Cage Match Back at the Wheel Thomas Friedman just loves to grind the gears. [Matt Taibbi]
The New York Times' Tom Friedman has a thing about wheels. They recur in his columns with chilling frequency. The tendency is so overt that he often reads like a classic case study in sexual fetishism-particularly given the fact that he sometimes mentions wheels in conjunction with his wife. A few years ago, he began a column on the E.U. as follows:
More and more these days when I return home from trips abroad and my wife asks me how it was, I find myself answering, "You know, honey, the wheels aren't on tight out there."
That is to say, more and more countries in Asia, Africa, even Central Europe feel like messy states, where the new institutions of free markets, democracy and the rule of law have not quite taken root, and just below the surface you find a web of corruption, criminality, mafia and a striking absence of any rule of law. Visit Russia or Indonesia today and you'll get a flavor of what I mean.
This is what it's like to read Friedman: Open any page in his archives, pick a paragraph at random, and you'll find two or three different metaphors all jumbled up in Pollock-esque paint explosions. Here he takes the automobile of democratic institutions and within about three seconds turns them into a plant whose roots are corrupted, underground, by spider webs, some of which are woven with the taut strands of the absence of the rule of law.
But it all comes back to the wheels. Friedman worries greatly about wheels. His vision of paradise is a clean, smoothly running car, wheels firmly screwed on, humming along on the road to profitable, eventless bilateral cooperation. The entire geography of his personal morality can be found within the parameters of this image.
That is why, in moments of great excitement, you can find Friedman reinventing the very design of the automobile, tossing parts out the window with revolutionary fervor, explaining his radical new vision for humanity in terms of a new way to drive. Thus his famous pre-war description of Bush's Iraq policy: "It's O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you're driving without one."
Is it? Does that metaphor really work? Regardless of what you might think about Bush's Iraq policy, is it ever possible to drive an actual automobile without a steering wheel? Friedman is perhaps the only writer in history whose meaning needs, literally, to be extracted by the Jaws of Life.
Which brings us to Iraq, the postwar phase. Friedman has resurrected the wheel. And his agonizing attempts to find a new way to explain our efforts there are themselves a metaphor. His horrific literary convulsions in recent weeks really symbolize America's tortured journey back to an image of itself as the good guy. It is a road, as Friedman might say, that is pockmarked with hidden icebergs.
Last week, Friedman wrote a column whose very title explains the core of his thinking. This time last year, Friedman told us we were all in the backseat of that proverbial Iraq-policy car whose steering wheel had been removed. In last week's "Iraqis at the Wheel," he attempts to explain how that car, not yet at rest, must be refitted with the steering wheel and handed over to a licensed Iraqi driver:
I repeat, yet again, Lawrence Summers dictum: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." Too many Iraqis still feel that they are renting their country, first from Saddam and now from us, so they aren't really washing yet. We cannot just toss the keys to anyone, as France suggests. But we can insist-much more vigorously-that they begin the constitutional process that will produce a legitimate body of Iraqis to accept the keys and eventually drive off on their own.
I have a parenthetical observation about the Summers quote. Friedman uses it a lot. In fact, he has used it four times in the last year. Once, he even referred to it as one of his "two favorite sayings." (The other was a Native American saying, which he called an "American Indian saying," to the effect that "If we don't turn around now, we may just get where we're going.") My observation is that it says an awful lot about you if one of your two favorite sayings is a quote by Lawrence Summers about a rental car. I mean, humankind has produced quite a lot of literature in the past 5000 years or so. Tacitus? Coleridge? Gandhi? "The course of true love never did run smooth?" No. Instead: No one has ever washed a rental car.
Only an American could describe another person's country as a car. In this one passage, the entire idiocy of the American worldview is laid bare. It is as though we had been invaded and occupied by the Chinese and forced to listen as commentators in Beijing debated our worthiness to assume control of our pagoda. I would not want to be a Chinese person walking the streets of Dallas in that set of circumstances.
Why the elaborate car metaphor? Easy: We need a new one, one that has nothing to do with Vietnam. Friedman has been a general on the front lines of the "It's Not Vietnam" campaign. In fact, he wrote an editorial with that very title, just two weeks ago. In this section, he explains how the murderous Iraqis are different from the Vietcong:
Just stop for one second and contemplate what happened: A suicide bomber, driving an ambulance loaded with explosives, crashed into the Red Cross office and blew himself up on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This suicide bomber was not restrained by either the sanctity of the Muslim holy day or the sanctity of the Red Cross. All civilizational norms were tossed asideŠ
The Vietcong, of course, were nothing like this band of blasphemous rebels. They would never, for instance, have thought of attacking us on Tet.
Continuing this line of thought a week later, Friedman explained another way that our efforts in Iraq are different than they were in Vietnam:
There is much talk now about the need for "Iraqification" of the police and armed forces, so Iraqis can take over for U.S. troops. No question, this is necessary.
This is nothing like Vietnamization, of course.
There is only one reason why muddle-headed idiots like Thomas Friedman can exist as prominent spokespersons in the United States. It's because muddle-headed policies require muddle-headed people to champion them. Our policy in Iraq is a tortured one. We can't simply hold elections and let actual democracy exist-"turn the keys over to just anyone," as Friedman puts it-because we'd get the wrong result. So we have to keep the troops in there so that we can "vigorously" insist upon a "constitutional process" that would create the necessary conditions for "democracy," which is our word for anything but Baathism, Shiite theocracy or whatever else would be there without us.
Again, this is nothing like Vietnam. We prevented elections there because communists, not Islamicists, would have won. It's a completely different thing.
If this sounds like colonialism to you, you've got it all wrong. It's more complicated than that. See, imagine that you're drivingŠ