Guys Named Matt

Matt Stoller recounts a tale from our college years:

What I should have said is that Friedman holds a special place in my development. I took a class from him at college on 'globalization', and read most of his books. In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq. I trusted him. I believed in him. And he got it one hundred percent wrong. And while honest people tend to admit their mistakes, and when the mistake is particularly soaked in blood, do a lot of soul-searching and apologizing, he never has. My mistake in looking at the Iraq war still pains me, and though I was a 24 year old kid with no experience in foreign policy or politics, my gullibility and the betrayal from my former guides still colors my thinking. For someone like Friedman, who should know better and occupies the most valuable opinion space in the world, it's stunningly immoral to pretend to having no responsibility in this quagmire. All of us are responsible, and the first step is to admit error. Maybe if I said this he finally would have understood where we come from, though I doubt it. But I didn't say it.

I guess Matt's two years older than me, but I was in that class, too, and generally had a similar trajectory.

Comments

I'm embarassed to say I was influenced heavily by Friedman and Pollack as well. But why the desire to him appologize? If I understand correctly, Stoller believes an appology from Freidman would be the moral thing to do and would thus make him a better pundit.

But Friedman's errors were a result of incompetence not vice. If appologizing would make it more likely that others would listen to him in the future, isn't that a bad thing?

Posted by WillieStyle | May 19, 2007 12:22 PM

Excuse me, but Friedman was then very publicly saying that he was fighting "Tom's War," and not the Bush Administration's war

The fly in this ointment, which should have then been obvious not only to Friedman himself but also to anybody who was listening to him was that Tom then lacked any divisions with which to prosecute "his" war. Alas, the only available divisions were Bush's and not Tom's. Hence, the only war that could be fought was Bush's; so Tom's war was perforce, at best, a mirage. You go to war with the administration you have and not with the administration you want, to coin a phrase.

Therefore, to support the war necessarily means to support Bush's war and has no other possible meaning. Both Friedman and his audience then should have been able to grasp that point.

No matter how "special" a place a pundit may hold, should he get up and assert "2 + 2 = 5," intelligent people are nevertheless expected to retain sufficient critical faculties to part from that august authority on that point. Similar parting should have resulted from Friedman's celebration of "Tom's War."

Posted by Duncan Kinder | May 19, 2007 12:52 PM

Re "But Friedman's errors were a result of incompetence not vice"
--------
A highly debatable statement.

Kenneth Pollack, for example, is "Director of Research" at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy -- funded by Haim Saban. Saban is the billionaire Israeli who (a) was the Democratic Party's largest donor in 2000-2002 (almost $15 Million) and (b) is a fanatical supporter of Israel. In his recent interview in Haaretz, for example, Haim Saban states that he thinks every Jew should serve in the Israeli military.

Saban is now pushing to crown Hillary Clinton as President --because, as he notes, George Bush has been an extremely strong supporter of Israel but is of no further value, having lost all political capital.

Tom Friedman has a sinecure at the New York Times -- the same paper which had rabid Zionist Abe Rosenthal as Executive Editor for years. The paper of Judith Miller who told us all those stories about Saddam Hussein's non-existent nuclear program.

Tom Friedman, Judith Miller, and Kenneth Pollack are all Jewish. That does not automatically make them disloyal of course. But it was American Jonathan Pollard's love for Israel that induced him to give away US national secrets. Julius Rosenberg noted in his memoirs that he gave the design of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union because Stalin had given refuge to his "co-religionists" from Hitler. Julius's spy ring --along with that of the Cohens -- ensured that America's cities have lived under the threat of nuclear annilation for the past 55 years -- and face that threat for the foreseeable future.

I've wondered at times what Tom Friedman, Judith Miller and Kenneth Pollack feel about Israel -- and if those feelings might have induced them to put their thumb on the scale of public discourse in order to have America dispose of Hussein. Hussein was no real threat to the USA --but he was definitely a threat to Israel.

Posted by Don Williams | May 19, 2007 12:55 PM

Unfortunately, the way one gets to a position of influence is by never admitting error. Only losers make mistakes.

Posted by MattF | May 19, 2007 12:55 PM

Tom Friedman, Judith Miller, and Kenneth Pollack are all Jewish. That does not automatically make them disloyal of course.

And then you name some different Jews who were disloyal, followed by coming back to the original Jews with "I wonder..." Nice argument.

Posted by Haggai | May 19, 2007 1:06 PM

1) Another interesting point is that Saddam Hussein was 67 years old at the time of the invasion.

So why did none of our pundits ask whether it was reasonable that a 67 year old man would wait 5 more years for sanctions to decline, would then spend his treasure on a nuclear program --likely to take 7 more years -- all so that he could
mount up on a white horse and lead a jihad at age 80. How many 67 year old men-- facing death within a decade -- are that energetic?

2) Why did none of our pundits note that Bush's phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was a vague term that misleads more than it informs? A term of deceit.

That there is no such thing as "WMDS" -- rather , there are biological weapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.

Why did none of our pundits note that if you look at the specific weapons, then Bush/Cheney's narrative begins to fall apart? Because it was unlike Hussein could have hidden a covert nuclear program from out spies --given it's emissions and power requirements. That chemical weapons would be bulky, heavy, difficult to transport from Iraq to America -- and would cause too few casualties to justify the devastating retaliation they would provoke.

That if Hussein had biological weapons, those weapons would not be interdicted by an invasion --rather, an invasion would provoke their release.

3) Why was it that when Bush lied us into this war, he had so much help from the alleged opposition?

Posted by Don Williams | May 19, 2007 1:13 PM

Though I never took that fateful lecture, I'm in the same position as the Matts. Friedman personally and his blend of Neoconservatism Lite greatly influenced my college-age thinking about teh war.

Contra WillieStyle above, the important thing isn't to get a groveling apology (like the one supplied by the also-influential Andrew Sullivan) but to have people who got it wrong think seriously about why they got it wrong, and then to correct for those errors so they don't continue to make the same kinds of mistakes in the future.

