The New York Times, you must remember, is probably one of the few actual media outlets that lives up to the conservative bugaboo of “liberal”. Maybe. William Safire, who is very conservative, writes OpEd pieces for them. But so does Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who are polite liberals, which means that they are different from mainstream conservatism (it there is such a thing nowadays) but not too different.* Paul Krugman writes from more of a traditional liberal perspective. (Can you show me a conservative paper that gives equal prominence to a few liberals?)
Thomas Friedman just wrote an editorial on Iraq that excoriated Howard Dean for having the temerity to suggest that it was wrong to make war on Iraq. At roughly the same time that George W. Bush was tacitly admitting that there never were any weapons of mass destruction (just, in his weasel words, “programs” of research for weapons of mass destruction). Thomas Friedman insists that Dean’s position against the war is not “serious” or “credible”. Not like his plan to reach out to our good friends in Syria and Iran for help in stabilizing Iraq. Not like Mr. Friedman’s very credible plan to bring peace to Israel by….. well, I don’t know. Why shouldn’t Bush get out there and join Israel and whack the Palestinians as well, if it is supposed to help?
Do you understand the state of diversity of public opinion in the United States? It is okay to think that Bush could be doing a better job at whacking Islamic militants where-ever they are, but it is not okay, even for a supposed liberal like Friedman, to question the very idea of aggressive pre-emptive militaristic tactics against America’s “enemies”. I think Friedman really believes that no reasonable person would think that there is ever any solution other than bombs and tanks.
Here’s Mr. Friedman’s concept of diversity on the subject of Iraq:
I define “serious” as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team’s
Okay, now I understand. “Serious” is middle-class. Middle-class people like war, because they usually don’t have to actually fight in person, and middle-class people understand the importance of maintaining an adequate supply of oil for their SUV’s.
I don’t mind Friedman saying that he supports the war on Iraq, which is as much as to say that Democrats and everybody else should agree with him. What pisses me off is his insistence that opinions other than his or George Bush’s, are not allowed to be taken seriously, and can’t be respectable, and should not be allowed as a political platform. How can you have serious political discourse in this country if members of the opposition have the temerity to actually disagree with the administration?
That is essentially what he is saying: it’s okay to have diversity of opinion, but not too much diversity.*
The generals in the Pentagon and the masters of intrigue and John Ashcroft would surely be happy to hear that the supposed flagship media outlet of the global liberal conspiracy thinks that pre-emptive war is okay and that it’s just plain silly to think otherwise.
The odd thing is, that Friedman may not even be right about the political viability of a pro-war position. Iraq is looking more and more like a dumb idea, like a quagmire that just might explode in a few years. We’ll never know** about it, because CNN and ABC will pull up their tent-pegs and disappear long before the consequences of it become apparent, just as they have deserted Afghanistan, and just as they deserted Nicaragua many years ago. But it just might. The average American believes in capital punishment (though less-so than they used to) but he also believes in minding your own business, generally, unless you really need to do something, and it’s looking more and more like we didn’t really have any more business in Iraq than we do in Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia or dozens of other countries.
* I am alluding, of course, to the hilarious scene in Woody Allen’s “Bananas” wherein Miss America is called to testify at the trial of Fielding Mellish (Allen) for treason, and asserts that, in America, it’s okay to be “different, but not too different”.
** 2022-04-30 Of course, in fact we do know, in spades, and the media have more or less acknowledged that Iraq was a massive blunder.