Read What Friedman wrote a year ago about supporting the Iraq War. It is interesting!!!
Why did Friedman support the war in Iraq?
Why did I think this was important? It had to do with 9/11.
The events of 9/11 highlighted something fundamental, as far as I was concerned. It highlighted the fact that for the last 50 years we, the U.S., have treated the Arab states as a collection of big gas stations. That’s all. And our basic message to them was: Guys, just keep your pumps open, your prices low and — in recent years — be nice to the Israelis, and you can do whatever you want out back. You can treat your women however you want as far as we are concerned. You can teach your children to hate Christians, Hindus and Jews however much you want. You can preach from your mosques whatever intolerance you want. You can deprive your young people of any chance to engage in free and democratic elections as much as you want. You can indulge in however much corruption you want. You can print whatever conspiracy theories and lies about America in your newspapers that you like. You can choke your universities with almost all religion classes and nothing that will prepare your young people for the 21st century as much as you want. Yes, you can do all these things “out back” — just keep your pumps open, your prices low and be nice to the Jews out front. That was our message.
It is my view that on 9/11 we, America, got hit with the distilled essence of everything that was going on out back in the Arab-Muslim world. That is where Al-Qaeda emerged — from the swamp of pathologies that were bubbling out back in that world. Therefore, it seemed to me that we had both a moral and strategic interest in fundamentally shifting policy from preserving the status quo to overturning it. That is, we had a fundamental interest in trying to collaborate with Arabs and Muslims — in this case the Iraqi exiles — to see if we could actually produce a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world that would begin to take on the pathologies and dysfunction there that were producing a generation of young people who hated us, hated their own governments, were totally humiliated and were ready to commit suicide almost at the drop of a hat.
Because when you have a civilization that is spinning off so many young people ready to commit suicide, you have a real threat to open societies as we know them. When you have people ready to blow themselves up using instruments from our daily lives — the cellphone, the shoe, the backpack, the car, the airplane — you have people who are destroying the very thing that keeps an open society open, and that is trust.
I trust when I get on an airplane that the person next to me doesn’t have exploding shoes. I trust when I walk to my office the person next to me is not carrying a bomb-laden backpack. Without trust there is no open society, because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society. So you will pardon me if I feel that we, the residents of every open society, faced a fundamental danger, post-9/11, from the pathologies going on out back in the Arab world.
It was for those reasons that I was ready, after 9/11, to entertain the idea of invading Iraq and, in collaboration with Iraqis, trying to build a new model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. As readers of this column know, I never believed or wrote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could threaten us. I never believed or wrote that invading Iraq on the pretext of W.M.D. was legitimate. In fact, I wrote a column before the war urging the president to “tell the truth” [Feb. 19, 2003] that the right reason for the war was not W.M.D. It was to deal with the problem of P.M.D. — people of mass destruction. They were the real threat to open societies, and they were coming from out back in the Arab-Muslim world.
But, as much as I felt that the Iraq war if done right could be really important, I also knew that it would be really hard. That was why I coined my ''Pottery Barn rule”: You break it you own it. (I told it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; he told it to Colin Powell; Colin Powell told it to Bush and to Bob Woodward, without saying it came from me, and that is how it ended up in Woodward’s book in Colin Powell’s voice.)
I knew from living in Beirut in the midst of the civil war there that it would take a lot of troops, a lot of money, a lot of domestic sacrifice, a different energy policy, a different approach to the Arab-Israel question and a lot of international cover to make this work. Everything I wrote before, during and after the war stressed those points. One in particular that I repeated was that there is no country in the world that we could not destroy on our own, but there was no country in the world that we could rebuild on our own. We needed allies to both share the cost and buy more legitimacy for the time it will take to transform Iraq.
My anger at the administration derives from the fact that I thought Iraq was so important that, as a columnist, I was going to set my own personal politics aside as I weighed the pros and cons. I checked my politics at the door. What I so resented — and anyone who wants to call me naive on this is fully justified — was that the Bush people never checked their politics at the door and that these people actually thought this was going to be easy.
They sent many political hacks to run the post-war in Baghdad, and Don Rumsfeld used Iraq as a lab test to try to prove that the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force was no longer valid. He gave us instead the Rumsfeld Doctrine, what I call “just enough troops to lose.” I believe, and have written, that Rumsfeld should have been fired a long time ago. He is the most overrated man in Washington, and young Americans have been killed and maimed because of his stubborn foolishness.
Let me repeat, anyone who says I should have known this before the war that these guys would never deliver the kind of war I advocated has a point. I placed my hopes over my experience. I assumed that given how important Iraq is to the Bush legacy, the president would never tolerate the sort of incompetence he has tolerated. I was wrong.
As for the overall enterprise, though, I still have a glimmer of hope that we can get a decent outcome in Iraq, one that will, over time, help tilt the Arab-Muslim world from the downward slope that it is on now onto a more positive track. And I believe that if we do that we will have done something very, very important both morally and strategically.
So to all of you who are writing in asking me to give up, let me simply say: I will give up when Iraqis give up and when the young Americans over in Iraq give up. My sense in talking to both of them is that they too still feel that, despite all that has happened, a decent outcome is still possible. As long as that is the case, I am going to hang in there.
I am not trying to win a debate. I am trying to report and write in a way that might make a little contribution to getting this thing right and on the right track — because I think it really could be that important for the world that my kids and yours are going to grow up in. That is my focus. I may be all wrong, but I did not come to this position frivolously or by just following my political loyalties. I know what I think and I know why I think it. And if I draw the conclusion that there is no hope for success, I will say that. But I am not there yet.