For example, one of the big mistakes I was making was thinking about the debate surrounding the war in terms of the motivations of the different sides. So when I saw one group saying we need to invade for all these humanitarian reasons, and one group saying that the first only wants to invade to steal all the oil, I concluded the first group was sincere, the second was just reflexively biased against American power, and picked sides accordingly. What I was wasn't thinking about was how well intentions, however noble, would be (1) faithfully executed and (2) actually doable on the ground.

The "Tom Friedman's war may be a good idea, but that's not the war we're going to get, so I'm going to oppose that one" position wasn't really available to me because I was making that kind of mistake, which means I should be mindful of that error going forward. After all, it's not like this intervention scenario was a one-time thing that will never happen again. c.f. Iran, Darfur, Somalia, etc.

Posted by Trevor | May 19, 2007 1:16 PM

Arnold Toynbee wrote a few hundred pages about the way sane and militarist generations alternate as memories of the horrors of war are replaced by fantasies of glory. But historical ignorance is not the only ignorance that led so many Americans to accept lunatic arguments like the rationalizations of aggressive war, and torture, and detention without charges, and so forth. Too many Americans only paid attention to the excited American discussion. Leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the American media painted any doubt about Bush war policy as extremist; but almost all other media worldwide painted the Bush policy itself as extremist. The truth was available to anyone who thought to look for it. So my opinion is that youth is a good enough excuse for stupidly supporting the invasion of Iraq, and also that Americans in general are entitled to believe their government is telling them the truth until proved otherwise. But I can't excuse people like Tom Friedman or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, who should have known better, and probably did.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 19, 2007 1:37 PM

I remember I supported the war for a few reasons, one, fresh off my bar mitzvah, and being 13, I thought the US's massively superior military strength would mean we'd basically kick ass pretty quickly and get out. Secondly, being in the bay area, I was around a lot of what I thought were rather daft anti-war, international ANSWER types who i just reflexively took the opposing position to. For the record, international ANSWER is still a bunch of commie ‘tards, but then again, the neocons are ‘tards too. So, do aspiring pundits who were 13 at the time of the war have to go through these apologies and recriminations?

Posted by matt z | May 19, 2007 1:45 PM

But his books are awful -- how could Friedman be one's guide after reading them?

Posted by david | May 19, 2007 1:48 PM

Friedman's first book is pretty good. Add search costs and arrive at the present reputational state of affairs.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | May 19, 2007 1:51 PM

Re "I can't excuse people like Tom Friedman or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, who should have known better, and probably did. "
----------
1) Senator Bob Graham, the senior DEMOCRAT on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was cleared to see everything -- and he stated in fall of 2002 that he had seen no evidence that Hussein was an imminent threat. Nancy Pelosi -- with equal access on the House side -- said the same.

2) That was no reason why the post-mortem of the intelligence data done AFTER the invasion could not have been done BEFORE the invasion.

3) The argument presented by war apologists today -- that European intelligence services shared the Neocons view of the Hussein threat -- is false.

I remember Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer telling us in early 2003 that Germany had the same intelligence that Bush had -- and that they did not see a threat.

Whereupon the whores in Washington DC launched a vicious series of attacks on Joschka Fischer --suggesting that Fischer's problem was that he had not been all that far from being a terrorist himself, in his youth. see,e.g,
http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/kell0211.htm

Posted by Don Williams | May 19, 2007 2:04 PM

in the bay area, I was around a lot of what I thought were rather daft anti-war, international ANSWER types who i just reflexively took the opposing position to.

This is, I think, an often overlooked factor in the leadup to war. The anti-war position as an entity-- that is, irrespective of the strengths of any particular argument for war-- was so thoroughly caricatured and villified as anti-leftist that people opposed the anti-war crowd as a matter of principal.

What's more, I think that there is an aspect of liberal culture (sorry for that clumsy term) that produces people who are desperate to prove their free-thinking ways-- desperate enough to argue in ways contrary to their usual belief system. I mean, as Matt Z says, he was surrounded by lefties in the Bay area. In a situation like that it's inevitable that some of the people who you encounter that voice the anti-war position will be intellectually unserious. But I don't think there's any excuse for letting that reality create in you the sense that, because those unserious people are voicing that opinion, the opinion must be baseless. I'm disturbed by what MY and many of the commenters are saying because, when debating war, you should approach the subject with such trepidation and caution that those concerns should fade before you've finished making up your mind. Particularly when, as in the Iraq war, there is absolutely no pressing need to begin the war quickly.

Posted by Freddie | May 19, 2007 2:20 PM

as anti-leftist

hmm that's clearly not what I meant to say. Just ignore that.

Posted by Freddie | May 19, 2007 2:23 PM

As ULTRA-leftist. That's what I meant.

Posted by Freddie | May 19, 2007 2:25 PM

"to have people who got it wrong think seriously about why they got it wrong"

Or in other words,

Parent: "Are you sorry?"
Child: "Yes"
Parent: "What are you sorry for?"
(silence follows)

