Norman Soloman: Hooked On War - Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction

Friedman: Just another warmongering chickenhawk dick.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/61853

Hooked on War: Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction

By Norman Solomon, CounterPunch. Posted September 7, 2007.

Nowadays you'll read the NYT's Thomas Friedman decrying the "madness that is Iraq," but the real Friedman is the man who called invading Iraq "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."

Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times this week, you'd never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States -- "everyone loves seeing us tied down here" -- stuck in the "madness that is Iraq." And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis "if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids."

The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America's most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can't bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

On the last day of November 2003 -- eight months after the invasion -- Friedman gushed that "this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan." He lauded the Iraq war as "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."

- snip -

Those words appeared in Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption "What The World Needs Now" and a smaller-type explanation: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is."

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It seems that many people believe that you can fight your ways on any one. I have just always felt it a bad way to go. I am always happy to see some one go to my way of thinking in place of war. That way of life, military, is well liked by many and they believe in force. I think I am right on this. I lived for many years in the middle of that life and all you need to do besides that is read.If that does not work for you just sit back and watch the people around you. Force is a big part of many people and how they live and control others.

He's making noises about Iraq now because he's one of the *voices* that wants us to get into it with Iran. He's a globalization whackjob who sees the US as an Empire that should control the Middle East region.

There is NO change in his heart regarding the Iraq War. He's following the neocon script of shifting the focus to Iran.

I sometimes read him any how.

:rofl: