his ideas for granting Palestinians an administrative presence in East Jerusalem, autonomous control over the Arab neighborhoods there and religious control over the Temple Mount were a huge leap forward for an Israeli leader.

But, he should have added, they didn't go far enough. The Palestinians needed three things: First, they must have not simply an administrative presence but a sovereign presence in East Jerusalem, over which they have full control and can fly their flag -- even if it is just one square block. It could be at Orient House or in the Muslim Quarter. Second, they must at least share sovereignty with the Jewish people over the sacred space of the Temple Mount, which is the site of both the ancient Jewish Temple and two of Islam's holiest mosques. And third, the Palestinians must have direct access from that sovereign Palestinian presence to both the mosques on the Temple Mount and to the Palestinian state in the West Bank, so they don't have to go through Israeli checkpoints.

He simply takes every Palestinian claim as legitimate and immutable and explains that Arafat should have made a counteroffer. Only Israel needs to compromise.
That's a nice thought but there was never any evidence that Arafat was interested in peace (and quite a bit of evidence to the contrary) and after nearly seven years of peace processing Friedman was covering for him!

The reason Jews, Israel and America are an anathema in the Arab/Muslim world is because too many have excused the hatred saying that the Palestinian claims were legitimate even if their methods were not.

The Arab world used that leverage and used the language of freedom to mask a syntax of violence. Hatred of Israel was legitimized by the cause of Palestinian statehood, while so many pretended that the hatred was a result of the Palestinian disenfranchisement.

It's easy for Friedman to refer to Arafat as "bum" and deride the administration for not showing enough "creativity." But if the U.S. had not supported Israel's sidelining of Arafat would Friedman be referring to him as a bum or would he still be making excuses for him? It took a lot for the United States to reverse the damage of the illusion a decade in the making.

And it's not up to Israel or the United States to change the Palestinians. Read the following CV of the recently departed Adnan al Ghoul:

Adnan al-Ghoul, the Hamas military leader assassinated in an Israeli missile strike Thursday, had long eluded Israeli forces through a mixture of stealth and luck.

Al-Ghoul, 46, joined Hamas in 1988 when the group was in its infancy, and went on to help found its military wing. He became the organization's top bomb-maker after Israel assassinated Yehiya Ayash, known as "the engineer," in 1996.

Al-Ghoul also developed the homemade Qassam rocket as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, according to Palestinian and Israeli military officials. Palestinian militants have fired dozens of Qassams into southern Israel in recent years, and Israel launched a broad offensive into Gaza late last month after a rocket attack killed two Israeli preschoolers.

What if al Ghoul had simply been killed in a traffic accident and his life story had read: al Ghoul founded a software company in 1990. His products were marked by creative, easy to use interfaces. By 2000 his company employed 400 people and was generating $500 million in revenues.

But there is no one like that. al Ghoul was the product of his society that values hate and destruction over creativity. But if the fictional al Ghoul and many others like him existed there would now be a Palestinian state that was at least four years old. Instead the Palestinians are further from statehood than they were 11 years ago. And they have no one to blame but themselves.

It would be asking too much to expect Thomas Friedman to understand that.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

He-e-e's B-a-a-ck

Well Thomas has been back for 2 1/2. There have been things that I've wanted to write about him. His most recent column "Hunting the Tiger" is compelling. Additionally, Roger L. Simon has already commented on it, giving me a springier springboard.
One of the nice things about Thomas is that consistency is not his strong suit. Simon points out:

Friedman marshals in his support senior Iraq envoys Jay Garner and Paul Bremer who have recently criticized the occupation. But Garner was fired after a sojourn of only weeks - so personal pique must be taken into consideration - and Bremer says he was misquoted.

This is interesting. Well first of all, early on this is what Friedman had to write about these two men ("Bad Planning", June 25, 2003):

Because the Pentagon had no coherent postwar plan for reconstituting Iraq politically, it made it up as it went along. Instead of a firm U.S. hand guiding things from the top, the Pentagon initially appointed the hapless Gen. Jay Garner to run Iraq. He's been replaced by the more deft L. Paul Bremer, but important time has been lost in which Muslim clerics have filled the vacuum in many areas. We must establish an Iraqi secular authority -- soon.

In other words he quotes Jay Garner, someone he has no respect for just to score a cheap shot against the administration. Oh, you say, but he respected Bremer, so Bremer's criticism holds water.
As Simon noted, Bremer argued that his comments were taken out of context. He acknowledged disagreements with the military, but he agreed overall with the administration's plans. Of course he wrote this rebuttal in the NEW YORK TIMES. Doesn't Friedman read the Times op-ed page? In "What I really said about Iraq" (October 8, 2004) Bremer concludes:

Mr. Kerry is free to quote my comments about Iraq. But for the sake of honesty he should also point out that I have repeatedly said, including in all my speeches in recent weeks, that President Bush made a correct and courageous decision to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein's brutality, and that the president is correct to see the war in Iraq as a central front in the war on terrorism.

A year and a half ago, President Bush asked me to come to the Oval Office to discuss my going to Iraq to head the coalition authority. He asked me bluntly, ''Why would you want to leave private life and take on such a difficult, dangerous and probably thankless job?'' Without hesitation, I answered, ''Because I believe in your vision for Iraq and would be honored to help you make it a reality.'' Today America and the coalition are making steady progress toward that vision.

I guess the honesty that Bremer asked of Kerry would apply just as strongly to Friedman. But as I noted above, consistency is not exactly Thomas's strong suit. I guess he didn't get the message.