Really, I like to think I can treat anyone as if they were a grownup, but when it comes to Friedman and his ilk, sheesh!

~~~

Matt Z, on the other hand, you got nothin to worry about.

Posted by ThresherK | May 19, 2007 2:38 PM

Well yeah, Freddie, that's pretty much the Matts' point: those of us on the left who at some point supported the war screwed up and failed to approach the subject correctly. I was in that category (though, like Matt, I more-or-less changed my mind before the war actually began), and I freely admit that my failure of judgment means that no one should take my opinion as anything like a good guide to foreign policy.

But the difference between Friedman on the one hand, and Yglesias/Stoller/me on the other, is that we acknowledge our mistake, and more importantly we can explain how we've tried to correct our judgment. It's one thing to make a mistake (though a morally disastrous one); it's another to chalk up the mistake to other people's failings (as Friedman has done) and give no indication that one's views have fundamentally changed as a result.

Posted by Christopher M | May 19, 2007 2:50 PM

Now do you see why we think don williams is a kook?

Posted by too many steves | May 19, 2007 3:08 PM

So, do aspiring pundits who were 13 at the time of the war have to go through these apologies and recriminations?

No, but your punishment is to never 'reflexively' take a position based who's making the argument.

Posted by Zero | May 19, 2007 3:21 PM

I have to speak out for the "Bay area lefties" and such here; the range of foreign policy ideas that, in this country, can qualify as "intellectually serious" is incredibly narrow....those who use the term without irony seem to equate "intellectually serious" with "seeking influence" or "respectable" or "establishment"--that's a big difference.

Eg, how is our current foreign policy w/r/t the state of Israel anything other than batshit crazy? don williams seems interested in propagating "our-Jewish-puppet-master" theories, which are classic anti-Semitism; but one can CERTAINLY make an intellectually serious analysis of the Middle East which would argue that American interests are served very badly indeed by our current policy.

Posted by nick | May 19, 2007 3:42 PM

Yes, my politics are no longer an animal farm style "DLC good, International ANSWER bad!" (yes, i was a full fledged DLC style neoliberal at the ripe young age of thirteen, migrated towards being a libertarian around 14-15, and now am just a happy mainstream liberal at 17, but enough about my surely fascinating political migration, maybe i could contribute to a book about this phenomenon....)

But the point is, despite the Iraq war was a, in the words of Dan Drezner, a "category five clusterfuck," we shouldn't go too far into the land "sovereignty left" i.e. humanitarian intervention can still be a good thing, assuming multilateral coalition building, international approval etc etc. The US can still have a "hegemonic" role, y’know by having our Navy ensure safe passage for container ships in the Gulf or in the Straights of Malacca, or by sanctioning or isolating the Sudanese government. I'm speaking to mainstream liberals here, so all you NLR readers or Cockburn fanboys can just call me an imperialist tool...I won't mind. Now, of course, we can imagine an embargo on the Bush administration doing anything in world politics, but it doesn't mean the US should essentially be do nothings, cowed by the bizarre coalition of the paleocon non interventionists and the unreconstructed "anti imperialist" left, whose politics are based around the inviolable sovereignty of such sundry types like Milosevic. Of course, plenty of liberals and neocons used the rhetoric and basic ideas of liberal interventionism to justify this fuck up in Iraq, but we're all smart enough to know the bad ideas (iraq) from the good ones (Bosnia, Kosovo...maybe Darfur). Well, it appears that I’m ranting. Just remember, Raimondo, Cockburn, Ed Herman and International ANSWER still have awful ideas about the US' role in the world, just as the neocons do. This may sound like some dumb wannabe Euston Manifesto "decent left" BS, but it isn't. We should just know, as liberals, we can have constructive ideas about the US in the international community and just because the "neo stalinoids" got it right once, doesn't mean they ever will again...

PS - Berube has the writing on this http://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/26/how-do-i-sleep/

and Hirsch's recent Washington Monthly piece about the international system following Bush was pretty $$$ as well

Posted by matt z | May 19, 2007 3:47 PM

So, do aspiring pundits who were 13 at the time of the war have to go through these apologies and recriminations?

Yes.

Apologize!

Apologize!!

Posted by Otto | May 19, 2007 4:11 PM

so all you NLR readers or Cockburn fanboys can just call me an imperialist tool...I won't mind

Jeez.

Can't you see, Matt Z, that it's precisely this attitude that served you so badly before the war? Taking a line of argumentation, however illegitimate you see it, and distilling it to shallow stereotypes and empty rhetoric is precisely the failing that led you along the neocons' prim rose path. There are many thoughtful, intelligent and sincere people who believe strongly that the United States is engaging in war and aggression to secure resources. When you so glibly dismiss the opinions of people who you don't agree with, you run the risk of again not giving their ideas a thoughtful analysis. Because the world will surprise you; you admit that it already has. So why still so sure that there is nothing of value in these people's opinions? You always produce the best counterargument by confronting the strongest possible version of your opponents argument. You don't do that by engaging in heavy-handed caricature.

Posted by Freddie | May 19, 2007 4:17 PM

"But I can't excuse people like Tom Friedman or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, who should have known better, and probably did."

Well this isn't an excuse, certainly not for Friedman, but I suspect Clinton and Edwards made a political calculation and one that made sense in context.

You could, and I did, come to the rational conclusion that a Saddam with chemical weapons was zero threat to the US and a very minimal threat to Israel. You could also rationally conclude that after invasion something would be found in the way of Chemical Weapons. At which point your chance of actually making the point that going to war was a mistake essentially became zero. The Bush/Rove political plan was to use any and all opposition to this war to be the result of Democrats blinding themselves to reality. "See we have the WMD right here". And it would have worked. Republican Permanent Majority was just a combination of Democratic opposition and a single bunker of functioning chemical weapons away from coming to reality.

So if you are Clinton or Edwards understanding that Bush was going to war no matter what, and calculating that he would find enough evidence to snow the American people that Saddam was a threat then outright opposition might be summed up as probable electoral suicide. Not exactly Profiles in Courage material, but from a political position understandable.

I do not believe you could find a single person that would have believed Saddam was efficient enough to clean an entire country of all evidence of Chemical Weapons while keeping both his generals and his neighbors fooled. We can't even do that here, periodically they find WW1 chemical shells buried outside old Army bases.

Because the totally unexpected result of the War Resolution was that it worked. The credible threat of force did in fact get UN Inspectors on the ground doing unfettered inspections and finding nothing because as we now know there was nothing to find.

