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The moral universe
of Thomas Friedman
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
“AMERICA did the right thing here,” argued
Thomas L. Friedman, minister of conventional
wisdom, on The NY Times Op-ed page yesterday.
“It toppled one of the most evil regimes on
earth.” And so a new rationale of the war is
emerging post-hoc, picturing the Bush Administration
as human rights avengers, “globo-cops”
out to right wrongs. Friedman uses a skull of one
of Saddam’s many victims as a symbol of why the
war was worth it. I read that with a certain
degree of mirth because as every serious student
of U.S. human rights policy knows Washington’s
stance on human rights is selective,
guided by perceived U.S. interests, not morality.
Isn’t it interesting how Saddam’s crimes are
being splashed across our TV screens now, but
so many others in so many countries, over so
many years were ignored, or criticized without
commitment to action. Today, while the Bush
Administration points to human rights abuses in
Iraq, it will not support an International Criminal
Court to try offenders. Talk of human rights
abuses in the U.S. is verboten.
Thomas Friedman waffled for weeks about the
justification for going to war with Iraq. Now that
war has been “won” he is out front supporting it
as a humanitarian intervention. Come on. Last
week Philip Weiss skewered Friedman’s pretensions
in The NY Observer. This week, some letter
writers speak about this self-described liberal
with a clarity that bears repeating.
Cathryn Carrol of Annapolis writes, “If people
wrote about blacks, the way he writes about
Arabs, he metaphorically (and justifiably) would
be drawn and quartered.” She also lambastes
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Friedman’s certainty, his sanctimonious insight,
and his pseudo-depth.
Jim Furlong of Connecticut takes on his core
ideas: “democracy and love of capitalism flow
from the barrel of a gun: that seems to be our
new idea. It is a variant of the idea that the ends
justify means.” Henry Bright of Florida charges
that Friedman “has become an intellectual captive
of the people he admires: the titans of industry
and globalization.”
Remember Cambodia
FRIEDMAN holds up the skulls of Saddam’s victims
as reason enough for the intervention. I
wonder if he remembers the Vietnamese invasion
of Cambodia to topple the genocidal Khmer
Rouge who piled up many more skulls that Saddam
ever did. That invasion was condemned by
all the policy wonks in the U.S.. Washington later
supported the killers, not those liberators. But
then again, there was no huge supply of oil in
Cambodia.
I was talking the other day with a Falun Gong
practitioner who reminded me that 50,000 of her
fellow non-violent colleagues are in jail, many
tortured or dead, thrown out of buildings and
trains. Have we heard a peep about that? We do
business with China and so can pragmatically
overlook their treatment of Tibetans or prodemocracy
activists.
You need a comment from Saddam
I WAS reminded also of a personal experience.
Along with my colleagues here at Globalvision,
we produced a special on human rights, which
included a segment on Saddam’s gassing of the