I have read most everything Thomas Friedman has written and somehow he never ceases to amaze me. How somebody who has spent so much time in the middle east including the tours he chronicles as a NY Times correspondent in "From Beirut and Jerusalem" it shocks me how little his insight seems to have affected his humanity.
Whether it is his blinding Zionism or his inability to not see the entire region as a live game of RISK and his inability to obscure the reality of human suffering from his greater vision puts his humanity in questions.
He seems to accept using real people as pawns in his vision of a sustainable Middle East peace. He may criticize George W. Bush for his execution on Iraq but he was a main cheerleader for the conflict an argument which he began to make 20 years ago.
In Sundays NY Times Friedman again speaks of a greater conflict and intertwines Iraq with Afghanistan and Pakistan and in bigger respect the Israeli/Palestinian situation and speaks of a war between progressive and anti-modernist forces obscuring the fact that the suffering of the average Palestinian has nothing to do with the Taliban, Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein
Whether it is his blinding Zionism or his inability to not see the entire region as a live game of RISK and his inability to obscure the reality of human suffering from his greater vision puts his humanity in questions.
He seems to accept using real people as pawns in his vision of a sustainable Middle East peace. He may criticize George W. Bush for his execution on Iraq but he was a main cheerleader for the conflict an argument which he began to make 20 years ago.
In Sundays NY Times Friedman again speaks of a greater conflict and intertwines Iraq with Afghanistan and Pakistan and in bigger respect the Israeli/Palestinian situation and speaks of a war between progressive and anti-modernist forces obscuring the fact that the suffering of the average Palestinian has nothing to do with the Taliban, Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein
I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women.
What he refuses to understand is that relative to Taliban run Afghanistan, Iraq was a fairly progressive society with infrastructure and going to war there 6 years ago is as sensible as going to war with Saudi Arabia today. This is the same mentality that George Bush used as cover for his modern version of the Crusaders forcing the spread western ideals over Middle Eastern countries because their standards do not match that of their own.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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