Doubting Thomas

The silliest column

In another ridiculous column, "The Best Man for the U.N."Thomas recommends someone other than John Bolton as US Ambassador to the UN. He recommends someone who's been there before, ex-President George HW Bush. Why does Friedman like Bush 41 for the job?:

Sorry, but we don't need a management consultant as our U.N. ambassador. What we need is someone who can get the most out of what the U.N. does offer to America. There is no secret about the U.N. - at its worst it is a talking shop, where a lot of people don't speak English and where they occasionally do ridiculous things, like appoint Libya to oversee human rights, and even mendacious things, like declaring Zionism to be racism.

But at its best, the U.N. has been, and still can be, a useful amplifier of American power, helping us to accomplish important global tasks that we deem to be in our own interest.

At worst the UN is worthless?
No, at worst the UN is harmful to the cause of freedom. "Zionism is racism" isn't simply mendacious. It was a statement of purpose that gave legal cover to a generation of Palestinian terrorism against Israel. It legitimized the Arab rejection of Israel's right to exist.
Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick documented exactly how the world organization subverted its organizations to forgive PLO terror and assail Israel in "How the PLO was legitimized." So know it's not mendacity it is excusing evil. And it's not only been in the Middle East where the UN has failed to act against evil.
The UN failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago. Its leaders seem more interested in makework programs designed for keeping their positions of privilege than in actually making a difference. (The UN has a school for diplomacy in Ghana, Kofi's nation of origin.)
And in an item I'll keep harping on: it protected Hezbollah after the terrorist organization kidnaped and murdered three Israeli soldiers in October 2000, saying it couldn't take sides. But by failing to aid Israel, the UN essentially sided with a terrorist organization over a member state. It's hard to imagine a more damning failure of the UN than its alliance with Hezbollah especially after it certified Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon as complete, depriving Hezbollah of any pretext for attacking across the border. Of course this outrage was simply an outgrowth of years of anti-Israel agitation.
No the UN needs shaping up. And it requires someone who won't simply work with the bad players, but someone who will confront them and force them to change.
There are few liberal mantras that are emptier than the one claiming that the Bush administration needs more people who don't simply accept the views that make the president comfortable but will challenge the prevailing wisdom.
It's empty for a few reasons.
1) It's clear that President Bush has changed his views since coming into office. He isn't isolated from new and/or challenging ideas; he embraces them if he finds them convincing.
2) If they really believed that someone willing to question the accepted wisdom and practices is a good thing, they'd endorse Bolton because he would hopefully force the UN to confront its malcontents instead of simply gladhanding them.
But Thomas argues:

If we had engineered more of a U.N. seal of approval before going into Iraq, we would have had more allies to share the $300 billion price tag, and more legitimacy, which translates into more time and space to accomplish our goals there. It's not a disaster that we went into Iraq without the U.N., but life would probably have been a lot easier (and cheaper) had we been escorted by a real U.N. coalition.

Right.
Norman Podhoretz had it right:

Here, I thought, the answer lay in what I had come to see as Bush’s characteristic modus operandi. Thus, just as he had challenged the UN to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq; just as, far from “rushing into war,” as his opponents charged, he had waited many months before taking action without the blessing of the Security Council; and just as he would later do in backing the negotiations aimed at keeping Iran from developing and North Korea from deploying nuclear weapons—so in this instance he was giving his critics every chance to show that they could attain the goals they claimed to share with him by means other than the use of force, or at least without rocking every boat in sight.

The UN never would have approved the war in Iraq; it was too compromised by the interests of its leadership and those it holds in esteem: France, Russia and Germany. For Thomas to argue that the UN's approval would have helped the American war effort in Iraq is naive at best; mendacious at worst.
So no, I don't think that someone like George HW Bush is the right guy to represent the US in the UN. We need someone who will make it clear that there is never an excuse for terror no matter how seemingly noble the motive. The failure to make this clear will only invite future 9/11's.
Is it too cynical to wonder if the reason Thomas has this fixation on Bush 41 was because he became the recipient of all sorts of wonderful leaks from Sec of State Baker? (Thomas endorsed Bush 41 for President last year. Now he endorses him for a second stint as Amb to the UN. This is getting tiresome.) It must have made Thomas feel awfully important. Now I guess he wishes to return the favor.

They?!?!

After Binyamin Netanyahu won the premiership in 1996, Thomas wrote a column title "The man who voted twice." He started by focusing on the right to vote accorded to assassin Yigal Amir. Thomas claimed that by first killing PM Rabin and then by voting for Netanyahu Amir exercised the franchise twice. His assertion is based on the unsupported notion that Netanyahu would not have won the premiership without the killing of Rabin. That is a dubious notion.
At the time Rabin was killed, Netanyahu had just passed him in popularity polls. The assassination turned the public against Likud and without the terror surge of February to March 1996, Netanyahu never would have won in June. As it was he squeaked by. Netanyahu won despite the assassination not because of it.
As an observer of the Middle East, Mr. Friedman should have known that. But real analysis is not his purpose. Slander is. He concluded that column "The bad guys won."
Three months after a wave terror swept Israel without Arafat lifting a finger to stop it, Friedman's only bad guys in the Middle East were the democratically elected leader of Israel and the people who supported him.
His slander is on display again today in "Rooting for the Good Guys." After asserting that PM Sharon changed his mind lest Israel would find itself

... in an apartheid situation - a minority of Jews would be ruling over a majority of Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

There is no mention of the risks involved in disengagment. Yesterday Ha'aretz reported that outgoing Chief of Staff Gen Ya'alon warned that disengagement will be followed by greater violence. In another article Ha'aretz reported that related relaxing of security positions will also likely lead to an increase in terror.
MEMRI just quoted Hamas leader Khaled Mesha'al saying that his organization's current calm is just a wait for a more opportune time to start terror up again.
So there is risk in Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. It is the assessment of Israel's military and the threat of Hamas. Yet Thomas disregards all that. What does he focus on?:

But this withdrawal is a threat to the Jewish religious nationalists. Their goal is not peace, but to conquer Israeli society with their messianic vision and biblical map. They killed Mr. Rabin for getting in their way and have threatened to do the same to Mr. Sharon. Some of these settlers will not go down quietly.

