The world’s most important columnist, the question of blackmail, Andrea Yates, &c.

March 25, 2002 8:45 a.m.

he New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman is widely considered a sage on the Middle East, and he certainly is knowledgeable. But sometimes, when you read him, you have to ask yourself: “What kind of a sage says this? Or that? Or this?” I have asked such questions many times, sometimes in public.

I am not exactly a Friedmanologist, though I’m an observer, and I commend to readers a piece on the columnist by Michael Wolff, the perceptive and always interesting media critic of New York magazine.

On March 17, Friedman had a column praising (though in a backhanded way) President Bush for a boost in foreign aid. There are many things in that column that seem to me un-sage-like, but I’d like to concentrate on only a few.

Writes Friedman, “Because of Sept. 11, [Bush] has argued, we need even deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, even more money for a pie-in-the-sky missile defense that would have been no use on Sept. 11, an even bigger defense budget and even more drilling for oil in wilderness areas.”

This is more like the reflexive line of the unthinking liberal than the reasoning of a sage.

“Even deeper tax cuts for the wealthy.” The “even deeper” implies that we have already had deep tax cuts. “Wealthy” says that the administration intends tax relief to go to . . . well, the wealthy. But, as anyone who pays taxes knows, the Democrats’ definition of “the wealthy” can get a little weird (not that there’s anything wrong with cutting taxes for the wealthy, as Seinfeld might say). (Reagan spoke of the “truly needy”; maybe, given Democratic rhetoric, we need to resort to the “truly wealthy.”) Also, Friedman’s statement implies that he believes that cuts in marginal rates would starve the government of revenue, which is not only unLafferian, but unmindful of history.

“Even more money for a pie-in-the-sky missile defense that would have been no use on Sept. 11.” Amazing that a distinguished public-affairs commentator should speak of missile defense as “pie-in-the-sky”; you would think that, at a minimum, he would be concerned about covering his you-know-what. It’s one thing to be skeptical (despite the testimony of credible scientists, the impressive tests, and so on), but it’s another thing to be so categorical, so foolish. Many technological efforts in history have been scoffed at as “pie-in-the-sky,” only to prove successful. Why would you want to be a scoffer of your own generation, if only, as I said, out of caution, out of a concern for reputation?

And if a workable missile defense is achieved in the next 20, or 15, or 10 years, will the likes of Tom Friedman pay any penalty for their “pie-in-the-sky” talk? Probably not. Memories are short. (But I will try to remember.)

Remember this, too: that Friedman’s fellow Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, referred to missile defense as “Star Wars Saran Wrap.” Such is her considered opinion on possibly the most important scientific project of these times.

And how about Friedman’s “that would have been no use on Sept. 11”? This is an oldie (by now) but goodie. One curious thing is that the Left, in the beginning, seemed worried that the terrorist attacks would aid the drive for missile defense. John Lahr, the distinguished critic of The New Yorker, wrote, “Isn’t it odd that on the day — the DAY — that the Democrats launched their most blistering attack on ‘the absolute lunacy’ of Bush’s unproven missile-defense system… the rogue nation should suddenly become such a terrifying reality?”

Friedman is, of course, correct: a missile-defense system wouldn’t have stopped the planes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. As a free public service, I will provide a partial list of other things a missile-defense system would fail to stop: a “suitcase” bomb; an invasion; poverty; the clap; tennis elbow.

A missile defense would hope to stop only missiles aimed at our communities, our hearts, our selves. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that rather worth doing? As someone pointed out after 9/11, aircraft carriers wouldn’t have stopped the terrorists, either, but who is now saying that we don’t need aircraft carriers, for the purposes those instruments serve? Who is saying that we don’t need tanks, guns, hand grenades, and the other things that this nation assembles for its defense?

Oppose missile defense if you must — but why drag 9/11 into it? We never said that SDI would be a cure-all, would bring in the millennium; we said that it had a chance to protect us against missiles, and that a defense was better than a retaliatory attack killing millions of innocents.

Continuing with Friedman: “an even bigger defense budget.” The first duty of the federal government, of course, is the physical defense of us citizens. No serious person disputes this. And we are now engaged in a war of self-defense — which requires a defense budget equal to the task. This is, indeed, what Washington is principally for: not midnight basketball, not free false teeth — this.

“Even more drilling for oil in wilderness areas.” Please: An increase in domestic oil production is not the end of the world; in fact, it could prove a nicely beneficial thing. With today’s techniques, oil can be drilled for with negligible harm to the environment, and that includes ANWR, which, in any case, is no garden spot for eco-tourists. One might do a little reading: Opposition to drilling in ANWR is based either on ignorance or on some kind of mysticism — a Green religion.

Friedman goes on to write, “The most obvious conclusion from Sept. 11 — that fighting terrorism around the globe will require a new, multidimensional strategy, not just a defense strategy — was the one Mr. Bush seemed least inclined to draw . . .”

