Thomas L. Friedman on the Iraq War

by Steven Yates
by Steven Yates

The week before last, New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist Thomas L. Friedman paid Columbia, South Carolina a visit. He spoke to a packed auditorium at the University of South Carolina’s Koger Center for the Arts courtesy of a grant-funded annual lectureship. His topic, as I’d predicted, was the Iraq War and why he thought it was justified – despite his being severely critical of how the Bush Administration has handled the situation since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Now before going on, a confession. I read Friedman closely, despite a kind of love-hate relationship with his material. (The relationship is one sided, of course: I read him, but I’m as certain as I am that the sun will come up tomorrow that he’s never heard of me.) While I disagree with him most of the time, he’s not just another media shill. He doesn’t even have a journalism degree. His degrees are in Mediterranean and Modern Middle East Studies. He’s studied the Middle East and its problems for years, as well as logging thousands of miles traveling in and around the region. He’s written three books, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1988), The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999) and Longitudes and Attitudes: The World In the Age of Terrorism (2002, 2003). He has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, for whatever that is worth. So if there’s anyone we should be reading as representative of the defense of U.S. interventionism in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East, it is Thomas L. Friedman.

Thus for some time now I’ve been using his writing as a kind of foil for my own thinking. While defending the war effort, his position differs from the Bush Administration’s. If by some chance his arguments on behalf of the Iraq War fail, we can probably be sure that the case for this war, and for a continued occupation by U.S. troops, fails period. As for hearing him speak, even if I knew in advance I would disagree with everything he said, when I thought about it I figured I would be crazy to pass up this opportunity. So there I was, hat in hand, entering Koger Center Auditorium on Sept. 30 to hear Thomas L. Friedman along with well over 2,000 other South Carolinians.

Friedman drew on a number of recent columns to argue that despite the apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Saddam’s nasty regime nevertheless had to go. It wasn’t exclusively about weapons of mass destruction, and wasn’t about whatever threat Saddam himself might have posed to the U.S. Terrorism itself posed – still poses – a threat to Western civilization. After 9/11 it became imperative to answer this threat with an open display of force "because we could," and because Iraq is in the center of the Middle East. Afghanistan was not enough, even if Afghanistan harbored the Taliban who sponsored al Qaida training camps. It is necessary to respond as forcefully as possible to the mindset that turning planes into flying bombs and hurling them into buildings is okay. According to Friedman the Iraq War delivered this message: "We’ve spent 250 years building our open society…. We are not going to sit on our hands and let you take it away." It wasn’t that Saddam had any connection with 9/11 or even with al Qaida. It wasn’t even about enforcing UN resolutions. It was about the U.S. exercising leadership, as the world’s only superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in paving the way for democracy in the Middle East beginning with Iraq: creating a society that will not breed terrorists. Friedman: "Context is everything. If you give young people a context where if you have an idea you can pursue it freely, if you have an invention you can develop it freely, if you have a thought you can voice it freely, guess what? They don’t want to blow up the world. They want to support it."

Friedman believes – as do many commentators – that Islam has been hijacked by a radical strain, and it is this radical strain that sponsors terrorism. Call this radical strain Islamism. As Friedman sees things, Islamism has become the third of three viciously totalitarian ideologies that were spawned in the twentieth century, the first two obviously being Nazism and Communism. Islamism is Islam drained of its spiritual character and replacing it with rage at the "poverty of dignity" which led to 9/11. What does Friedman mean, "poverty of dignity"? What he is driving at is just the realization – obvious to Middle Easterners – that America remains way ahead of them economically, technologically and militarily. Muslims in these nations are humiliated by our dominance, which in some areas of their lives exceeds that of their own governments. And "when you feel your own dignity being cheapened, that can make you do angry, angry things." Like turn planes into flying bombs and take them nose first into buildings.

Friedman believes, furthermore, that Western civilization achieved what it has because the two faiths that have been dominant here – Judaism and Christianity – made peace with modernity. They embraced the idea of the open society. They embraced technology. After a long struggle, they even embraced science. Islam, so far, has not made peace with modernity. The tension between Muslims and the West will continue to exist – Islam will continue to be vulnerable to its radical, Islamist strain, that is – unless and until it does. Islamism has been brewing for years, and the 9/11 attacks became "the capstone of a bubble," the terrorism bubble. It is necessary to puncture this bubble.

