I Can Almost Imagine The Conversation

Thomas Friedman talking to his taxi driver in Jenin:

Tom: What do you think of my ideas on how to achieve a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Driver: I think you're an idiot. Are you going to quote me in your column?

Tom: Not this time.

And yet somehow it's hard to avoid the simple wisdom of a taxi driver.

Friedman is one of those who has, in essence, argued for decades that "everybody knows" how the Israel-Palestine conflict will end up. The Israelis will return most of the occupied territories to the Palestinians, making some land swaps along the border in the interest of security and to annex its larger settlements, and the Palestinians will give up their claims of a "right of return" to villages within Israel. This remains the basic premise of his seven percent five (er, six) state solution. The only problem is that while Friedman has been content to yammer on about what "everybody knows", and assume that his take on conventional wisdom will somehow magically turn into reality, he's pretty much ignored everything in the real world.

So now he finds himself in a café in Jenin, sipping coffee served by a waiter whose opinion is also not likely to end up in his column, and writing stuff like this:

The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Admit it - if you were the waiter, wouldn't you be tempted to slap him upside the head and remind him that you have to fly out of Jordan, because you're not even allowed into Jerusalem? To point out to him that if forty years of "suck on this" policy directed at the Palestinians didn't work, you would have to be close to senile to think it was an approach to take with the larger Arab world? Because somebody who is an "expert" on the Middle East, as Friedman is supposed to be, should be aware of the forty-year effort to create "facts on the ground" that prevent the return of the occupied territories and resources to Palestinian control - a conscious and deliberate policy to prevent the "conventional wisdom" from ever becoming reality. Friedman acts as if this all occurred beneath his notice ("How did this conflict get so fragmented?"), but I think we know better than that.

Friedman presents an exceptionally silly statement,

Another reason [this conflict got so fragmented] is that every idea has been tried and has failed.

Really? So if I call up Uri Avnery and ask, "When you were a member of the Knesset right after the 1967 war, and you called for immediate withdrawal from Palestinian lands and forecast great misery for Israel if it tried to annex those territories, did Israel try that?" Or did they follow the model preferred by Ariel Sharon:

Standing with the cabinet ministers on a high hill, I pointed out exactly what I thought was needed. If in the future we wanted in any way to control this area, I told them, we would need to establish a Jewish presence now. Otherwise we would have no motivation to be there during difficult times later on.

A model Sharon continued to advance as Prime Minister, only a few years ago.

So... maybe Friedman means that we've tried every possible solution to end the conflict and occupation other than ending the occupation. Or even proposing to end the occupation. Even Friedman's new preferred "solution" promises no end to occupation - he simply wants to change the occupying power and stick Saudi Arabia with the tab. You know what? People don't like to be occupied by foreign military powers. The "best" outcomes seem to come when the occupying power does its best to make clear that it doesn't want to be there, and gets out of town at the earliest possible date. As Israel can attest through its experience with Hezbollah, although the Shia of Lebanon initially greeted its forces as liberators when it invaded Lebanon in 1982, the consequences can be grave if you overstay your welcome. There's also the Chinese model - claim the entire territory for your nation, bring in tens of thousands of your nationals and settle them in the occupied land. This works best, of course, if you're not a democracy and are willing to tolerate a generation or two of unrest, violence, and occasional terrorism as growing pains.

Except there's another solution we haven't tried. Arbitration under international law. (Are you laughing yet?) Each side picks its own arbitrator, and the two arbitrators pick a neutral from a list acceptable to both sides. They then apply the principles of international law to the conflict, and decide each issue by majority vote. Both sides have to abide by the outcome. If you held a plebiscite in the Palestinian territories, you would likely get 90+% approval for such a proposal. But, you know, ain't gonna happen.

If we're going to be serious for a minute, we can stick with Friedman's "conventional wisdom" and the idea of a plebiscite. Have both Israel and the Palestinians hold a vote, asking their populations to instruct their leaders to negotiate a resolution consistent with Friedman's conventional wisdom.

This would not be something instantly implemented - it would be the destination for a new road map, fully implemented only when Israel could be reasonably certain that its border with the Palestinian territories would be acceptably policed, monitored and peaceful. But it would bring an end to any claim of legitimacy to either side's claim to be held hostage to its extremists. It should give Palestinian leadership the backbone it's been sorely lacking on the "right of return" issue, and open the door to the resolution of the refugee camps in which some Palestinian families have been living for sixty years - not so bad, perhaps, for those refugees living in Jordan, but pretty awful in Lebanon or Gaza. Under a road map with a destination, the Palestinians would have nobody to blame but their leaders and themselves for any delay in their getting a state.

If Tzipi Livni becomes Israel's next Prime Minister, perhaps such a vote could be held. If it's Netanyahu... ain't gonna happen. It will be interesting to see if Netanyahu the retread is smaller, more corrupt and less competent than he was the first time around; it wouldn't surprise me, given the recent pattern. Friedman alludes to the sort of chest-thumping bravado that passes for "courage" among Israel's political "leaders":

The other day, Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, was quoted in the newspaper Haaretz as criticizing Lieberman as a lamb in hawk’s clothing, asking: “When has he ever shot anyone?”

As the last Prime Minister to actually show moral courage on these issues could attest, Israel needs leaders who have the courage to risk taking a bullet. Barak revealed himself in an unguarded moment, when he admitted that if born Palestinian "I would join a terror organization." That's the courage of Yassin, not the courage of Rabin.

