Liberal sentiments are seductive things. They help us to avoid rigorous thinking and painful conclusions. They give us a warm optimism about the state of the world, and a happy belief in our own well-intentioned goodness. In politics, they are also the first refuge of the hardened scoundrel
Thomas Friedman’s article works on both counts. First, it presents a complex situation in terms of two spurious opposites: the utter evil of our enemies, and the essential goodness of our selves. Why can’t our enemies be more like us? For then they will be redeemed; then their abysmal world will see the true glory of the high and sunlit hills.
Second, the article allows Thomas Friedman to affect liberal credentials he patently doesn’t possess. Friedman is not a liberal, he is not a progressive, he is not in any sense a worthy spokesman for those he patronises. On the contrary, he promotes a version of reality that is glib, self-servingly selective, and deceitful. And he neatly deflects attention from the real rogues of the piece.
It is clear who Friedman would like us to believe are the real rogues – apart, that is, from “bin Laden”. He hammers the point home again and again. The real rogues are “the bad guys”, “the rogues’ gallery of dictators”, the “Arab dictators”, the “petro-dictators”, the “Arab leaders”, the “Arab autocrats”, the “Arab regimes”. And who else? Certainly not Israel – “whose own behaviour at times fed the Arab sense of humiliation” (but little else). And certainly not the United States.
As critical readers, we all presumably know about “nuancing” a news story, and about subliminal bias. So what do we learn about the United States and its role in the Middle East? Well, the US is mentioned five times: the first mention is, implicitly, as a victim; then it gets a knuckle-rapping for being a greedy oil-consumer (just like Europe and India and China, so that’s okay); and a couple of times it is mentioned as a butt of Arab anger. Is that all? Are we seriously expected to believe that the United States, and its Israeli attack dog, are no more culpable than that?
Yes. For Friedman, the Arab-Israel conflict is nothing more than a device applied by “Arab autocrats” to keep their people quiet. As for “bin Laden”: he is not our creature; he is, again, a product of those “Arab autocrats” and their cynical disregard for their own people. We, perhaps, share a little guilt for being inattentive. That the US cynically, very deliberately, fostered Osama bin Laden for its own purposes in places like Afghanistan is something Friedman wishes to keep mum about.
However, let it not be said that the United States is merely a greedy onlooker. After all, when the chips were down, “we did our part”. We shot “bin Laden”. That this act itself smacks of unilateral arrogance and contempt for international justice is not even nodded at. Greedy or not, the United States has its imperial right. So now the “Arab and Muslim people” must do their part: and kill “bin Ladenism” with “real elections, real constitutions, real political parties, and real progressive politics”. But what is “real”?
It all depends. “Real” is what the United States Government, and its apologists (like Friedman), wish to impose upon others, if not upon themselves. So “real elections” are what put George Bush Junior into the White House – not what brought Hamas to power in Palestine; “real progressive politics” are the kind of elitist stitch-up you get in the US – not what you got in the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, or in Mossadegh’s Iran, or in Castro’s Cuba, or in Allende’s Chile, or in Saddam’s Iraq. Above all, “real” is”decent”, peaceful, non-violent, and no threat to either America or Israel.
But, for Friedman, all those “Ahmeds” of the “outback” need to be taught. And the lessons may sometimes be hard. In 1998, Friedman recommended “bombing Iraq, over and over again”; in 1999, he recommended that we “blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no-one knows when the lights will go off….” As for the other denizens of the outback: bombing the Gazans is a good way to “educate” them; Israel should use terror, and proxy death squads, to control dissent in neighbouring lands; while the Afghans, thank God, have learned their lesson – and now “pray for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.”
But it’s an old story, and Friedman has a long and worthy pedigree. For woe betide anyone who dares to challenge this Judeo-Christian Empire of ours with anything stronger than “decent” non-violence. Take up rifles, and we will bomb the hell out of you – as we have done, with happy regularity, since we “educated” the Kurds and the Dervishes some 90 years ago. Show true independence, and we will deal with you. As we dealt with Haiti, the Philippines, Italy, Congo, Iran, Guatemala, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chile, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Palestine … The world is littered with the victims of Western “reality”, of the West’s “real progressive politics” – of a truth that Friedman cannot bear to utter.
Of course, this is the function of writers like Friedman – to reshape events for popular consumption, to mock those in the non-Western “outback”, and to obscure unpalatable truths about people in power. But the tragedy is not that there are too many Thomas Friedmans. The real tragedy is that there are intelligent people, “decent” people, who are very happy to believe what men like Friedman have to say. And it is doubly tragic that there are many modern Muslims, educated enough to know better, who are only capable of interpreting the Muslim world through the eyes of slick Western hacks and Zionist bigots like Thomas Friedman.