Let’s move toward Friedman’s ultimate justification for the Iraq War – as I understand it. During his lecture he cited a column written a few months back (I alluded to it above), "Because We Could." He told there were four reasons for the Iraq War: the stated reason, the moral reason, the right reason and the real reason.

The stated reason – stated because the Bush Administration "never dared to spell out the real reason for the war" – was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed a potential if not immediate threat to Americans. The moral reason held that Saddam’s brutal regime was an "engine of mass destruction and genocide" that had murdered thousands of his own people.

The real reason, however, comes down to the perceived need to "hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world" that had built up that terrorism bubble holding that "plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was o.k., having Muslim preachers say it was o.k. was o.k. … [W]e hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it, and because he was right in the heart of that world."

Hold that very last thought. It brings us to Friedman’s right reason: "the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because … the real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states – young people who hate America more than they love life." Thus Friedman sees building a "liberal democracy" in Iraq – along with resolving the ongoing clash between Israelis and Palestinians – as the key to defusing the threat of terrorism over the long run: "to create a space to partner with Iraqis right in the center of the Middle East, to take up this battle … for a more progressive Islam." To encourage a dialogue within Islam that will defuse radical Islamism. For "if there is no war within Islam, there will be a war with Islam – and we don’t want that!"

As defenses of U.S. intervention go, I am not in favor of just dismissing this one out of hand. Friedman isn’t stupid. But he is of the school of thought that the U.S., as the world’s only superpower, has global responsibilities that go with this. In previous correspondences with readers, I have occasionally been hit with arguments such as the following (I am paraphrasing here, I hope fairly): "Your position (and Lew’s and the rest of you folks at LewRockwell.com) is isolationist, and isolationism is out of date; it just will not work in the world of modern technology, near-instantaneous communication, and globalization where there are nevertheless quite different cultures. To maintain peace in a world of two or more competing cultures or ideologies, both or all sides have to want peace. If one of these sides wants to wage war and abolish the other(s), then those other(s) have no rational choice except to respond." Friedman’s position suggests an answer to this: thwart future wars by thwarting what motivates them. Remove the motivation for Islamist jihad against the West by offering them the benefits of an open society. One reader wrote to me not long ago: "To beat [the Islamists] we are going to have to find a way – somehow – to bring a measure of our own systems to the attention of those peoples."

The same reader conceded: "We cannot make them choose those systems, no – they may well decide they still prefer their insane religious zealotry – but I, and most others, believe that, exposed to our systems, they will choose it as the preferable one to operate their lives by. Certainly most people who immigrate to this nation do so, to some extent, [and] their children still more" (italics his). Friedman echoed this sentiment, concluding his lecture by observing: "This may be a fool’s errand. But I’d rather go down hoping and trying, rather than listening to people say how those people can never be democratic, can never have what we have." And: "India has the second largest Muslim population in the world – but there are no Indian Muslims in al Qaida." The point: India has more and more embraced modernity.

This raises a lot of good and interesting questions, not all of which I can deal with in a single article. I choose three. The first is whether, given our history of involvement in the region, Muslims will be motivated to embrace "our systems." The second is, what, precisely, will they be embracing when they embrace "our systems"? The third: what can we do to defuse a legitimate danger and simultaneously maintain our commitment, as a society, to principles identified in our answer to the second?

Friedman is surely entirely correct on one central point: U.S. dominance in the region bothers Muslims and other Arabs. As many of us have pointed out on numerous occasions, our involvement in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern nations has been extensive – to the point of sabotaging popularly elected governments and replacing them with puppet regimes that were at least as brutal as Saddam’s if not more so. Jacob Hornberger, in a valuable article published late last year, laid out a timeline of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East going back over 50 years. He began with the ousting of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh through the CIA-sponsored coup that instilled the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who proceeded to brutalize the Iranian people for the next 25 years. The Shah’s regime paved the way for the rise of Islamism in Iran – as we discovered the hard way in the late 1970s with the fall of that regime, the rise of the equally brutal Ayatollah Khomeini and the hostage crisis that began in 1979. The assault on the U.S. embassy in Tehran was emblematic of the hatred that had been whetted against this country because we had backed the Shah. Hornberger observes how the U.S. then partnered with Saddam Hussein against Iran. (The claim that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction was not a priori absurd. We know he used chemical weapons against the Iranians. He got them from us!) Hornberger also notes how U.S. operatives worked closely with Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, in the hopes of thwarting Soviet advances in the region. He observes, finally, how a U.S. Ambassador initially gave Saddam Hussein a green light to invade Kuwait in 1991, the event that triggered the first Gulf War when the first George Bush turned on him.

