From Minneapolis to Washington
Thomas Friedman’s Vision for the Middle East

by Laura Fokkena

Back in 1989, I thought I was in the minority for having heard of Thomas Friedman. Granted, his book From Beirut to Jerusalem was on The New York Times’ bestseller list, but it was a book about the Middle East, and back then regional squabbles were stories reserved for slow news nights. The Berlin Wall was on the verge of collapse, and all the real action was in Europe.

Now, after Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Fox, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, after a dozen years of Iraqi sanctions and, of course, Sept.11, Thomas Friedman — New York Times columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner — is everywhere. He’s in Bahrain and Qatar and Sri Lanka, on NBC and PBS and FOX and Al-Jazeera. I half-expect the man to pop out of my closets and my medicine cabinet, talking about the Saudi peace plan and the history of Kurdish rebellion.

Recently I caught him on The Discovery Channel, where he hosted the documentary Searching for the Roots of 9/11, adding his two cents to the clamor of voices trying to answer that same tired question: "Why do they hate us?"

I was happy to see him take it on, actually. Friedman lets people finish their sentences, a rare and admirable quality for anyone who frequently appears on television. Unlike the president, he’s not afraid to travel, and unlike other American reporters covering the Middle East at the moment, he’s never been "embedded" with the military. Unfortunately, though, Friedman has a spin of his own, one that paints the United States as the central focus and its foreign interests as benign. By the end of the documentary, his conclusions about the roots of 9/11 weren’t much more than dressed-up versions of Bush’s ludicrous "they’re-just-envious" theory.

In a recent issue of Egypt’s Al-Ahram, Edward Said wrote of "the unexamined conviction that opposition to our policies is ‘anti-Americanism’ which is based on jealousy about ‘our’ democracy, freedom, wealth and greatness or, as the current obsession with French resistance to an American war against Iraq has it, plain and ordinary foreign nastiness." In the particular case of the Middle East, "the narratheme of America as the honest broker, the impartial adjudicator, the entirely well-intentioned international force for good, has no serious competitor to it."

Friedman might be this narratheme’s loudest trumpet.

To its credit, Searching For the Roots of 9/11 gives air time to several critics who would never play on The O’Reilly Factor: students, businessmen, diplomats, professors and artists from across the Middle East weigh in on the issue, most of them ultimately wondering why the United States is entitled to a level of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that it does not always permit the rest of the world to enjoy. Friedman, with his deep "I’m listening" nod, comes across as a particularly attentive audience.

But ultimately Friedman can’t help but insert himself into the debate, which wouldn’t be so troublesome save for the particular global vision to which he inevitably clings. To Friedman, the world is divided into the reasonable and the unreasonable: the people you can sit down and talk to, and the loose cannon outliers who must be contained. In his Feb. 9 column, he called these competing realms the "World of Order" (the United States., the European Union, Russia, India, China, Japan and "scores of smaller nations") and the "World of Disorder" (Iraq, North Korea and global terrorist networks).

Friedman is from Minnesota, and his writings reflect an intensely Midwestern ethic, one that shrugs off the importance of history, alliances and concrete power differences in favor of a world view that pits the plain against the ostentatious, common sense again passion and paranoia, "normal" against "weird." Adjectives like "sensible," "decent" and "fair-minded" crop up again and again in Friedman’s writing. Nouns like "inequity" and phrases such as, say, "grossly disproportionate share of the world’s resources" get comparatively less play.

On the plus side, this Minnesota club of the level-headed is a club anyone can join, regardless of race or religion, which makes Friedman appear uncommonly unbiased against a backdrop of Middle East opinion split sharply around the Palestinian issue. He’s been called a pawn of Saudi Arabia by George Will, a sell-out by Israeli hardliners, and a "free trade zealot" by Leah Platt in The American Prospect. He’s "built a cottage industry out of ticking off Egyptians," wrote Ashraf Khalil in The Cairo Times. To anyone looking for an objective middle-of-the-road position, then, Friedman appears to be the centrist’s dream. All sides hate him equally. What’s not to love?

There are two major problems with this conclusion. First, Friedman’s centrist position ignores the massive disparities in income, technology, military expertise and access to media between the so-called "World of Order" and "World of Disorder." If I argue that we should kill everyone in Texas and you argue that we shouldn’t, killing only half its population might be a centrist position but this does not by definition make it moral. Friedman’s constant insistence that both sides (and there are always only two) should compromise on any given issue is an ahistorical framework that takes no account of the past compromises made (forcibly or otherwise) by any of the parties involved, and one that prioritizes short-term pragmatism over the larger issue of human rights. His equation of individual acts of Palestinian resistance with the full force of the Israeli military occupation is the most dramatic example of this line of thinking.