I had to blink when I read this. We all look at the papers: Haven’t Bush and his people warned constantly since 9/11 that we are in new, tricky, unexplored territory, and that this new kind of war requires a “multidimensional strategy”? Bush, Rumsfeld, et al. say it nearly every day, and act on this understanding nearly every day. Reading that sentence was like reading, “Gore really needs to wake up on this global-warming threat.”

Writes Friedman, “The 9/11 terrorists did not hit us because they were poor. But millions of poor people gave passive support to those terrorists because they resented our greed or our support for their bad regimes.”

What greed? The United States? The most generous nation in the world — no, in the history of the world? The only nation that, when all is said and done, really gives a damn about other peoples? The nation that has given more in blood and treasure for the good of other people than has any other nation ever? We not only give massive amounts of aid to foreign governments directly, we bankroll pretty much every international institution and event there is. We even paid for 25 percent of that Hitlerian jamboree in Durban.

“Support for their bad regimes.” Well, this can’t explain the Syrians, or the Sudanese, or the Iraqis. Does it explain the Palestinians? Should we cut off all contact with Arafat and the rest of the PA thugs and terrorists? This can’t be what Friedman means, of course.

Does he mean the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Saudis? Is the “street” really on the liberal side of those regimes? Does Friedman really believe that if the U.S. withdrew support for Hosni Mubarak, say, ordinary Egyptians would rise up in gratitude?

Friedman later writes, “The reason so many Muslims are angry is because most of them live under antidemocratic regimes backed by America, with lagging economies and shrinking opportunities for young people.” First, it’s questionable whether “most Muslims” live under America-backed regimes. This is a matter of a little math — don’t, please, forget the Iranians, or the Indonesians. Also, it depends on how you define “America-backed.”

Second, people like Friedman are usually urging the U.S. to make nice to Arab regimes, to understand the Arab position, to see as “moderate” any regime not directly killing Israelis. I don’t recall ever hearing a mainstream commentator say, “Damn it, those Jordanians, most of whom are Palestinians, should not have to live under that stinky little Hashemite monarchy.” On the contrary, commentators are always singing hymns to that monarchy, and doesn’t Queen Noor look lovely in her gowns and jewels, dancing at parties and talking with Barbara Walters?

Did you ever hear a commentator — pre-9/11 — say, “We should really think about our alliance with the corrupt and stifling House of Saud”? If you had suggested such a thing, you would have been denounced as an AIPAC propagandist. Only two seconds before writing the column in question, Friedman was talking with Saudi rulers and conveying their (meretricious) “peace plan.” Is not the House of Saud one of those anti-democratic regimes Friedman decries, and urges the U.S. to turn its back on?

Along the same line: The only people who complained when Secretary of State Christopher waited around for the tyrannical Hafiz Assad in Damascus were pro-Israel hawks. Everyone else thought this was “nuanced,” “evenhanded,” enlightened, and so on.

Third, Friedman’s “angry Muslims” seem at least as anti-democratic as the regimes that rule them. Are they in the streets appealing for democracy? Do they oppose the regimes from the liberalizing — rather than the bin Ladenizing — side? It seems not: They’re taking their pilgrimages to Mecca and crying there, “Death to America! Death to Israel!” (This was reported by returning pilgrims to Detroit.) Fouad Ajami speaks of a “thin layer” of governing elites, protecting societies — and the world — from what is worse in the mob. Few thoughts provoke as many shudders.

Then Friedman says — proffering chestnuts — “We need to find a way to ratify the Kyoto climate change treaty. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it would also send a hugely positive signal to the world — that America understands that if it’s going to have lasting allies in a global war on terrorism, it has to be the best global citizen it can be. The attitude that we are entitled to consume 25 percent of the world’s energy, while we’re only 4 percent of the world’s population, is obnoxious. Selfishness and hubris are a terrible combination.”

The Kyoto Protocol — it’s hard to be polite about this — is a crock, and everyone knows it, including those governments that pretend to be for it. It exists only as a bludgeon against the United States. And, by the way, one important way of being a “global citizen” is to pursue — on behalf of everyone, really — the terrorists who take innocent lives, and the governments and groups that support them. That’s global citizenship.

And we consume a lot of energy because we are a free economy, uplifting the whole world, and we produce a lot of energy. Our energy use is not depriving others of their energy use — the best way to help the poor and backward is to encourage them to adopt those habits that have made us prosperous, chief among them freedom, if that can be called a “habit.”

Do poor countries want to be closer to parity with the U.S.? Fine; delighted to hear it. Rather than beg from us, they must imitate us.

Finally, Friedman writes, “Mr. Bush has repeatedly told the world: If you’re not with us, you’re against us. He needs to remember this: The rest of the world is saying the same thing to us.”

Consider what America has proven in the past century alone — particularly in two world wars, and then in additional wars in the Far East and the Persian Gulf. (Let’s not forget the Cold War, either.) What other nation, in the history of man, has been so “with” the world’s peoples at large? No nation has ever invested so much to keep the world safe. As one of my colleagues sighed, France isn’t patrolling the globe, making sure your country doesn’t get invaded. Jordan isn’t safeguarding the freedom and success of the South Koreans. The United States, in addition to looking out for its interests, has taken on the role of its brothers’ keeper to an astonishing — and, again, unprecedented — degree.