Clinton may not have expected Saddam to blink. Edwards may not have expected Saddam to blink. But the fact is once Saddam admitted those inspectors all responsibillity for this war shifted to the Decider. Who at that time was proud to proclaim that fact.

For Clinton, Edwards and others who ignored evidence for political reasons Saddam's admittance of Inspectors may be the equivalent of blind pigs finding an acorn. But the pure fact is that by February 2003 we were well on the way to proving that Saddam was in fact disarmed. The War Resolution worked, Bush went to war anyway.

I don't plan to vote for Hillary in the caucus vote but neither she nor any other Democrat is fundamentally responsible for this war except to the extent that they were enabling a sociopath. Which would have been good enough for me. Then again who was listening to Dirty Fucking Hippies back then.

DFH and Proud

Posted by Bruce Webb | May 19, 2007 4:33 PM

First, let me clear something up, NOW, at my older and wiser age of 17 am very anti Iraq war, clearly we should have never gone in, i don't buy the incompetance dodge, i think we should leave sooner rather than later, I think the Bush administration is more dangerous to the international order and peace than any muslim terrorist etc etc, but let me get to the point.

I think that the framework from what Berube calls the "sovereignty left" and what they call the
"anti imperialist left" is bunk. Yes, their reflexive opposition to US action in the world is partially justified after an entire Cold War of fuckups. (don't worry I'm as pissed off about Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Iran in the 50s, Vietnam etc as any Chomskeyean) But they lack the ability to make distinctions or gradations between acceptable or inevitable us intervention or action in the world and bad, avoidable us intervention. Additionally, I think its odd that people who call themselves leftists end up allying with paleocons like Justin Raimondo or Ron Paul whose heroes are reactionaries such as Taft. This of course makes the neocons look even worse, that Ron Paul and Justin Raimondo look non crazy compared to them.

But, hopefully in 2008, we'll have a democratic president (i pray to the FSM for Obama and Richardson) who isn't hell bent on retarded neocon interventionism, but who will be faced with dilemmas of how to use our considerable power. And though Raimondo, Paul, Herman, Cockburn, the NLR and International ANSWER were substantively right about Iraq, they will be wrong about Darfur, they will be wrong about development aid, they'll be wrong about nearly any sensible intervention we need to make the world a safer place (ever hear of that silent genocide in Afghanistan, Noam?). WE, the mainstream left (not those noxious neocon cheerleaders in leftie costume 'decent left') need to make those distinctions and judgments and not be consumed with US military bad, anyone who opposes US or liberal world order good! Just because the one size fits all politics of the sovereignty left and paleo right were correct.

Now, it may be true that I'm beating a straw man and that I’m using the same rhetorical techniques as phony 'liberals' like Peretz or Lawrence Kaplan use to browbeat the left because we don't support the US liberation of the oppressed Iraqi people and as liberals, its liberation uber alles. There is, however, a substantive point to be made that can be lost in the hullabaloo of Iraq war supporters apologies and recriminations for those who refuse to see the error in their ways, and that is, just because you were right on Iraq doesn't you are always right.

Of course, the sensible liberals like James Fallows, Robert Wright, Joshua Cohen, Michael Walzer, William Galston etc got it right the entire time, and we should basically be following their leads.

Posted by matt z | May 19, 2007 4:46 PM

You know, I've always wondered how the thoroughly unrespectable ANSWER ended up with all antiwar protest permits in DC. If someone wanted to ratfuck the antiwar movement, that was a pretty smart way to do it.

For what it's worth, I thought the Iraq War was a shitty idea from the day I heard about it. Of course, I also thought the Afghanistan War was a shitty idea. I've had more second thoughts about that one, but ultimately I still think that accepting Al Qaeda's definition of what they did as an act of war rather than murder was a terrible mistake.

Posted by Antid Oto | May 19, 2007 5:01 PM

Matt, the famous one, has a pretty good international ANSWER story, well not ANSWER per se, but about how these "neo stalinoids" just seem to go all around the country looking for any sort of ieftie protest. Ygl was part of the Harvard organizing for improving the labor conditions for maintenence and staff people at Harvard. These international answeroids would show up with their signs decrying us imperialism, the oppression of the DRNK, freeing mumia and the general rabble of international leftist causes. The best part of this entire exchange is Matt describing himself as "always a part of the far right faction." Apparantly, these ANSWER guys are just good at getting permits and organizing.

http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=226&cid=1175

Posted by matt z | May 19, 2007 5:15 PM

Friedman did seem to have a grasp on Lebanon and Israel, but I never got the impression that he knew his ass from his elbow when it came to Iraq. The whole Shi'ite majority being suppressed by the Sunni minority with the Kurds just waiting for the chance to go independent was pretty obviously a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

Posted by daveNYC | May 19, 2007 5:21 PM

Matt,

For those of us who weren't reading your blog in '02, could you summarize why you supported the war then, and what has changed your viewpoint (or maybe link to a post where you already did that)?

Thanks.

BTW, the reason I supported the war was because I thought the argument in The Crisis of Islam made sense: that despotic Arab regimes had stifled all of civil society except the mosque and that, freed of despots, other "isms" -- liberalism, feminism, capitalism, communism, whatever -- would emerge to compete with Islamism in the Arab marketplace of ideas. Could still happen, in the long run, but it's obvious now that the Bush administration and most war supporters underestimated the forces that would conspire against this (e.g., current Sunni autocracies funding Sunni Iraqi irregulars) and perhaps vastly overestimated the number of Arab liberals willing to risk their lives to make this work.

There may be more liberal Arab intellectuals prominent in Western capitols and universities than there are in the Arab world; in any case, not enough of them for any sort of pluralism to easily take root back in places like Iraq.

Steve Sailer probably goes too far in this essay about Iraq (PC Thinking = Disaster, This Time in Iraq), but he does have a point that Bush's (and many pro-war pundits') impulse toward egalitarianism and thinking other peoples share our aspirations played a role in over-optimism about the prospects for a democratic Iraq.

In hindsight, while I do think that, post-9/11, some attempt at changing the status quo in the Arab world was necessary, it would have been a lot easier to attempt to instigate a Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict (like the one currently in Iraq) than to try to plant democracy there. For all the crap the Bush administration has gotten for attempting the nobler approach, the cynical one would have been a lot easier and cost less in American lives and money. We could have simply deposed Saddam, immediately asked the UN to monitor elections, and then left. The Iraqis would have ended up with essentially the same government they have now, and perhaps a bigger civil war. But without us to contain it, that civil war could have expanded and drawn the furies of the Islamic world in on themselves, letting Shiite groups like Hezbollah and Sunni groups like Al Qaeda fight each other instead of non-Muslims.

