A sensible centrist, if you forgive the phrase, alternative would be . . . .

Time's up, Reed.

King Abdullah and Vice President Cheney have already explained the plan, here.

The Shii are out. And Maliki knows it (that's the reason for this evening's dinner cancellation).

We'll be retreating to the desert, and Saddam's boys (Nawaf Abaid calls them "ex-Bathists") will be back.

Think they'll be getting Cobras?

Friedman is fundamentally unserious (an ego thing).

In many ways, he's like Bush. Delusional and incapable of admitting he was wrong.

(b) arm the Shiites with tanks

What !!!! ????

Tanks are so wonderful to put down insurgencies!! The Americans have been using them for that purpose for 3.5 years, and look how well it's worked out!

After reading Friedman's book (the world is flat) and seeing him on CBS, my opinion is that this guy talks a lot but that's it.

Specifically-- on CBS-- he was Katie's first guest and he suggested that "if Bush and American's care about winning, they'll send in a lot of troops and make the required sacrifice" and further implied that "if Bush had been bold enough to send in these troops, his legacy would have been assured..."

Of course, since Kofi Annan declared the "Iraq War" (read occupation) illegal, isn't Friedman inciting Americans to support an illegal US action?

In his book, "the world is flat," he uses the same "bag of tricks" to cleverly convince the "working class" that the "rigged race to the bottom" is "good for them" even though it's a losing proposition and he doesn't hear the "sucking sound" that Ross Perot did.

I used to think "Friedman is a smart guy," just as Katie Couric told her audience, but, recently, he seems to "over simplify things" for rhetorical impact.

Specifically, while his thoughts are initially catchy, the embedded spin makes me sick after more thought.

Thomas Friedman "justified" America's unproked, dastardly attack (as FDR said indignantly about the Japanese "sneak" attack on Pearl Harbor) in this deep, philosophical way:

"We had to hit somebody."

Later, as evidence of his stupidity and callous indifference multiplied, he began backtracking; pronouncing "the next six critial months" so critical so often that the phrase "the next six critical months" now bears his name: i.e., "a Friedman."

Thus, America's (and Friedman's) unprovoked and dastardly night attack on a non-belligerent nation (at least the Japanese waited until dawn) has turned into an almost-eight-Friedman quagmire. Indeed, Deputy Dubya Bush desperately hopes to somehow turn his Iraq debacle into a ten-Friedman extravaganza so that he can slip out of office and blame his own and his successors' "Friedmans" on someone else.

Thomas Friedman ought to shut the fuck up, since he has absolutely nothing of any value to say about Iraq, America, or a "flat" world that most people recognize as spherical by now.

As for military retreats, America once had generals who could manage such things under intense fire from hordes of Chinese swarming across the Yalu River in the bitter mountain passes of North Korea -- and do it in good order, brilliantly saving troops and equipment under the most critial of circumstances -- and do it in a matter of weeks, not "Friedmans." If American no longer has such generals -- and it does not look like we do -- then we need to summarily cashier the whole sorry lot of them for wasting more years than it took to defeat Germany, Japan, and Italy turning a six-week "cakewalk" sprint against nobody into a "long war" glacier race expanding through Parkinson's Law and the Peter Principle to occupy all the "Friedmans" that any incompetent claque of stuffed shirts ever "managed."

As Reed Hundt and Thomas Friedman prove beyond a shadow of a doubt: America simply does not have a serious political cast of characters with whom to have a worthwhile discussion any longer.

Maybe I missed the boat, but what has Tom Friedman ever done to warrant having his opinions taken seriously?

Robert Fiske the Independent's extraordinarily well informed Middle East reporter says that TF was a good foreign correspondent 20 years ago in Lebanon during its civil war ,the Sharon-led Israeli invasion and the shameful assults on the Palestinian camps. And is saddened by what seems to him to be TF's decline.

For what little it's worth my memory is the same 's. And , again for what it's worth , I think  that , discounting his understandable pro Israel bias , TF is still  knowledgeable about what motivates other countries and - to a lesser extent - how we should respond.  Even in that respect , however , like others above , I think he's unable to admit his mistakes.  Just vanity, I'm afraid.

Where I feel he is now and has always been incompetent is on economics in general and globalization in particular . A different subject which I won't pursue.

A different subject which I will pursue is to recommend in the strongest possible terms that everyone read Jossi Alpher's brilliant article in the current Bitterlemons. His understanding of the complex feelings of both the Palestinian and Israeli PEOPLE , rather than their leaders , puts to shame most of the shouting that occurs here on that subject. Read it !

I'm kind of surprised this little "opinion" piece hasn't gotten more play.

Looking at Nawaf's limited resume, it looks like he's connected -- probably doesn't go to the mens' room without Prince Turki's okay.

Want to bet the piece was drafted at 601 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W.?

Republican water boy TF is "well-regarded, influential, and estimable"?

Please.

All I can say is that if it's Robert Fiske you're relying on for judgment, that says more about you than it does about Friedman.

