Only in an environment where leftist ideologues are not only given a forum but gleefully handed a bullhorn could a moderate like Thomas Friedman inspire the type of invective present throughout Shawn Redden’s editorial about “the new Orientalism.” That he invokes the title of a book similarly crippled by a lack of balanced understanding is truly fitting for a piece as rife with misguided intuition as it is devoid of facts and reason.
To claim that there is, “no bigger apologist for (the Orientalist) world view than Thomas Friedman,” is more than an ipse dixit, it is willful ignorance. The same can be said for the received truths about “Bush’s unlawful, unconstitutional, unintelligent, and unsuccessful occupation of Iraq.” Surely, Mr. Friedman does not count himself among the group he himself calls “Bush’s war hawks.” Rather, like millions of other Americans, he supported the war in Iraq upon a rationale that he had the courage to put in front of all of America twice a week.
Would it be so easy to label Mr. Friedman an apparatchik if one read his entire book, “Longitude and Attitudes?” I think not. Just as Christopher Hitchens has rightly illustrated how Said ignored the distorted Eastern view of the West, much less the German support of Islamic imperialism (the Ottoman Empire) in his quest to discredit Western academia, it is important here to show how Redden ignores a host of concrete positions that Friedman has in order to discredit those that supported the war.
While I am not sure where Friedman explicitly mentions “the Arab mind,” I am sure that throughout the hundreds of articles comprising his latest book there are countless calls for reasoned discussions between the U.S. and the U.N. “I would trade four weeks for four years of U.N. help,” in rebuilding Iraq, he said. In an article not in the book, Friedman calls for a “lobotomy” for the post-war planners. For Friedman, the war did not have to happen. He persuasively argued that Saddam only let inspectors back in because of the threat of unilateral U.S. action.
Friedman cannot be counted among those on the far right that question the very validity of the U.N. There were not month-long diatribes against Libya, state sponsors of terrorism, chairing the human rights commission at the U.N. There was no endorsement of military action against Syria. His endorsement of “aggressive diplomacy,” like his pleas to France and the U.S., was a cry for a middle road, an equitable solution to a pressing problem. Can it be argued that Saddam would not have been sent a quite different message if he did not see the Germans and the French every day, with more and more vigor, ruling out the use of force under all circumstances?
Marching down Redden’s thinly veiled move towards denouncing Friedman along with Israel and the U.S., it is striking how sensitive an anti-war “thinker” can be to valid criticism. Is not a “more progressive Iraq” and reform via “a democratic Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq” something worthwhile? Political correctness has truly run amok if an informed observer such as Thomas Friedman is attacked when he takes issue with a society that is devoid of democratic liberty, a society that brutally subjugates women, a society that looked the other way as Saddam put 400,000 of his own people into mass graves. That all societies are equal is truly a myth; Redden’s Israeli roadblock non-sequitur at least is testimony that he too believes this.
Alas, you and I are just another example of how the powerful elite achieve their goals when “populations are whipped into a frenzy of fear.” America’s past foreign policy can rightly spark debate, and it should. America is not without fault. Thomas Friedman is among many that agree with this, and his search for an answer cannot be crudely fit into an outdated depiction of Western attitudes toward the Middle East. However, perhaps it is Redden that has lost perspective as, with the two-year anniversary of September 11th just six days past, maybe America does have reason to hope for and work towards a more prosperous society abroad.