Posted by Fred | May 19, 2007 5:39 PM

The Iraqis would have ended up with essentially the same government they have now, and perhaps a bigger civil war. But without us to contain it, that civil war could have expanded and drawn the furies of the Islamic world in on themselves, letting Shiite groups like Hezbollah and Sunni groups like Al Qaeda fight each other instead of non-Muslims.

Sigh! Clearly a brutal civil war that spread across the region and was instigated by us deposing Saddam would have no blowback implications for us. As to the "marketplace of ideas" stuff: When chaos abounds, the currency is violence. The factions with the most guns (not the most compelling ideals) would win.

Posted by WillieStyle | May 19, 2007 5:55 PM

WillieStyle:

"Clearly a brutal civil war that spread across the region and was instigated by us deposing Saddam would have no blowback implications for us."

There were already "blowback implications" before invaded Iraq: the status quo (sanctions & no fly zones on Iraq; troops in Saudi Arabia to defend against Iraq) was considered an affront to Osama bin Laden (we didn't get any positive blowback for serving as the Muslims' air force in Kosovo though).

Posted by Fred | May 19, 2007 6:17 PM

I have never understood the allure of Tom Friedman. Even when he makes arguments I agree with I find him to be one of the most facile and superficial writers out there. I would hope that people see now that his weakness for the too clever metaphor (ie countries with McDonald's don't go to war)isn't just a flaw in writing style, but his actual thought process.

Posted by AJ | May 19, 2007 6:57 PM

AJ:

"countries with McDonald's don't go to war"

Did Friedman really say that? I remember a front page article in the WSJ during the Kosovo air war that profiled how Serbian McDonald's franchisees were dealing with the negative PR implications of being an icon of the country that was bombing them.

Posted by Fred | May 19, 2007 7:54 PM

I find him to be one of the most facile and superficial writers out there

Well there you have it. That's a feature, not a bug. There's only so much a college freshman or sophomore (even at Hahvahd) can handle. Call it the Ayn Rand Effect.

Posted by Trevor | May 19, 2007 7:58 PM

I was younger than both of these guys, and I knew everything that was going to happen with this. Matt's real problem isn't that he was young, it was that he was naive.

Posted by soullite | May 19, 2007 7:59 PM

Same difference. I was both young and naive. I think they tend to be correlated.

Posted by T | May 19, 2007 8:05 PM

Fred:

If I remember correctly, Friedman made the comment about countries with McDonald's mere months before bombs started being dropped on Kosovo.

Posted by Bryan Cox | May 19, 2007 8:07 PM

Oddly enough I am the same age as Matt Stoller, saw Thomas Friedman give a talk on globalization at the UofI in Champaign in 2000 or early 2001, and found him so obviously uninformed (easily the worst campus talk I had ever been too) I immediately dismissed anything he had to say about Iraq in the run up to the war. Perhaps Thomas Friedman has more to do with this than we know.

Posted by Asteele | May 19, 2007 8:32 PM

god, I'm glad I never took either Friedman or Pollack seriously and while I did contemplate the moral pros and cons of invading Iraq for a while, for some reason my intuition led me to be right about almost everything that would happen with Iraq: it was crystal clear to me that they would invade Iraq no matter what, after Cheney's speech before the veterans of foreign wars in August 2002 and it was immediately clear to me that they would mess the whole thing up royally once I heard the name Chalabi mentioned - one caveat: I did believe they would find at least some chemical/biological weapon's precursors somewhere, as I wasn't yet cynical enough to imagine they would be capable of making up simply everything they said

can I join a think-tank now or get some biweekly column space in a national newspaper, please

Posted by novakant | May 19, 2007 8:59 PM

Paint me in this picture too. But I fail to see where an apology would makes things better. Would it boost my approval of Friedman? Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that we were all wrong, including the president(s). I think Friedman still believes in the general premise that a post 9/11 world would not tolerate a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein. But that does nothing to explain how a post 9/11 world won't tolerate the absence of such a dictator either. It's not that Friedman won't apologize. It's that he refuses to see that his world view isn't as on target as he thinks it is.

Posted by Chris | May 19, 2007 11:42 PM

Well, if we're recounting our "I was wrong about the war" stories and apologizing, here's mine. First, I apologize. I'm not sure that I think that I was entirely stupid, but I am sure that this war has been such a disaster in so many ways that anyone who supported it for any reason should apologize for it.

That said, my support was more a lack of opposition than anything else. There was no doubt in my mind that BushCo was going to have the war it so badly wanted, no matter what anyone else did or said. I still believe this: if so many things had been different, if the media hadn't supported Bush's narrative, if Congress hadn't gone along, whatever, I still think BushCo would have made this war happen one way or another.

Unlike many other people, I was certain that Iraq had no WMDs other than a few chemical things laying around from many years ago. I also didn't think that Iraq was any longer much of a military threat to the region.

But I did believe that Hussein was a brutal dictator and that the Iraqi people were unhappy with him. I also believe that the US still had via the old UN resolution the legal opportunity to intervene, if it chose to do so.

Finally, I'm old enough to remember the first Gulf War very well and I was absolutely shocked at the ease with which the US fought that war. It's not so much that I had believed the hype about the Iraqi army and whatnot, but that I believed that even a crummy military would still be able to fight a war that would be difficult for the US and its allies in Iraq. I was wrong, and that colored a lot of my subsequent thinking. I expected that this invasion would be a cakewalk, and it was. I expected that the Iraqis would be (mostly) happy to see Hussein go, and they were.

The real nitty-gritty is the occupation and reconstruction. I didn't expect that there wouldn't be internecine strife. But I suppose that I preferred that the Iraqis sort that out in the absence of an imposed peace from a brutal dictatorship. Where I was really, really wrong is that I actually thought that the neocons were actually in charge and that the large occupation and nation-building they envisioned would happen. This was a huge error, really, given how many warning signs there were via Rumsfeld's vision of the war, for example.

Basically, I never in my worst nightmares imagined that the US could follow-up the war with such a bad-faith, delusional and then brutal and even evil occupation that makes Hussein look good in comparison. It's easy for some of you to say that you knew this would happen, but I think that's just luck. While the US has proven itself capable of big clusterfucks in the past, I think there's generally been a larger history of professional competency at least from the career professionals who actually plan and make things happen.