Oh dear!. Brad , if I were relying on Robert Fiske for judgement I would have said so. What I relied on him for was for his long standing acquaintanceship with Friedman.(The last time I heard Fiske interviewed ,on a visit here , he was on his way to have dinner with him.) For the sake of providing some perspective I did describe Fiske as well informed and I stand by what I actually wrote .

BTW I hope you and everyone else will read the
Alpher article.

He married money.

Isn't that enough?

Actually Friedman's point is that computers have allowed both capital and work to shipped around the world to where it either gets the best return or is least expensive.

The way to counter lower costs is to provide great value added. A better educated worked force, knowing a number of Indians who are getting their mediacal and engineering degrees in the United States before going home it would seem that our universities are potentially very helpful in keeping the U.S. competitive.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Yeah. I can recall TF in 1993 on Washington Week
In Review making (A) the sensible sounding defense of NAFTA that if we didn't want the Mexicans to cross our border we needed to provide them with jobs to do there.

But then he subseqently defended(B) the later further globilization which resulted in those Maquiladora factories shutting down when it became yet cheaper for us to outsource to the far east.

If A was supposedly our policy then B was in conflict. Who knows whether he ever noticed
the conflict. More likely he just used any argument that occured to him in order to buttress his taxi driver level economic thinking. Sad.

And eerily reminiscent of neo con Iraq.

As Ricks points out our strategy ( A)was to win hearts and minds. But our tactic(B) was to outsource supply to understandably frightened oil truck drivers who drove 60 mph and fired indiscriminately at innocent Iraqis.

B conflicted with A. And the neo cons never noticed.

J. McCutchen

Ten months may or may not be "realistic" but the prospect is looking more and more REAL

Muqtada Sadr's boycott of the government may not mean much in the day-to-day since a quorum of the parliament is to be found in London these days not Baghdad but it has gained major support from the Sunni bloc as well as the few Christian parliamentarians. This seems not to have been lost on al-Sadr who is even now, Reuters reports, working to form an anti-US majority that to demand withdrawal.

Better clear the helicopter landing pads.

The US hasn't got until 2008

J. McCutchen

Troops could be withdrawn within six months.

The only folks in LaLa land are those who cling to the belief that the US could invade, destroy, occupy and build a friendly Arab muslim nation - not with 150,000 not with 650,000

I sympathize with both sides here: those who point out that Friedman's papering over his failure and the wrongness of invasion and those who note that Reed is again proposing a wrong third way, sticking to a "centrist" plan that'll salvage things, somehow.

But on Friedman's economics, Dan G. has an interesting point. It could very well be true that education is part of the our answer to low wages overseas, and that no sensible person is denying the latter. I myself am a free trader, at least in the Stirling Newberry or Stiglitz sense of that combined with serious reforms that don't impoverish Third World nations by too heady a push to free market solutions there and harsh lending terms, that include environmental agreements, and that provide for some serious attention to economic inequality in America. I'm not a Green.

But Dan's totally wrong that Friedman is one of those sensible people. He's advocating a race to the bottom and in denial about it. You just don't hear him saying that engineers overseas are getting jobs because they're paid a tenth as much. In his imaginary world, it's because they go for innovation and we don't. It's the same with anyone who takes free market as a religion, insisting that the private sector works better because it drives people to new solutions, as it surely would in education (right), rather than because it weeds out the failures that are everywhere and because people compete on prices and wages.

I don't have his book here at the office, but it takes no more than surfing for "Friedman India" to turn up this charming set of quotes, where I'll run them together in one paragraph and use quotation marks rather than a blockquote indent, so we don't disguise disparate sources.

“I visited Mr. George's school in February, and he took me to a classroom where 8-year-old untouchables were learning to use Microsoft Word and Excel. . . . The broad globalization strategy that India opted for in the early 1990's has succeeded in unlocking the country's incredible brainpower and stimulating sustained growth, which is the best antipoverty program.” “I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.” “You have a culture, also, where being a doctor or an engineer is absolutely the top of the pyramid. It's amazing. You go down any side street in Bangalore, and there seems to be an engineering school, you know, or some kind of software programming classroom.” “My primary tutors for this book, were two Indian entrepreneurs: the president of Wipro, Vivec Paul, and the CEO of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani. So, how did I happen to end up with two Indian entrepreneurs? (And these are the heads really of the two cutting-edge, high-tech/outsourcing companies.) It's because they're actually at the epicenter of it now.” “And Africa not only has the telegraph, it skipped over into wireless! It skipped a whole generation. And even in Africa, because the world is flat, you will get pockets where you have the infrastructure, education, environment, and laws right, they're moving ahead. I have a friend of my wife's whose son worked there, who in the book is quoted, ‘Everyone in Mali uses Linux.’"

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

On November 30, 2006 - 1:38am Ghost of Tom Joad said: Maybe I missed the boat, but what has Tom Friedman ever done to warrant having his opinions taken seriously?