The U.S. is not, and cannot be, responsible for every falling sparrow in the world — but no other nation has tried to catch so many. Friedman and others ask us to consider whether the peoples of the world think that America is “with” them. Well, if they don’t think it now — after all we’ve shown — when will they? Everyone in his right mind knows that America is “with” the world. If Muslims hate us, it is perhaps because they despise the qualities we embody — for example, peaceful coexistence with other countries, with the various religions. We don’t shriek at the existence of a sliver of land occupied by Jews in the vastness of the Middle East.

Besides which, isn’t it slightly perverse that Muslim terrorists kill thousands of us, while the Muslim world in general explodes in ululating cheers — and Friedman and others worry, “Gee, what do they think of us?” Mightn’t a Muslim worry, “Gee, wonder what they think of us”?

I once wrote, in despairing over Tom Friedman, that he “knows about 100 times more about the Middle East than most of us will ever know, in that he has devoted much of his career to that region.” He has won a thousand awards, has been accorded endless honor.

But it’s hard to see how his reputation as a sage can survive the columns he is writing.

And why do I bother to spend so much time — and to heave such sighs — over one lousy columnist? Because, after 9/11, Friedman became arguably the most important columnist in the world, or at least the most important columnist in the United States. He is the dominant voice on the Middle East at the dominant newspaper. He is the one to whom everyone’s turning. What Friedman’s opinion is, is on everyone’s lips. I hear this: from conservatives, from liberals — from everybody.

So, he bears a tremendous burden, has a tremendous obligation: like, Don’t be dumb.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting note on his “Best of the Web” the other day. Under the title “Terrorist Welfare Queens,” he quoted an Associated Press report saying, “Leaders of poor nations warned their rich counterparts that if they want a world free of terrorism, they will need to pay for it.” Quipped Taranto, “No argument there — that’s why America is increasing defense spending by tens of billions of dollars. But of course, that’s not what the Third Worlders gathered in Monterrey for the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development meant. ‘Drawing a direct link between poverty and violence,’ the AP dispatch explains, ‘leaders at a U.N. summit said increased aid to the world’s neediest is more urgent than ever in the post-Sept. 11 world.’”

This does indeed smack of blackmail: Give us money, or be subject to terrorism.

It is hard — for me, at least — to provide aid to such people. You would think that the goal of stopping wanton murderers would be enough.

And forking over dollars, of course, does not guarantee goodwill toward the U.S. More than a few have noted that the more we gave Western Europe, the more certain Europeans resented us, feeling their shame, their dependency, and biting the hand that was trying to feed them.

An Egyptian friend of mine told me that, whenever a needy Egyptian sees “Food Gift from the United States of America” on the wrapping around his chicken, there is a little burning of shame.

Here again, the U.S. is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t: and no government, through its actions or words, can solve the psychological problems of every twisted or beset denizen of the Third World (or even the First). The task before us is to beat our enemies — to stop those trying to kill us en masse. That is job enough for one country.

Let’s turn to something cheerier: Andrea Yates. I thought I’d try out a thought on readers, a.k.a. NRO-visiting guinea pigs: I got the sense that some people — even if they didn’t state it — thought Yates’s crime was not so bad because she merely murdered her own children. She did not murder five of someone else’s children. There were no outraged parents, demanding the just punishment of the slayer of their little ones. No, the parents of the murdered children were both concerned with saving the murderer’s skin. I can’t help thinking that it would have been different if the murdered kids were someone else’s children — and I got a little chill thinking that no one was crying out for retribution on behalf of those kids. There were no parents pointing the finger at the murderer saying (for example): Give her the chair.

It might be useful to state the elementary: We don’t own, as chattels, our children, and to kill or harm your own is as bad as killing or harming someone else’s.

And here come the letters re abortion!

Regular readers have heard me speak of one of the bravest and most inspiring political prisoners in the world, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who for years has been languishing and occasionally tortured in one of Castro’s dungeons. His “crime,” of course, was to appeal for basic human rights. (For a brief bio of this remarkable man, try here.)

A few days ago, his wife, Elsa Morejon, was able to take a statement from him, which she conveyed by phone to the rest of us. It is a simple statement, typical of Biscet:

“Here, from this dwelling of pain, I also defend human rights. I have, I am, and I will always be on the side of justice and for the liberty of all Cubans. I give thanks to God and to all the people who know how to love, because in their hands I have left my family. To my brothers in exile and to all those who love justice, I shall always have you in my presence. God bless you all.”

I am continually amazed, when I interview or read about Cuba’s political prisoners, at their basic absence of hate, at their calm, at their insistence that love is a way of defending themselves, and their fellows, against their persecutors. They are better people than I, I can assure you.

Folks, this wasn’t the cheeriest of Impromptuses (what is that plural, anyway?) today. No fun and games. We will return to something more like our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Hang in there.