HOW MANY PULITZERS?:

White man's burden (Ari Shavit, 4/05/03, Ha'aretz Friday Magazine)

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical [...]

Some things are true even if George Bush believes them, [Tom] Friedman says with a smile. And after September 11, it's impossible to tell Bush to drop it, ignore it. There was a certain basic justice in the overall American feeling that told the Arab world: we left you alone for a long time, you played with matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone any longer. [...]

This is not an illegitimate war, Friedman says. But it is a very presumptuous war. You need a great deal of presumption to believe that you can rebuild a country half a world from home. But if such a presumptuous war is to have a chance, it needs international support. That international legitimacy is essential so you will have enough time and space to execute your presumptuous project. But George Bush didn't have the patience to glean international support. He gambled that the war would justify itself, that we would go in fast and conquer fast and that the Iraqis would greet us with rice and the war would thus be self-justifying. That did not happen. Maybe it will happen next week, but in the meantime it did not happen.

When I think about what is going to happen, I break into a sweat, Friedman says. I see us being forced to impose a siege on Baghdad. And I know what kind of insanity a siege on Baghdad can unleash. The thought of house-to-house combat in Baghdad without international legitimacy makes me lose my appetite. I see American embassies burning. I see windows of American businesses shattered. I see how the Iraqi resistance to America connects to the general Arab resistance to America and the worldwide resistance to America. The thought of what could happen is eating me up.

What George Bush did, Friedman says, is to show us a splendid mahogany table: the new democratic Iraq. But when you turn the table over, you see that it has only one leg. This war is resting on one leg. But on the other hand, anyone who thinks he can defeat George Bush had better think again. Bush will never give in. That's not what he's made of. Believe me, you don't want to be next to this guy when he thinks he's being backed into a corner. I don't suggest that anyone who holds his life dear mess with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.

Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.

What a condescending ass. Unless one of his 25 exiles is George W. Bush, the war was going to happen. And what the heck is he talking about, that we need international legitimacy to give us "time and space to execute your presumptuous project"? Only the people fighting and the people fought for can lend any war legitimacy and we'd appear to have the broad support of both. Meanwhile, who's going to dictate time and space to us? The UN? The EU? The French? The Arab world? C'mon, Tom, wake up and smell the Kofi. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2003 11:22 PM