Thomas Friedman was a very brave and promising foreign correspondant who covered the Lebanese Civil War for the NY Times. His reputation was built on two huge exposes he wrote for the NYT which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ariel Sharon and the IDF had known and turned a blind eye to the Christian Phalagist militias massacre of Palestinian Civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
He was also recognized as a bit of a scholar and an arabist having studied in that field at Cambridge (I think)

Anyway, something seems to have died in him after Rabin was assasinated and the 2nd Intifata (with suicide bombing) took off. He became much harder in his views towards Arabs and arab culture. When he finally came back to the States he absorbed a lot of economic platitudes which he distilled into a very deterministic theory and developed a very superior attitude to those who didn't agree with him.

It's been kind of down hill ever since. I wish he would remember his younger self.
Right now all he will be remembered for is the term Friedman Unit, meaning the next 6 months.

J. McCutchen

JimBob Baker Better Break Out the Butterfly Net

Headlines WaPo :

Bush is right about one thing - It won't be a "graceful exit"

He does the same thing when he comes to America, in fact. How does something like WalMart emerge, especially from a relatively poor state? Because it's such an innovative retailer, a nice way of dancing around its not providing adequate wages or benefits

what's worse is that they take away all the Christian expectations that "a few fish and a few loaves of bread can feed everyone."

Even though Friedman tells the reader that a "rising tide lifts all boats," in the next six months, smart people realize that a "rising tide only lifts boats at the shoreline."

I hope that people change the debate from "providing adequate wages and benefits" to "helping build a civilized community."

Modern corporations are leeches that suck the life out of a community.

The NY Times Magazine recently wrote about charter schools that force their teachers to work 16 hours a day, monday thru friday, and provide tutoring on Saturday too!

After reading that article, I concluded that "poor kids did better because they were adopted by teachers and kept away from TV and video games because of a longer school day."

Friedman, in his books, doesn't even begin to reconcile how families and individuals can survive in a dog-eat-dog world.

If I worked 16 hours a day teaching 7th grade math, I would be both replaceable and fairly stupid compared to my peers who pursued more intellectually demanding tasks.

As far as I see it, the problem with being a laborer is that you sacrifice "personal growth" to "do your job..."

Walmart workers perform a great job and then society betrays their loyalty. This recognition, I think, is one of organized labors strongest points.

Part of the reason why Friedman is so wrong about Iraq is because, perhaps, he doesn't understand that his "hope for the world" is destroying economics at the core-- nobody trusts each other-- and that causes cultural fragmentation.

Your plan has the right pieces
It seems like the timelines would to some degree be overlapping
Could you sketch it out somehow showing where each pieces fits into an overall sequence?
Perhaps organizing it around year-by-year accomplishments

About Friedman's choices: I began to read Friedman's NYT columns several years ago after learning that he was the world's smartest man. It didn't take long for me to see that he frequently took both sides of an argument. I supposed this was done so that however things turned out, he could claim to have been right. It seems just as true to say that however things turned out, he was wrong!

Stephen Colbert could have coined his "truthiness" word for Friedman. Friedman declares as fact what he wishes to be true and then works backward to spin together a column that supposedly supports his truth.

For the curious, I noticed that "Friedman Bashing" is taking off.

Tom Tommorrow's blog has some juicy nuggets about the guy...

Link #1 to Tom Tommorrow Blog:
I try not to read ... Thomas Friedman, because his writing tends to make me wish I were dead...

Link #2 to Tom Tommorrow Blog:
Friedman Among Wealthiest, Now a Billionaire who , Friedman Lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house

J. McCutchen

Not more troops, not fewer troops...Iraq is out of control or what part of "FUBAR" do some Americans have trouble with?

More Troops?

By William S. Lind

"The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil was is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands".

To wrap up the Friedman discussion so that any further comment is clearly superfluous read Glen Greenwald's post today.

Although I question how much a solution of the Palestine problem would be directly linked to any kind of progress in (ex-) Iraq, the importance of Palestine is crucial.

The European countries have backed off from their effort to support the Palestinians economically. How much this is due to pressure from the U.S., or how much is just a result of U.S. support for Israeli attacks on the installations the Europeans have paid for, is beyond my ability to see.

But facts remain.

The Palestinians' fate can at this point in history be improved by no other actor than the United States. Until America starts investing in infrastructure there, the U.S. will be considered to be clearly siding with the Palestinians' oppressors and indirectly (and directly) threatening the future of Palestine and the Palestinians.

U.S. investments in Palestine would be understood as a signal that the U.S. wouldn't approve of repeated destruction by the Israeli Army, and would crucially change the dynamics of the conflicts in the Middle East.

America would finally get a chance to be perceived not as a threat and supporter of tyrants and oppressors, but as a bringer of hope of peace and prosperity.

Yes. And Chris Floyd’s article puts Friedman to shame: http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd12012006.html

Wish I'd said that!

http://samthornton.blogspot.com/