Second, Friedman seems convinced that the United States provides the world benchmark for "reasonable"; all other nations are but struggling imitations of the American Dream. In this world view, guitars and nail polish are synonymous with democracy, motor scooters and Domino’s Pizza are signs of progress, and foreign nationals who go to school in the United States while decrying American foreign policy are called to explain their "hypocrisy," as though seeking a graduate degree in a wealthy country that can afford to devote extensive resources to higher education, particularly in the sciences, implies an inherent acceptance of that country’s policy on all issues. 

Meanwhile, educational systems in Friedman’s version of the Middle East are thwarted only by the opposition of inexplicably backward leaders, rather than by a lack of funding in a developing region where 37 percent of GNP goes toward debt repayment to richer nations.

Most problematically, the failure of democracy in the region is presented as an internal Arab problem. U.S. support of such regimes is written off as coincidence, bad luck or thoughtless foreign policy. It’s "a factor we should reconsider," rather than part and parcel of the way America controls dissidents abroad. The problem, it seems, is always one of hopelessness and insufficient will, never circumstances beyond one’s control. If you have a situation that can’t be solved, it’s because you’re just not trying hard enough. Now go to your room and think about it.

Under such a philosophy the countries with the highest standards of living are free to dole out rhetoric about democracy. They are generous peacemakers; they have no imperialistic tendencies, no designs on empire, and the fact that they’re viewed otherwise in the Middle East is reduced to a perception problem for the United States. The concrete experience of the victims of American military conquests is erased: too angry, too shrill.

It’s a convenient argument, and one that has begun to resonate. Throughout the United States, and certainly in Europe, there are many who are aware that an occupation of Iraq will likely lead to a backlash against Americans and American interests. And perhaps it’s to Friedman’s credit that he frames his arguments accordingly. While activists focus on civilian casualties and the suffering of children in Basra, perhaps he realizes that all that is too terrible and too far away to capture the attention of policymakers but hopes that they’ll take notice once their own agenda is on the line.

But for a reporter who has spent more than two decades covering international affairs, the single-minded focus on American interests via "blowback" at the expense of any discussion of human rights for their own sake — well, the reader grows weary. Particularly when he insists on inserting "the America Question" into every story he writes. Just when Friedman’s interviews start to get interesting, he brings them back to the question that obsesses him: "Yes, but what do you think about America?" And his interviewees probably even have an answer at the ready, just as they’d also be able to tell you their favorite ice cream flavor or the date of their birth, should the question arise. It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s a subject that occupies their minds 24/7.

It’s a strategy intended to keep us interested, and it often works (who doesn’t like to see themselves through the eyes of others?) but it also feeds the vanity of an already arrogant country, which, brought to its most dangerous conclusion, is the sort of rhetoric that can convince young men and women to enlist in the military so they can "liberate" foreign nations. American veterans of Vietnam, Somalia and now Iraq seem genuinely surprised that they weren’t universally welcomed on foreign territory. And who wouldn’t be, after a lifetime of watching news that presents American culture as the central focus for everyone on the globe?

I rather liked Friedman back in 1989, when he was still a voice among many. The fact that he was a rabid supporter of globalization was offset by his ability to give good anecdote, and so I forgave him for being the sort of guy who’d take his golf clubs to Beirut. But the ubiquity of his presence in the mainstream media has led to the ubiquity of his message. (Cartoonist David Rees, author of Get Your War On, captured this sentiment best with a character’s summary of the pro-invasion stance: "All I know is, Thomas Friedman said some people are about to get FREE!!!!") The more we see of him, the more the ethnocentric ahistoricity of his arguments goes unchallenged.

"Thomas Friedman was a student here at St. Antony’s and we’re very proud of him," said Israeli historian Avi Shlaim last summer in a Middle East Report interview. "But that doesn’t mean I agree with everything that he writes. It’s absurd for him to say that the Arabs [should] forget the past. How can anyone be asked to forget the past?"

P O P  F O R U M
Discuss. Debate.

Laura Fokkena is a writer based in Boston. Her work has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines in the United States and Middle East. Previous PopPolitics articles can be found here.

Related Sites
Read Thomas Friedman’s columns online here.