What I should have seen, because I have despised Bush from the very beginning of his presidency, is just how true it is that "small government" conservatives are the true enemies of competent governance. They don't believe in it, so they have little regard to professional competency, and thus they substitute partisan politics, dogma, and croneyism in its place. From its dismissal of the military's recommendations for the war and occupation, to the use of big business contractors, to the installation of know-nothing ideologues into key transitional Iraq positions, to absurd emphasis on "free markets" in Iraq at the expense of seeing that there was clean water and electricity...all this is incompetence at an amazing level that goes far, far beyond anything we saw in Vietnam. Frankly, it's hard to get my head around it. It's an accomplishment of sorts. I think history will remember it as such. Hoover? He's gotten a bad rap. For a real fuck-up, look at Bush.

Maybe I should have been able to predict this. I don't know. But, like matt z, I think that military interventions can be the right thing to do. I thought so in Kosovo, I still think so in the case of Afghanistan (even though the incompetence is true, there, too). But whatever I thought and think, this war in Iraq is a horrifying disaster and I'm sorry I ever did anything other than oppose it, loudly.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | May 20, 2007 2:01 AM

Keith, while your honesty is admirable, I have to disagree that correctly predicting the outcome of the Iraq war was 'just luck'. A few points:

First Gulf War: some predicted that the US would have more difficulty - they didn't, but that is solely due to the very limited aims of that war, which allowed Saddam's army to retreat. In fact Cheney himself gave as a reason for those limited aims that going into Baghdad would lead to an unpredictable and volatile situation. Keeping a strong central power in place, i.e. SH, was seen as preferable for the sake of stability (and at the peril of the Shiites).

Afghanistan: again the US had limited war aims, they never at any point in time had control over the country, but in this case removed the controlling power (Taleban) using the warlords as proxies. The result of not filling this power vacuum is an unstable tribal state financed by drugs in which none of the purported neocon's goals (women's rights anyone) would be realized. Nation building was never seriously attempted and Afghanistan is hardly a success story.

Yugoslavia: when Wolfowitz said that Iraq had 'no history of ethnic strife', he must have forgotten Yugoslavia which didn't have any ethnic strife either during Tito's rule, but we all know what happened once this strong central centre of power was removed.

If you attempt nation building, you better be deadly serious and prepare for worst case scenarios and even then you can't be ceratin of the outcome. Instead the US admin ridiculed every warning about postwar difficulties, even by those who were in favour of the war for humanitarian reasons. They propped up Chalabi, who wasn't taken seriously by anyone with any knowledge of Iraq. They talked about being 'greeted with flowers/as liberators', a 'cake-walk', 'no history of ethnic strife'. Finally the troop ratio in Bosnia was ~12/1000 (troops/civilians), in Kosovo it was ~20/1000 - in Iraq it's ~1.5/1000. All these things were strong indications that they just weren't serious and would mess it up big time.

Posted by novakant | May 20, 2007 9:19 AM

"All these things were strong indications that they just weren't serious and would mess it up big time."

While being opposed to the war in 2003, I thought the WH was likely to overthrow Saddamn, install a strongman like Chalabi or Allawi with most of the Iraqi army intact, get out of the way, and let heavily funded local proxy forces do the messy work of stabilizing the country.

I thought that's what was meant by "going light".

Such a scenario may still have been a bad idea in terms of US national interests, but at least it wouldn't have been the unambiguous disaster the US led occupation turned out to be.

I think it would have been hard for even those who correctly saw bad motives on the part of the administration to imagine that they'd "go light" on the military while having a "go heavy" overall strategy.

Posted by Petey | May 20, 2007 9:52 AM

,"The reason I supported the war was because I thought the argument in The Crisis of Islam made sense: that despotic Arab regimes had stifled all of civil society except the mosque"

Iraq was perhaps the most secular country in the Middle East and until his latter years Saddam fostered civil society except the mosque. Yes he was a monster who hung opponents on meat hooks, on the other hand women could dress how they liked and attend university and drive and leave their husbands. I can forgive people for being wrong on WMD, I can even understand though not agree that defending an ally was sufficient reason to invade. But anyone who wants to raise the 'despotic Arab' defense needs to answer the question 'Why not Myanmar?'

I am sorry but we rolled in with force protection rules that were totally inconsistent with any goal of bringing democracy or reforming civil society. We made getting too close to an American convoy a death penalty offense, we gave civilian mercenaries licenses to kill and immunity from prosecution under either US or Iraqi law, we took no measures to protect the instruments of civil society when we took Baghdad. Not only did we not protect the National Museum, we actually allowed the Intelligence Agency to be looted. If there was even an ounce of belief in restoring civil society the first step is securing the files of the Secret Police. We didn't even do that.

At least invading Iraq to secure the oil or secure permanent bases outside of Saudi Arabia makes sense from the Kissinger/Dr. Strangelove perspective. The notion that you reshpe society by launching cruise missiles into civilian neighborhoods, that you can combine any sort of humanitarian impulse with 'Shock and Awe' is beyond naive. There is a line of thinking out there that suggests 'Saddam murdered his own people' (most of them while he was a US client)) 'therefore we are enabled to 'free' them by bombing their neighborhoods' that is very disturbing. It tends to separate a Free Iraq from free Iraqis. When does 'collateral damage' stop being collateral? Clearly that question was not even being addressed during the Thunder Run into Baghdad.

Posted by Bruce Webb | May 20, 2007 10:19 AM

"While being opposed to the war in 2003, I thought the WH was likely to overthrow Saddamn, install a strongman like Chalabi or Allawi with most of the Iraqi army intact, get out of the way, and let heavily funded local proxy forces do the messy work of stabilizing the country."

Well Petey that would all depend on how you define "get out of the way". If you define it as "Install Chalabi, get him to recognize Israel, while the US prepares to invade Syria, crush Hezbollah once and for all and so secure Israel's northern border, and then turn its attention to regime change in Iran" then maybe we are in agreement. If not you may want to examine the list of signatories to the Project for the New American Century Statement of Principles. Pretty much the entire Bush foreign policy team is there. You got Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams, Khalilzad right there and throw in Mr. Imperialist Donald Kagan. If you take their message seriously, and I do, there is little to zero notion that their vision of the US shared any conception of "get out of the way".

"Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?"

It is pretty hard to reconcile 'get out of the way' and 'shape a new century'. These people openly posted a vision of American Empire back in 1997, self-selected their leader to be Vice-President and War Chief and proceded to implement their vision. They just fatally overestimated American power, or maybe just overestimated Chalabi's base. But they were totally upfront about their aims and anyone who thought this was limited to regime change in one country was dangerously naive.

Posted by Bruce Webb | May 20, 2007 11:17 AM

"If you take (PNAC's) message seriously, and I do, there is little to zero notion that their vision of the US shared any conception of "get out of the way".

I thought the WH was likely to turn the stabilization of Iraq over to local proxy forces and get out of the way precisely because of PNAC's ambitions. You can't fight more wars if you're already bogged down in a failing occupation that taxes your manpower, as the past 4 years have shown.

Posted by Petey | May 20, 2007 11:25 AM

install a strongman like Chalabi or Allawi with most of the Iraqi army intact, get out of the way, and let heavily funded local proxy forces do the messy work of stabilizing the country

I don't see how that could have worked at all: the pre-invasion military and political power structure was predominantly Sunni, yet a strong man would have had to be Shia - how was he supposed to stabilize the country while leaving the army intact?

now that the tables are turned and the sh@t hit the fan, though, some are proposing a 'solution' along these lines as a Plan B for getting out of Iraq - but morality aside, I still don't think that's going to work

Posted by novakant | May 20, 2007 12:31 PM

You forgot about the OIL, Petey. That was one of the major things driving the invasion. Dick Cheney was simply smart enough to frame Houston's agenda in a way {protection of Israel ) that would appeal to the billionaire financiers of the Democratic Party and kneecap any critical review by the opposition.

As I've noted, both the Israel Lobby and Big Oil were in bed re disposing of Saddam. They've fallen out now because:

a) Israel Lobby LIKES a weakened Iraq fractured by perpetual civil war --whereas Big Oil needs a robust but obedient puppet government --hence, Big Oil's whores can't simply "get out of the way"

b) Israel Lobby is VERY anxious to deal with Iran before it gets nukes -- but it can't send the US military to deal with Iran so long as the US military is bogged down in Iraq.

c) Dick Cheney, on the other hand, noted back in the 1990s that Iran is the PERFECT conduit for Caspian Sea oil -- Iran has claims because it borders on the Caspian Sea, Iran is the shortest route for oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean oil tankers, and Iran is more than strong enough to protect the oil pipelines from sabotage. Provided, of course, that the Great Satan doesn't inflame the populace by a military attack.

We're not just talking about oil for the US, of course. China has few oil deposits but is rapidly modernizing and replacing all those bicycles with Toyotas. The idea of building service stations for 1 billion+ Chinese probably causes erections in the Boardrooms of Big Oil.

d) The reason why you never see any mention of the above agendas in the New York Times is left as an exercise for the reader.

Posted by Don Williams | May 20, 2007 12:35 PM

"I don't see how that could have worked at all: the pre-invasion military and political power structure was predominantly Sunni, yet a strong man would have had to be Shia"

Both Chalabi and Allawi are Shia.

The idea is that the bulk of the army would have accepted a non-militant Shia like one of those two.

"some are proposing a 'solution' along these lines as a Plan B for getting out of Iraq - but morality aside, I still don't think that's going to work"

Agreed. I think that ship sailed several years ago at this point.

Posted by Petey | May 20, 2007 12:38 PM

Both Chalabi and Allawi are Shia.

I am aware of that ;). What I meant to say was that any such strong man would have to be Shia. If by bulk of the army, you are referring to the lower ranks, I still don't see why the command level wouldn't have organized an insurgence, as they have done, and why the Sunni soldiers wouldn't have joined them in this endeavour. Convincing the army leadership to accept rule by a Shia strongman was very unlikely. The fact that the Shia are hardly a monolithic bloc, as we can observe on a daily basis, would complicated matters further.

Posted by novakant | May 20, 2007 1:14 PM

"I still don't see why the command level wouldn't have organized an insurgence, as they have done"

The idea was that protecting their positions would have been their incentive.

"Convincing the army leadership to accept rule by a Shia strongman was very unlikely."

Again, the key to the logic behind both Allawi and Chalabi was their demonstrated lack of interest in sectarian religiosity.

There's a big difference between accepting a strongman who happens to be Shia and accepting an active Shia partisan as strongman.

----

I'm not saying it would have worked, but I do think it had a plausible chance of working. And, of course, this is all a separate discussion than one about the wisdom of such an invasion...

Posted by Petey | May 20, 2007 1:23 PM

I don't think that would ever have worked out, since neither the Shia nor the Kurds would have been able to accept the continued presence of the army leadership that has commited numerous atrocities against them in the past. The fact that soemthing akin to the strong-man theory was peddled relentlessly by Richard Perle doesn't inpsire confidence either - I think it was pure fantasy.

In my view, the only way this might possibly have worked would have been to establish a WW2 style occupation with at the very least 600000 troops for two to five years - but that obviously wasn't in the cards, so it's just more fantasy.

Posted by novakant | May 20, 2007 2:25 PM

I was only 5 and 1/2 in the runup to the war, but right after I'd memorized Go Dog Go, I jumped at the chance to follow Thomas Friedman's column in the most important opinion space in the world! Mommy helped me with the hard words, although she balked at reading me long passages from Kenneth Pollack's The Case for Invading other Countries because we Care. She said The Little Train that Could was far more appropriate, and more morally and intellectually complex, too! I do remember asking Mommy, in 2003, when Tom Friedman kept referring to the silent majority of Iraqis, how he knew what they thought, since he didn't speak Arabic, had never spent a week in the country, and mainly rubbed elbows with exiles like Chalabi, which is like trying to figure out what Americans are like by studying financier/crook Robert Vesco in Cuba. Mommy would say, he just does. Mommy knew all about pundit wisdom!

Also I wondered why, of the three countries were connected to 9/11 - Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan - and that we clumsily let the enemy disappear in Afghanistan, started paying Pakistan tribute money, and are apparently afraid of even broaching the delicate subject of the 13 or 14 Saudi hijackers with the Saudis, while we proposed to invade a country that had nothing to do with the attack. I said, isn't the U.S. funny, Mommy! It lets the bad guys who attacked it regroup and make videos, while it expects to occupy a country for years that it knows nothing about, in spite of the fact that occupations almost always tend to make the occupiers mad and not want to eat their supper and to strap on bombs and blow themselves up in police stations.

