Solomonia Archive: Thomas Friedman gets it right

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Thomas Friedman gets it 100% (ok, 99.5%) right today, as does Roger Simon (although I've left behind a lot more of my left of center baggage than Roger has).

It's No Vietnam

...Let's get real. What the people who blew up the Red Cross and the Iraqi police fear is not that we're going to permanently occupy Iraq. They fear that we're going to permanently change Iraq. The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because — unlike many leftists — they understand exactly what this war is about. They understand that U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the cold war. They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched — a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.

Most of the troubles we have encountered in Iraq (and will in the future) are not because of "occupation" but because of "empowerment." The U.S. invasion has overturned a whole set of vested interests, particularly those of Iraq's Sunni Baathist establishment, and begun to empower instead a whole new set of actors: Shiites, Kurds, non-Baathist Sunnis, women and locally elected officials and police. The Qaeda nihilists, the Saddamists, and all the Europeans and the Arab autocrats who had a vested interest in the old status quo are threatened by this...

Simon decries the vapidity of the current crop of Democratic hopefulls, and despite his left-of-center domestic views, will be supporting GWB until further notice.

Here's what I wrote on Simon's blog:

"It seems to me that while many on the Left like to lecture Americans on their myopic self-centeredness - that we don't know or care about the world beyond our shores - what we have with this current crop of liberal Democrats is just the opposite. They seem to have this idea that the American Behemoth can just sit pat and not take these foreign threats seriously, that we can just absorb body-blows without taking action, and that what's more important is that we look inward and find newer and more interesting ways of redistributing wealth. Their foreign policy theory seems to be about as deep as trying to get France and Germany to praise us and wring their hands on our behalf and that that's all we need. They just don't seem to get that the pipsqueak who's blows we've been shrugging off is now starting to load a pistol and all the hand wringing and jaw-jabbering in Europe won't be of any damn use once he's done."

In the interest of full-disclosure, it's easier for me since most most of my domestic politics have gone over to right-of-center, although to call Bush's policies "radically conservative" as Friedman does seems to me absurd, that's neither here-nor-there. Even if I supported any of the Democratic candidate's domestic agendas, how could I trust them on it seeing how alternatively clueless and duplicitous on foreign policy they are? They don't "get it" in the War on Terror, so how is it that I could expect them to seriously stand for anything of consequence on any front when it doesn't simply involve the basest pandering politics?

Posted by Solomon at 9:42 AM on Thursday, Oct 30, 2003
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