Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Looking back at it now, I see that in McCain’s October 11, 2002 Senate speech supporting the Iraq war resolution, he quoted Jeffrey Goldberg:

This is not just another Arab despot, not one of many tyrants who repress their people from within the confines of their countries. As New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently traveled across northern Iraq, recently wrote in Slate:

There are, of course, many repugnant dictators in the world; a dozen or so in the Middle East alone. But Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger. To review: there is no dictator in power anywhere in the world who has, so far in his career, invaded two neighboring countries; fired ballistic missiles at the civilians of two other neighboring countries; tried to have assassinated an ex-president of the United States; harbored al Qaeda fugitives…; attacked civilians with chemical weapons; attacked the soldiers of an enemy with chemical weapons; conducted biological weapons experiments on human subjects; committed genocide; and… [weaponized] aflotoxin, a tool of mass murder and nothing else. I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close… to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.’

Here’s more of what Goldberg wrote in that specific Slate article:

There is not sufficient space…for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected)…

The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.

Too bad McCain didn’t use that.

(Goldberg aficionados may also want to read a recent article by Spencer Ackerman about Goldberg and Stephen Hayes.)

All decent human beings will enjoy seeing Thomas Friedman get pied, because all decent human beings possess an instinctual understanding that he’s a blithering idiot:

But why, precisely, is Friedman a blithering idiot? In Bad Samaritans, Ha-Joon Chang describes one underappreciated but hilarious example:

Toyota started out as a manufacturer of textile machinery (Toyoda Automatic Loom) and moved into car production in 1933. The Japanese government kicked out General Motors and Ford in 1939 and bailed out Toyota with money from the central bank (Bank of Japan) in 1949. Today, Japanese cars are considered as ‘natural’ as Scottish salmon or French wine, but fewer than 50 years ago, most people, including many Japanese, thought the Japanese car industry simply should not exist.

Half a century after the Toyopet debacle, Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus has become something of an icon for globalization, thanks to the American journalist Thomas Friedman’s book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book owes its title to an epiphany that Friedman had on the Shinkansen bullet train during his trip to Japan in 1992. He had paid a visit to a Lexus factory, which mightily impressed him. On his train back from the car factory in Toyota City to Tokyo, he came across yet another newspaper article about the troubles in the Middle East where he had been a long-time correspondent. Then it hit him. He realized that that ‘half the world seemed to be … intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining, and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization. And half of the world – sometimes half the same country, sometimes half the same person – was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree’.

According to Friedman, unless they fit themselves into a particular set of economic policies that he calls the Golden Straitjacket, countries in the olive-tree world will not be able to join the Lexus world. In describing the Golden Straitjacket, he pretty much sums up today’s neo-liberal economic orthodoxy: in order to fit into it, a country needs to privatize state-owned enterprises, maintain low inflation, reduce the size of government bureaucracy, balance the budget (if not running a surplus), liberalize trade, deregulate foreign investment, deregulate capital markets, make the currency convertible, reduce corruption and privatize pensions. According to him, this is the only path to success in the new global economy. His Straitjacket is the only gear suitable for the harsh but exhilarating game of globalization. Friedman is categorical: ‘Unfortunately, this Golden Straitjacket is pretty much “one-size fits all” … It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it’s here and it’s the only model on the rack this historical season.’

However, the fact is that, had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the early 1960s, there would have been no Lexus. Toyota today would, at best, be a junior partner to some western car manufacturer, or worse, have been wiped out. The same would have been true for the entire Japanese economy. Had the country donned Friedman’s Golden Straitjacket early on, Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power that it was in the 1960s, with its income level on a par with Chile, Argentina and South Africa – it was then a country whose prime minister was insultingly dismissed as ‘a transistor-radio salesman’ by the French president, Charles De Gaulle. In other words, had they followed Friedman’s advice, the Japanese would now not be exporting the Lexus but still be fighting over who owns which mulberry tree.

BUT: In Friedman’s defense, he’s doing the best he can, given that a strange furry parasite has attached itself to his upper lip and sucked his brains out through his nose.

Tom T. adds: As someone who gives the occasional public talk, I’m not a big fan of the pie-in-the-face school of ideological disagreement, myself. But in Thomas Friedman’s case, I’m almost willing to make an exception.

When you’re a rich, famous Washington journalist, what should you do when government officials tell giant whopping lies to your face? Yesterday on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos demonstrated the correct response: politely change the subject and pretend it never happened.

(You can read about the U.S. attempt to use a faction of Fatah to stage a coup and overthrow the elected Hamas government in Vanity Fair.)

STEPHEN HADLEY, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: One thing people need to recognize, he [Abbas] has called for Hamas to renounce terror. He has called for Hamas to reverse the coup where they essentially seized power in Gaza. And one of the things one has to recognize is President Abbas is doing something very difficult now. He’s trying to negotiate a Palestinian state with Israel. The Palestinian administration still represents the people of Gaza. There are Gazans who are in the government of Prime Minister Fayad. Over 50% of the budget of the Palestinian administration goes for salaries and other things in Gaza. So one of the things when you’re talking to Hamas, it really undermines President Abbas and the government of Prime Minister Fayad at a very critical time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s talk about the Olympics…

Now might be a good time to donate to the Real News.

Robert Jensen did a long interview in 2005 with activist/philosopher/weirdo Abe Osheroff, who was then ninety. Osheroff died last week, and Jensen has written this kind obituary:

As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.”

That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home.

Osheroff is remembered most for his rich life of political activism. From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War to streets all across the United States, he was a master strategist, energetic organizer, and courageous fighter.

But when I think about a world without Abe, it’s Osheroff-the-philosopher I will miss the most. Conversations with Osheroff typically turned into wide-ranging philosophy seminars — inquiry into the maddening complexity of being human in an inhuman world, focused on the difficult moral and political questions that he always pursued with intellectual rigor and a demand for accountability expected from himself and others. And at the same time that Osheroff was in this relentless pursuit of more knowledge and a deeper understanding, he squeezed all the joy possible out of this life. He taught and he told stories, he learned and he loved, with incredible passion.

The rest.

As we know, we are in Iraq merely to support the elected Iraqi government, and in all matters are following their lead. That’s why we had to help Prime Minister Maliki with his attack on the Sadrist forces. So let’s ask Maliki what we should do now:

ROBERTSON: This week is an important week in the United States. Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker, General [David] Petraeus giving their reports on the state of the surge — looking ahead on what U.S. troops should do — U.S. surge drawdown will end in the summer. They are considering a pause, maybe weeks or months to examine when they should pull all American troops out. What do you want the U.S. to do? Should there be a pause in the drawdown? Do you want it to be weeks? Do you want it to be months?

AL-MALIKI: […] I believe the American forces can draw down. I don’t believe the decision for a drawdown should be paused as long as Iraqi security forces — based on the first agreement the more Iraqi forces move forward, the more U.S. forces move back until all security responsibilities are handed over and coalition forces remain in a support role. And in a support role, you don’t need such a big number.

Here’s today’s top story in the Washington Post:

Bush Backs Petraeus on Indefinite Suspension of Troop Pullout in Iraq

President Bush ordered an indefinite suspension yesterday of troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer…

Fortunately Karen DeYoung and Peter Baker, the authors of the Post article, managed to write 1440 words on the subject without mentioning the views of Iraq’s prime minister. Otherwise Americans might have grown confused about how much Iraq is sovereign and all that freedom is reigning.

(The only large news outlet that seems to have quoted Maliki’s views when reporting on the “pause” is AP.)