Mommy said, you are either with us or against us, son. Then she said, let me read you this nice chapter about how the world is flat.

Posted by roger | May 20, 2007 3:21 PM

I'm a one trick pony in the Yglesias comment section but I'm usually only motivated to write comments when I strongly disagree with something, and I find all the Friedman bashing ridiculous.

He was 100% wrong??!! Have folks actually read his columns (particularly in the run-up to the war)?

He made the same points over and over again:
- He did NOT believe that Saddam had WMD (at least anything that was a worry for the US)
- He nevertheless thought acting to remove Saddam from power was justified both on humanitarian grounds and as a way to change the dynamic in the Middle East by creating an opportunity for democracy.
- That said, he thought that such a move was fraught with danger and should only be attempted with (a) Allied Support and (b) if America was willing to commit sufficient resources.
- He said the worst of all possible worlds was to invade without such a committment.

Then, after the invasion, he constantly excoriated the Bush Administration for not committing enough resources.

So I'm wondering, where did he get it so wrong? While one can make the case for the "incompetence dodge", the fact is we simply don't know what would have happened if the Bush admininstration had doubled the boots on the ground, made a real effort at internationalizing the occupation, and actually allowed competent people at the State Department to make the decisions they are paid to make.

Friedman argued for all those things. And he argued for them before the invasion, immediately afterwards, and continuously over the last four years.

So please, I'd like to understand where he was so wrong? Please point to the columns.

Posted by Gordon | May 21, 2007 2:03 AM

Some Friedman excerpts in the run-up to the war and immediately after (all of which, I think, fairly represent the case he was making, though please correct me if you think I'm wrong).

And so I repeat the question again, where was he 100% wrong? Not 100% right absolutely. But always upfront about what he thought were the risks ...

-----------------

Friedman on Feb 19, 2003

...I am also very troubled by the way Bush officials have tried to justify this war on the grounds that Saddam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is simply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. You don't take the country to war on the wings of a lie.

Tell people the truth. Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice -- but it's a legitimate choice. It's because he is undermining the U.N., it's because if left alone he will seek weapons that will threaten all his neighbors, it's because you believe the people of Iraq deserve to be liberated from his tyranny, and it's because you intend to help Iraqis create a progressive state that could stimulate reform in the Arab/Muslim world, so that this region won't keep churning out angry young people who are attracted to radical Islam and are the real weapons of mass destruction.

That's the case for war -- and it will require years of occupying Iraq and a simultaneous effort to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to create a regional context for success. If done right, such a war could shrink Al Qaeda's influence -- but Al Qaeda is a separate enemy that will have to be fought separately, and will remain a threat even if Saddam is ousted...

-----------------

Friedman on March 5, 2003

...Indeed, our own Congress is being asked to suspend belief yet again and accept Mr. Bush's promises that this war, soaring oil prices and a weakening dollar won't bust the budget even more than his tax cuts already have. And when the respected U.S. Army chief of staff wisely cautioned that stabilizing Iraq could require some 200,000 troops, the Bush team told us to ignore him, too. Troubling.

But it's also probably too late. For Mr. Bush and for the U.S., the costs of leaving Saddam in place -- having made Washington blink and abandon its allies in the region -- would be enormous. I suspect that when the small group of war hawks persuaded Mr. Bush to begin a huge troop buildup in the gulf back in July -- without consulting Congress or the country -- they knew that it would create a situation where the U.S. could never back down without huge costs.

This reminds me of the joke about the man who gets lost and asks a cop for directions, and the first thing the cop says is, ''Well, you wouldn't start from here.'' No, I wouldn't have -- but here is where we've been put. So those who argue against the war have to admit that doing nothing now would mean perpetuating Saddam's tyranny and giving succor to all dictators. And those, like myself, who have argued that removing Saddam is the right thing to do have to admit that the risks of doing so are rising so high, and the number of allies we have for the long haul becoming so few, that it may be impossible to do it right.

-----------------

Friedman on April 9, 2003

It's hard to smile when there's no water. It's hard to applaud when you're frightened. It's hard to say, ''Thank you for liberating me,'' when liberation has meant that looters have ransacked everything from the grain silos to the local school, where they even took away the blackboard...

This was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. We must do better....

America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the food doesn't arrive, if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get.

----------------

Friedman on June 18, 2003

... If I were President Bush, though, and my political life depended on Iraq being a success, I would already be worrying. I would have double the number of U.S. troops there and be throwing so much food and investment into Iraq that people there would think they've won the jackpot. Why the president is not doing that beats me, and it could end up beating him.

Posted by Gordon | May 21, 2007 2:29 AM

Re Gordon's question "I'd like to understand where he[Friedman] was so wrong?"
-----

Friedman has never been within 1000 miles of an active battlefield --so what right did he have to ask Americans to send their sons and daughters to die for his stupid shit armchair social engineering?

Our soldiers sign up to defend this country -- not to seize oil for Houston or to pander to billionaire financiers of the Israel Lobby.

What right has Friedman to suggest that we inflict massive death and destruction onto a people on the other side of the world in the name of imposing an ideology that's a blatant FRAUD even in this country?

Maybe if we took Friedman's closest relatives, had them killed in Baghdad and then presented them to him in a coffin he might get a faint inkling?

OR maybe we should snatch Friedman's ass and drop him into the middle of a Baghdad ghetto with no money and no cell phone and see if he gets the message.

Posted by Don Williams | May 21, 2007 11:55 AM

Don: I have to admit that I've never been within 1000 miles of an active battlefied. I have no idea if you have either (although since most of us haven't, I'm guessing not).

But Friedman, of course, has. Remember that he was based in Beirut through most of the early 80's.

Of course, I'm guessing he would say that's irrelevant. Whatever "rights" we had came out of our commitment to actually improve the lives of Iraqis. Obviously, we have failed in that.

The question is whether that failure was inevitable or a result of the incompetence of the Bush Administration. I'm still inclined to blame Bush, although it's certainly fair to argue otherwise.

Posted by Gordon | May 21, 2007 7:31 PM