First of all, as noted above, withdrawal will likely not bring peace. (Friedman should be a little chastened. He was a champion of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, claiming that it helped Israel. Here's an abstract of "Taking the High Ground":

Thomas L Friedman Op-Ed column holds that at time when Israeli rightist parties are debating whether to approve Prime Min Ariel Sharon's proposal for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, it is worth recalling Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000; disputes contention that withdrawal was failure; holds that with UN-approved pullout, Israel completely reversed its situation; maintains that it went from holding strategic and moral low ground, to holding strategic and moral high ground

Maybe Israel holds the "moral high ground" along its northern border but the strategic high ground may be a different matter. Yesterday the Jerusalem Post reported:

The air force has increased its reconnaissance over Lebanon as the military has reinforced its forces along the northern border to address any attempt by Hizbullah to escalate tension.

Certain reserve units have also been instructed to prepare for training and be available for immediate call-up should action be required against Hizbullah attacks.

According to military sources, reserve units have been training in the North to prepare for possible confrontation with Hizbullah. They will work in conjunction with the air force and other special forces to thwart attempts to fire rockets into northern Israel.

Being so wrong hasn't really taught him humility.)
While certainly there is a religious component to to the belief those religious residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza who see the lands as part of their Jewish heritage, I suspect that the vast majority of them would object less to the withdrawal if they really thought it would bring peace. But non-religious Jews, such as Datya Yitzchaki also see a historical significance to Gaza:

Kfar Darom was among the 11 settlement points established in the Negev in 1946 and bravely withstood the Egyptian siege of many long months under the most difficult of conditions. That is the most impressive story of courage in all Israel's wars, says historian Aryeh Yitzhaki. And this week, we received a copy of a letter sent by Avraham Diament, the legendary district commander, who led the group of young men and women that lived in Kfar Darom during that difficult war, to the prime minister:

Mr. Ariel Sharon, my dear friend, shalom and greetings, As the district commander of Kfar Darom in 1946-48, I am appealing to you with an entreaty from the depth of my heart that you, rather than disengage, connect! How much better would it be that a preeminent fighter like yourself be remembered as the prime minister rather than as the prime destroyer, Heaven forbid.

I sign with genuine fear for the fate of the settlements of the Gaza Strip in the west and east, and with greatest respect, A. Diament.

This isn't strictly speaking an exclusively religious issue.
And it wasn't settlers who killed PM Rabin, it was Yigal Amir who wasn't even a settler. His brother and two other acquaintances of his were also implicated in the crime. His use of the word "[t]hey" is false and inflammatory.
Once again Thomas shows his contempt for citizens of Israel who live outside of the Green line. What he has not shown is how disengagement will make Israel safer.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Not a leg to stand on

Earlier, I took issue with a Thomas Friedman "Holding up Arab Reform" in a post "Make Way for Reform". I took issue with Friedman's excusing the anti-Israel and anti-American sections of the Arab human development report.
What had set Thomas off was that there were reports that the Bush administration had pressured the authors to delay the report until some of the harsher anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric had been changed. Well apparently that may not have happened.
The New York Times has an editor's note appended to the end of this week's article about the recently released third Arab Human Development Report, "Faulting U.S., Report Urges Arab Lands to Democratize". The essence of the commendable editor's note is that the charge that the United States blocked earlier release of the AHDR is unsubstantiated and disputed by administration officials and that these qualifications should have been mentioned in the article. I e-mailed the public editor to ask if the editor's note will now be attached to the Friedman column that apparently was based on nothing more than rumors.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Thomas silences his voice

For three years running, Thomas has been promoting the Arab Human Development Report. So I was not surprised that since the AHDR is currently in the news, that would be the subject of his column today, "Arabs lift their voices". I was not disappointed. He has seen the report and, of course, gives it high marks. I won't critique the whole column, but there's something that really sticks out here.
The column starts:

Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.

and ends:

But the important thing about this report is that political reform is now being put on the Arab agenda by Arabs. Yes, it's scathing about the Western and Israeli roles in retarding Arab democratization, but it's equally scathing about what Arabs have done to themselves and how they must change - people don't change when you tell them they should, but when they tell themselves they must. Read this report and you'll also understand why part of every Arab hates the U.S. invasion of Iraq - and why another part is praying that it succeeds.

I suppose that last sentence redeems the column, slightly. But there's a disconnect between praising the rise of democracy in Iraq and the disputed territories and then airing the grievance against Israel and the United States with no comment. Could the "occupations" that the report decries be the reason for the increased democracy in those two areas? And is there any reason for Friedman to say that it's OK as long as they criticize Arab regimes too? Yes, Thomas should have been a lot sterner when it came to criticizing the report.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.