Our involvement in the region, using Arabs and then casting them aside when their usefulness was over – surely this describes the history of the U.S. government’s relationship with Saddam Hussein – no doubt has inclined Muslims with memories not to trust the U.S. Suppose that – somehow – a representative government could be brought about in Iraq. How could its leaders be sure that the U.S. government would respect the nation’s sovereignty and not turn on them at the first sign of noncooperation with our political and military elites?

This brings us to the second consideration raised above. What, precisely, are the Iraqis to embrace? A system akin to ours? To use Friedman’s term, which is the popular one among all political elites today, "liberal democracy"? What is "liberal democracy," and what is so great about it? If "democracy" means that the leaders are elected by a popular vote taken from the majority, then since the majority of Iraqis are Muslims, this would mean another Muslim state – very likely the antithesis of our system, especially if the Muslims in control are Islamists. The very idea of reconstructing a "liberal democratic" Iraq seems ludicrous.

Our system, it bears rehearsing, was not considered a democracy, "liberal" or otherwise, by its founders. It was considered a Constitutional republic "if you can keep it." Rule by a majority was not considered a particularly good idea. Hence the strictures in the Constitution aimed at keeping the roles and responsibilities of the central government as limited and specific as possible, and keeping power as widely dispersed as possible.

Before we figure out if we could do this for Iraq instead of "liberal democracy," maybe we should ponder: how did we do it (and keeping in mind that we didn’t do it perfectly by any means, as the last 216 years of history abundantly testifies)? Let me see now. Efforts to place strictures on government – on power generally – go back at least as far as the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta was penned in 1215, and hardly a success in its own time; the spectacularly nasty King John went right back to doing as he pleased the following year. There was no specific political philosophy of individual liberty to be found there. Indeed, the Western world developed the philosophy of liberty only gradually, over a period of centuries, embodied eventually in writings such as those of diplomat-turned-philosopher John Locke, historian-turned-philosopher David Hume, economist and philosopher Adam Smith, and so on. Arguably, the individualism that would be articulated at the core of libertarian thought was still ahead of its time in the late 1700s – otherwise the new republic would have gotten rid of chattel slavery and made a clean break with the past. It may be ahead of its time even today!

Building a free society – and, most important of all, building into it structures of protection against those who want power – is not easy – and were I as famous as Thomas L. Friedman that would undoubtedly go down as the biggest understatement of 2003! I have long maintained that the goal of political philosophy is not answering questions like, What is the ideal society? or What is the ideal form of government? but rather, How does society (individuals acting in cooperation) control power (individuals who want power), without sacrificing justice?

We’ve lost most of our Constitutional republic because of the things we didn’t get right. There were too many loopholes in the Constitution, and those who wanted power learned to exploit them. Others simply took the freedoms supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution for granted. They failed the test for vigilance, were unmindful of the alien ideologies creeping into "our systems" via government schools, until the idea of limited government itself became an alien concept. I would expect that we might have a lot of difficulty exposing Iraqis to "our systems" and expecting them to understand them much less embrace them and put them into practice.

I don’t know any Iraqis personally – but I can surely imagine their being confused by us, not to mention fearful of American military might. On the one hand, they see this might, and the open display of force Friedman saw as necessary to retaliate for 9/11. They also receive doubtless troubling mixed messages from the U.S. all the way across the board. They see our unqualified support for Israel although clearly as regards that conflict, neither Israelis nor Palestinians have clean, blood-free hands. They see the U.S. as the center of Christianity (and protector of Judaism, embodied in Israel). And then they see our materialism, our mass-consumption culture, a hedonism that includes Britney Spears music videos displaying so much skin she might as well be naked. I presume that those Iraqis with Internet access might understandably worry about their children downloading such videos – or worse! – if Iraq develops along Western lines. Friedman describes our prosperity as having resulted from forms of Judaism and Christianity that have been "upgraded" so as to embrace modernity. These "upgrades" in fact are uneasy and often conflicted and contradictory mixtures of Christianity (or possibly "Sunday Christianity") with materialism and hedonism.

What, precisely, would they be asked to embrace when embracing an "upgraded" Islam that has made peace with modernity? Surely a few intelligent Iraqis and Muslims are asking such questions when they wonder about the motives of the Americans now in control of their country who want to "reconstruct Iraq" and build "liberal democracy."