Why did I think this was important? It had to do with 9/11.
The events of 9/11 highlighted something fundamental, as far as I was concerned. It highlighted the fact that for the last 50 years we, the U.S., have treated the Arab states as a collection of big gas stations. That’s all. And our basic message to them was: Guys, just keep your pumps open, your prices low and — in recent years — be nice to the Israelis, and you can do whatever you want out back. You can treat your women however you want as far as we are concerned. You can teach your children to hate Christians, Hindus and Jews however much you want. You can preach from your mosques whatever intolerance you want. You can deprive your young people of any chance to engage in free and democratic elections as much as you want. You can indulge in however much corruption you want. You can print whatever conspiracy theories and lies about America in your newspapers that you like. You can choke your universities with almost all religion classes and nothing that will prepare your young people for the 21st century as much as you want. Yes, you can do all these things “out back” — just keep your pumps open, your prices low and be nice to the Jews out front. That was our message.
It is my view that on 9/11 we, America, got hit with the distilled essence of everything that was going on out back in the Arab-Muslim world. That is where Al-Qaeda emerged — from the swamp of pathologies that were bubbling out back in that world. Therefore, it seemed to me that we had both a moral and strategic interest in fundamentally shifting policy from preserving the status quo to overturning it. That is, we had a fundamental interest in trying to collaborate with Arabs and Muslims — in this case the Iraqi exiles — to see if we could actually produce a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world that would begin to take on the pathologies and dysfunction there that were producing a generation of young people who hated us, hated their own governments, were totally humiliated and were ready to commit suicide almost at the drop of a hat.
Because when you have a civilization that is spinning off so many young people ready to commit suicide, you have a real threat to open societies as we know them. When you have people ready to blow themselves up using instruments from our daily lives — the cellphone, the shoe, the backpack, the car, the airplane — you have people who are destroying the very thing that keeps an open society open, and that is trust.
I trust when I get on an airplane that the person next to me doesn’t have exploding shoes. I trust when I walk to my office the person next to me is not carrying a bomb-laden backpack. Without trust there is no open society, because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society. So you will pardon me if I feel that we, the residents of every open society, faced a fundamental danger, post-9/11, from the pathologies going on out back in the Arab world.
It was for those reasons that I was ready, after 9/11, to entertain the idea of invading Iraq and, in collaboration with Iraqis, trying to build a new model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. As readers of this column know, I never believed or wrote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could threaten us. I never believed or wrote that invading Iraq on the pretext of W.M.D. was legitimate. In fact, I wrote a column before the war urging the president to “tell the truth” [Feb. 19, 2003] that the right reason for the war was not W.M.D. It was to deal with the problem of P.M.D. — people of mass destruction. They were the real threat to open societies, and they were coming from out back in the Arab-Muslim world.
But, as much as I felt that the Iraq war if done right could be really important, I also knew that it would be really hard. That was why I coined my ''Pottery Barn rule”: You break it you own it. (I told it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; he told it to Colin Powell; Colin Powell told it to Bush and to Bob Woodward, without saying it came from me, and that is how it ended up in Woodward’s book in Colin Powell’s voice.)
I knew from living in Beirut in the midst of the civil war there that it would take a lot of troops, a lot of money, a lot of domestic sacrifice, a different energy policy, a different approach to the Arab-Israel question and a lot of international cover to make this work. Everything I wrote before, during and after the war stressed those points. One in particular that I repeated was that there is no country in the world that we could not destroy on our own, but there was no country in the world that we could rebuild on our own. We needed allies to both share the cost and buy more legitimacy for the time it will take to transform Iraq.
My anger at the administration derives from the fact that I thought Iraq was so important that, as a columnist, I was going to set my own personal politics aside as I weighed the pros and cons. I checked my politics at the door. What I so resented — and anyone who wants to call me naive on this is fully justified — was that the Bush people never checked their politics at the door and that these people actually thought this was going to be easy.
They sent many political hacks to run the post-war in Baghdad, and Don Rumsfeld used Iraq as a lab test to try to prove that the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force was no longer valid. He gave us instead the Rumsfeld Doctrine, what I call “just enough troops to lose.” I believe, and have written, that Rumsfeld should have been fired a long time ago. He is the most overrated man in Washington, and young Americans have been killed and maimed because of his stubborn foolishness.
Let me repeat, anyone who says I should have known this before the war that these guys would never deliver the kind of war I advocated has a point. I placed my hopes over my experience. I assumed that given how important Iraq is to the Bush legacy, the president would never tolerate the sort of incompetence he has tolerated. I was wrong.
As for the overall enterprise, though, I still have a glimmer of hope that we can get a decent outcome in Iraq, one that will, over time, help tilt the Arab-Muslim world from the downward slope that it is on now onto a more positive track. And I believe that if we do that we will have done something very, very important both morally and strategically.
So to all of you who are writing in asking me to give up, let me simply say: I will give up when Iraqis give up and when the young Americans over in Iraq give up. My sense in talking to both of them is that they too still feel that, despite all that has happened, a decent outcome is still possible. As long as that is the case, I am going to hang in there.
I am not trying to win a debate. I am trying to report and write in a way that might make a little contribution to getting this thing right and on the right track — because I think it really could be that important for the world that my kids and yours are going to grow up in. That is my focus. I may be all wrong, but I did not come to this position frivolously or by just following my political loyalties. I know what I think and I know why I think it. And if I draw the conclusion that there is no hope for success, I will say that. But I am not there yet.
posted by Stew On The Go | 6:48 AM
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