And mikey, while I love just about everything you write, I have to say that I diverge from your viewpoint here, at least a tad. Incitement to commit crimes against humanity is a bad thing, although of course it doesn’t come close to planning crimes against humanity.

It’s not as though Friedman was a good man who was turned around by 9/11. It’s not as though he urged moderation at first (as far as I know). It’s not as though he even thought that Iraq had any responsibility for 9/11. He simply thought the US should lash out at someone, anyone, and Iraq was as good as anywhere else.

I guess I’m just so bitterly disappointed that there were so few sensible pundits. I suspect they would have been vilified and/or sacked, but I can’t recall too many voices speaking out against precipitate action. And such action might just have brought enough sense to enough people that the war didn’t happen: I know it’s not likely, but it’s possible.

Instead, there was an unholy baying for blood, and now, when everything has gone thoroughly pear-shaped, they manage a sheepish “We was misled”. There’s no real mea culpa, no admission that they believed and howled because they wanted to believe and wanted to howl.

I’m not saying that he should be in the dock. I’m saying that I’d like for him and all the others like him to stop, and think, and realise what a dreadful tragedy they’ve helped to unleash on the world.

On a side-ish note, I find it interesting that he says this:

Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

In fact, long before 9/11 substantial porttions of the world saw America as the country that says “Give me your resources, and let me dictate your leaders”. It’s good that he recognises that the war on Iraq has been a complete clusterfuck in so many ways, but it would be even better if he could understand why, and why so much of the world already hated America.

I guess the short version of this rather lengthy diatribe would be this: propaganda does work, and the mainstream media has some effect on public opinion, and therefore some responsibility to think carefully before urging unimaginable horror on others.

But then, I’m a DFH who thinks that war never solves anything, and that war only breeds war. So what would I know?

i dont think you’re right about neocon narratives and their success, i think that stuff is going to wear out soon

“Our” reaction? “Our”? Ooooh no, leave me out of it Mr Suck on This.

If I remember my polling data the American people – with a hearteningly large amount of dissenters – were on-board with the invasion of Iraq – a war crime – and it’s worth examining how their opinions were moved to support such things. People like Tom Friedman are the machinery that moves the masses when the government wants a kooky policy to go forward. In this case the masses were moved to support what you pointed out elsewhere was the worst crime prosecuted at Nuremburg: the waging of aggressive war.

I’ll Godwin further: if Joseph Goebbels had simply been the William Randolph Hearst of Germany – sticking to propaganda duties only – rather than a government minister would he have been complicit in the crimes or would he just have been a writer?

Scratch that: see this film which is a better analog, although Riefenstahl is more talented than American propagandists of more recent vintage. This is really a good movie and…what was she responsible for?

Y’know, this is a load of crap. And totally unfair.

The american people did not rise up and hack a million iraqis to death with machetes.

The american government decided all on it’s own to send the american military on an eight month buildup in order to invade and occupy Iraq. They didn’t do it because friedman told them to. They would have done it if friedman told them NOT to.

The savagery in Rwanda was nothing like the calculated, brutal war crimes of the bush/cheney cabal, and frankly, Bubba, you’re better than that…

mikey

I hope to hell he had a mouse in his pocket when he wrote that.

Fuck you, Friedman.

Suck on it, Tom; we were not all as stupid as you now claim to be, and you need to DO a hell of a lot more than simply to admit the obvious. (I’m not going to thank you for stating the obvious; either: that was always part of your job description all along.)

I have a few students like you, Robert M. Y’all give me hope for the future.

/optimism

I agree whole-heartedly.

Seems to me that you’re the ideal Noam Chomsky reader.

Anyway, in Rwanda state radio announcers were instrumental in the spread of genocide without being instrumental to the shaping of policy. Those people are criminals in my book. Friedman’s been less explicit about what to do about the vermin opposing US interests, so I’d say that he’s less of a criminal.

I know. A bunch of you are going to explain to me why I’m wrong and Friedman IS responsible for death and horror on an unimaginable scale. I can hear HTML and diffbrad now

“Responpible” is not the right word but the media does have a responsibility to serve as a watchdog — the government is not going to watch over itself.

The government will behave badly and make mistakes, the media is supposed to be a primary force of correction.

In six months, it’ll be April 1st.

Stoopid, lyin’ shithead.

1) El-Baradei, Blix, and lots of other people who are in a position to know say that Iraq doesn’t have any significant weapons stockpiles. The President’s argument is full of holes, and even our own intelligence services can’t come to a solid conclusion.

2) Even if I grant the hypothesis that Iraq has managed to successfully carry out a weapons research program, all putting our troops in-country is going to do is provoke a crazy dictator who has a stockpile biological and chemical weapons. Does that sound like good tactics to you?

3) Even if I grant that he has WMDs, and that for some reason he won’t immediately deploy them against our troops, we’re putting the invasion and subsequent reconstruction of a whole country in the hands of an empty demagogue, a man whose military service consisted entirely of detachment to help with a Senate campaign, and later on couldn’t properly organize the staff of a baseball team.

I was nineteen, and even then I was smart enough not to follow Bush and his sycophants down the rabbit hole. Not all of us got stupid, Friedman. Here’s an idea: throw all the weight of your incestuous influence on the Beltway-insider community behind ending the war and restoring the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Make a difference, instead of supporting the status quo and bending with the prevailing winds; help those of us who didn’t have an crippling 9/11-induced mental short-circuit make damn sure that our foreign policy won’t continue to be guided by a pack of pitiful man-children playing soldiers in someone else’s sandbox.

One of the many inexplicable Pulitzers that’s been handed out in the last decade or two.

Yeah. Friedman’s a cheap, dishonest shill, a tool to be used by the most craven village insiders, just like Broder. What’s worse is he’s been a willing tool, volunteering eagerly to support the worst kind of policy nightmares.

But he’s a writer. He’s not a policy maker, and he’s not an elected official. He didn’t build Gitmo, he didn’t invade and occupy Iraq, and he didn’t repeal Habeas.

It just seems to me that the “balance of vitriol” is unevenly distributed between the criminals responsible for the “plays on the field” and the cheerleaders and sportswriters (if I may extend the analogy) who excitedly polish the policy’s image.

I know. A bunch of you are going to explain to me why I’m wrong and Friedman IS responsible for death and horror on an unimaginable scale. I can hear HTML and diffbrad now. Just doesn’t make sense to me…

mikey