Entries associated with the tag "Thomas Friedman":

Barack Obama has made a campaign issue of his good judgment on the Middle East, and I'm beginning to wonder if that good judgment now has him exactly where John McCain wants him.

From the get-go Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq as the wrong war for the wrong reasons. McCain lined up behind his president. Now Obama wants to redeploy our Middle East forces. He wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 14: "Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Irag is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq. As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan."

Famous last words -- "finish the job in Afghanistan." American and allied armies invaded soon after 9/11 and overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks, but it turned out the job wasn't finished. The Taliban leaked back in. Was the problem simply that we were two combat brigades short?

"The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan," Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times on July 30, "is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want." He approvingly quoted from a July Time cover story by Harvard professor and Kabul resident Rory Stewart: "A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining."

Friedman supported the Iraqi invasion in the beginning, though not for the reasons President Bush gave to the nation. Friedman sees the whole, vast Arab-Muslim world as a dysfunctional realm that has failed at modernity. Far more important than the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Friedman believes, is the creation of "islands of decent and consensual government" that offer young people an alternative to clerical nihilism. He thought Iraq could become such an island. He seems to think that again. "The reason the surge helped in Iraq," he said in his July 30 column, "is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists -- the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news."

So McCain, if he has his wits about him, can say this: "Thanks to the surge, whose effectiveness my opponent refuses to admit, the Iraqis now see a way forward to peace and democracy. If they are correct, Iraq will set an example for the entire Muslim world of a nation prosperous, pious, progressive, and free. This is an outcome my opponent was unable to imagine and cannot imagine yet. For some reason, he'd rather fight in Afghanistan, a primitive collection of clans and warlords on the fringes of Arabia that for centuries has defied every attempt to civilize and reform it, chewing up and spitting out every invading army that tried. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found in Afghanistan, and neither is the future of the Arab-Muslim world. My opponent is young and naive and doesn't understand any of this."

Maybe Obama does and maybe he doesn't, but as violence increases in Afghanistan the idea that it's the "good war" is being called into question even in precincts that might considered Obama's base. The leftist listserve Portside has just forwarded me a couple of articles that warn Obama to watch out. Conn Hallinan, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, commented, "The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan."

A cliche is a figure of speech you get by without. If you use it yourself it’s vernacular.

At the end of every year the rhetoricians are heard from, and I was troubled to see it is what it is show up in a couple discussions about phrases it was time to let be. According to an Associated Press report carried in the Tribune, it was just chosen by Lake Superior State University for its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. But then so was waterboarding. The AP says the LSSU choices are taken seriously enough that a previous year’s were posted on an Arizona Supreme Court bulletin board as language for attorneys to avoid. The U.S. Supreme Court faces a landmark ruling concerning habeas corpus and Guantanamo, and if the justices banished waterboarding from the discussion they’d be sneered off the bench.

Even if it is what it is says nothing at all (and I don’t think it does), it says it in a nicely Zen-like way. Consider the case made against it by columnist Rem Rieder in the December/January American Journalism Review. Rieder’s theme is the need for frank talk in hard times; he scorns publishers who order cutbacks and promise inanely that their papers will "do more with less." He rightly salutes a Spokane editor who warned his staff that cuts were coming and told them bluntly, "Doing more with less is corporate-speak BS and you won't hear it from me. There is no way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig.”"

But then Rieder digresses. "While we’re banning expressions, how about adding 'It is what it is' to the dustbin? Is it just me or is this suddenly ubiquitous catchphase truly annoying? First of all, what does it even mean? Are there lots of people out there who think it is what it's not? Second, it carries the connotation that we're stuck with the status quo, no matter how melancholy, and nothing can be done about it."

Not true. It simply means "a pig is a pig." Rieder has missed his own point.

Whatever. (Most nominated word for LSSU’s 1997 list. Yet still useful for making abrupt transitions.) The word of the year for 2007, as chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary, is locavore. It wouldn’t be my choice. I propose the fast-finishing transformational. Here’s Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on December 19: "I still don’t know what Bali was about, but I do know that it was incremental, not transformational--and incrementalism, when it comes to clean energy, is just a hobby." Here’s Mary Schmich in the Tribune on December 2: "Sixteen. It’s a transformational age. . . . Between the ages of 16 and 19, moral codes are fixed and futures are charted."

I began seeing transformational everywhere after Andrew Sullivan sensitized me to it with his fine essay in the December Atlantic on Barack Obama. Sullivan sees Obama’s faults acutely, but he supports him for president because, in Sullivan's view, Obama's candidacy is "potentially transformational." Sullivan thinks America is in dire need of transformation, and my guess is that in their bones most Americans agree with him. No American under 30 has lived through a presidential election without a Bush or Clinton on the ballot.