Thomas Friedman: An unabashed idiot fighting for the American way

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”

Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, but because there are not enough Americans ready to fight and die for the kind of government al Qaeda wants.”

“The main reason we are losing in Iraq is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Iraqis ready to fight and die for us rather than for themselves.”

And so on.

Friedman began yesterday’s column with the astute observation that from time to time, the one-liners used by political parties to encapsulate their marketing campaigns don’t reflect reality.

Sometimes in politics, particularly in campaigns, parties get wedded to slogans — so wedded that no one stops to think about what they’re saying, whether the reality has changed and what the implications would be if their bumper stickers really guided policy when they took office.

There’s no hope for someone who thinks political parties take their slogans seriously. The two political parties have stood for the same things for decades now: Republicans for screwing up government, and Democrats for letting Republicans screw up government. The slogans never have any basis in reality beyond the occasional brief and random intersection.

There’s also no hope for someone who views government in other countries entirely through the lens of what’s good for us. It’s a view that necessarily limits our course of action to forcing other countries to do what’s good for us, and if there’s one thing modern history screams in our ears, it’s that doing so is almost never good for us even in the short term.

Friedman says that terrorism is the result of humiliation, the fallout from repressive and incompetent governments, in Muslim countries. His solution is to replace the self-imposed humiliations with externally-imposed ones, a conceit which seems to suppose that we haven’t been in that business for quite some time already.

I recently mentioned (again) Max Boot and his post-911 vision of America supplying “Afghanistan and other trouble lands [with] the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” There’s less than a sliver of daylight between Friedman’s imperialism in democratic drag and Boot’s undisguised version; neither have anything to do with what the child-like natives of troubled lands want for themselves, foremost among which is not the US running their countries for their own good.

I’m not much for political bumper stickers, but I’ll vote for the first party that comes up with one mocking all things Friedman. Even if they don’t mean it.