Sadly, Thomas Friedman is still acceptable in polite society. As a complement to Dr. Paul’s commentary this week on Iraq, watch the below clip from the not-so-distant past, recorded just over a month after the US attacked Iraq, and remind yourselves why it is a shame he is not ostracized. If he has apologized for his comments in this interview, I have not been able to find it.
Friedman, occupying his own linguistic universe, justifies the US attack on Iraq because there was a “terrorist bubble” in the 1990s, which “said flying planes into the World Trade Center was OK.”
So, opined Friedman:
what we needed to do was go over to that part of the world…and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there…and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. … What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying ‘which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, that we’re just going to let it grow? Well suck on this.’
This genocidal call for collective punishment of all Arabs — in particular those in Iraq who had no part in 9/11 — harkens back to dark areas of history, where people were rounded up and deported to a grim end not because they had committed crimes, but because of their religion or ethnicity. Yet somehow Friedman continues to function and profit in his writing career, strange as it may be.