This brings us to the third and final question I will address here. Suppose we can somehow clarify the idea of Constitutionalism and that of a Constitutional republic for Iraqis and other Middle Easterners. What can we do to defuse the legitimate danger we face at present? Can we assume that if we leave them (the Islamists) alone they will leave us alone? Admittedly this is a chancy assumption. Unquestionably there are Islamists who would like to destroy America and everything it stands for. Are we compelled to wage wars against them to prevent them from destroying us?

I don’t think so. Actually, when you get down to it, neither does Friedman. Not really. Friedman presents some strategies. They are a mixed bag. Friedman is a convinced globalist, and so views the world through the globalist lens. His suggestion in his lecture, therefore, was for Americans to "be the best global citizens we can be." He spoke of having "to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," although I didn’t hear many specifics. He argued that we "need to lessen our dependence on Middle East oil," a task that would be far simpler if radical environmentalists would allow oil companies to drill for the proven oil reserves available on U.S. soil and offshore. And: "We need to be better listeners. Listening is a sign of respect."

Suppose we listen to something Osama bin Laden himself once said. In the context of a 4,400-word document given the official stamp of approval by President Bush and designed to present the basic evidence that bin Laden was the one responsible for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden himself spoke (this dates from October 12, 1996):

It sounds very much to me like bin Laden wanted the U.S. to leave – to cease meddling in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern nations. Given that we wouldn’t leave, it is necessary to get rid of us by force. This is very much in line with those who argue that U.S. interventionism has led to the present predicament. Disengaging ourselves therefore might not be sufficient to stop terrorist activity at this point – that ball is already rolling – but it might be part of a sound strategy aimed at protecting Americans from terrorism by removing one of the sources of resentment that originally motivated Islamism: aggressive, imperialistic U.S. foreign policy.

I would suggest adding to these such things as: protecting our borders. Much has been written about the threat posed by our porous borders. Several of the 9/11 hijackers were in this country illegally, on expired visas. I could write a separate article on illegal immigration and its dangers had it not been done many, many times. The threat that terrorists could gain entrance to the U.S. amidst the hordes of illegals crossing over from Mexico is surely a reasonable one. Yet what has happened is that several states have now passed laws allowing illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses! This sends the message that neither state governments nor the federal government are serious about securing our borders. Their minions would rather use the Patriot Act and other legislative abominations to curtail the liberties of U.S. citizens. Yet obviously one of the keys to preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is to prevent terrorists from getting inside this country. They would not be in much of a position to harm us from the outside; these groups simply don’t have the resources or technological know-how to build nuclear weapons or other doomsday devices to fire across our borders from the outside.

So I will submit that the soundest strategy for curbing the threat of terrorism is twofold. Begin curtailing U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern nations. If they are serious about wanting us to leave, we should take them at their word and leave. This would include relinquishing the goal of a reconstructed Iraq converted to "liberal democracy." While there is an argument to be made for a U.S. obligation incurred by our having ruined the infrastructure of the country, we should be making plans to withdraw as many troops as possible from harm’s way. This brings us to the second part of the plan: to deploy these troops against our borders – particularly our border with Mexico. The Mexican government won’t like it, but we don’t need Mexico’s permission to put a stop to the invasion taking place. Even Hispanics who have been U.S. citizens for a while, having gone through the proper procedures for becoming a U.S. citizen that once existed, have begun to resent both this onslaught and the policies that serve to encourage it. But in stopping Mexicans from coming here illegally, we may also stop the next Mohammed Atta from gaining the access to this country he would need before he could harm U.S. citizens.

This sort of solution is, of course, not perfect. There are no perfect solutions. The Middle East is a mess, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. But I continue to believe that the best contribution the U.S. government could make towards improving things in that part of the world is to acknowledge, frankly, the mistakes interventionists have made in the past and resolving to end these "foreign entanglements." This means relinquishing the idea that being the world’s only superpower enjoins upon us the responsibility of building an empire, exporting this vague and confused notion of "liberal democracy" on peoples who have no desire for it and might be better off without it.

October 11, 2003

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994). He is currently at work on three books: In Defense of Logic, a philosophical treatise; Skywatcher’s World, a science fiction novel, and This Is Not the Country I Grew Up In, a collection of past articles from LewRockwell.com and other sources. He is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and next January will be joining the adjunct faculty of Limestone College. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

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