They're Not Actually Smoking Crack, You Know....

When people like John Bolton start suggesting that Gaza be placed under Egyptian occupation control, your initial reaction may be, "What's he smoking? Why would Israel ever allow Egyptian troops on the streets of Gaza? Why would the Palestinians go along with such a thing?" But that would be missing the point. People like Bolton don't put stuff like this on the editorial page of the Washington Post because they're pulling wacky ideas out of thin air - they are attempting to prepare the public for an outcome that is acceptable to a particular political faction - one that disfavors ever allowing a genuine Palestinian state, but wants to remove the burdens of occupation from Israel.

Thanks to Carter, a president Bolton no doubt loves to malign, Israel and Egypt have several decades of stable peace. They're both highly dependent upon U.S. aid, and Egypt would certainly love to get more. Egypt has experience oppressing controlling its own Islamic factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt may not have much concern about Israeli politicians blaming every rocket that flies out of Gaza on Hamas, but as an occupier they would not want every rocket that flies out of Gaza to be blamed on them. So Israel gets more peace, Egypt gets more money, the Palestinians get more oppression, and everybody... everybody who matters to Bolton... is happy. If he can get Jordan to take over managing and controlling the Palestinian population on those remnants of the West Bank Israel chooses not to keep, all's the better. He concedes,

This idea would be decidedly unpopular in Egypt and Jordan, which have long sought to wash their hands of the Palestinian problem.

That's more than a bit dishonest. Jordan has a very large Palestinian population. In the past, this led to an ugly and violent confrontation between Jordanian forces and the PLO (September 1970, or "Black September"). It's difficult to conceive of a Jordanian occupation of the West Bank that would not ultimately precipitate similar conflict. (But what does Bolton care?)

Bolton refers to this as a "Three State solution", but it's patent that he doesn't actually give two figs about the Palestinians, and that it's actually a "one state solution with different occupying powers for the Palestinians."

One place to avoid problems is dispensing with intricate discussions over the exact legal status of Gaza and the West Bank.

Or as I suspect he puts it in less polite company, "Palestinians? F--- 'em". People more honest than Bolton who adore this "solution" are more accurate in their description - see, e.g., Daniel Pipes:

The National Post cleverly dubs my plan (in its title to this article) the "back-to-the-future option," but I like best the name bestowed on it by blogger Mary P. Madigan: "the no-state solution." Perfect.

Although analysis like this is typical of the garbage that passes for "scholarship" at the American Enterprise Institute, that's not the same as saying Bolton has no valid points. It does make sense to tie Gaza into Egypt's economy, particularly given how Israel has frozen it out of the Israeli economy - it's only other neighboring country. The same holds true for the West Bank and Jordan - although there are some real structural difficulties in separating the West Bank from Israel, worsened if Israel doesn't remove most of it settlements (and, believe me, removal of settlements is not part of Bolton's plan - he doesn't even mention them.) If we ignore religious and ethnic issues, it would make far more sense to fully incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into Israel; but that's not going to happen. Even with a tunnel connecting the two territories, it's hard to imagine the West Bank and Gaza forming a viable economy as an independent state.

Today, along comes Thomas Friedman with what he no doubt thinks is a clever twist on things - The 5-State Solution. In the column, Friedman pretends that he's King Abdullah II, proposing how the conflict can end... without a Palestinian state. This is a "five state solution" to Friedman as it involves Israel, Egypt (to occupy Gaza), Jordan (to occupy the West Bank), Saudi Arabia (to bankroll the occupations), "Palestine" (the nation not created, because it would continue to be under foreign occupation; but Friedman leaves open the possibility that there might be a Palestinian state at some point in the future, perhaps revisiting the issue after five years), and Israel. Oops - he forgot to consider this caveat: "The U.S. would be the sole arbiter of whether the metrics have been met by both sides" - I guess it's a "six state solution"? That'll go over well, on the day Saudi Arabia says, "We're done here, and now we should create a Palestinian State", and the U.S. says "no".

What of democracy, you ask? Well, I'm not sure that Friedman has ever cared about democracy. Palestinian human rights? Well... same answer. What's important to Friedman is that "This would be an Arab solution" that happens to resolve the conflict in a way 100% consistent with Friedman's own prejudices and desires, and that's good enough for him. The only question remaining is, does he know he's doing a slow dance with John Bolton and Daniel Pipes? I suspect so.

Walking... or is it Crossing a Fine Line

Thomas Friedman expands his "suck on this" psychology to the Palestinian territories, arguing that Israel's principal goal in its recent armed conflicts is to destroy civilian infrastructure, and to frighten and punish civilians:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Glenn Greenwald responds that Friedman's approach to asymmetric warfare sounds an awful lot like terrorism.

The war strategy which Friedman is heralding - what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as "exacting enough pain on civilians" in order to teach them a lesson - is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets. It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of "terrorism."...

Other than the fact that Friedman is advocating these actions for an actual state rather than a "subnational group," can anyone identify any differences between (a) what Friedman approvingly claims was done to the Lebanese and what he advocates be done to Palestinians and (b) what the State Department formally defines as "terrorism"?

I'm not endorsing Friedman's interpretation here. As is his wont, he's describing what's happening in his own mind and projecting it onto the rest of the world. But really, it's a deplorable position and one likely to result in even more blowback.

Friedman yammers about how he believes Israel's infliction of pain on Lebanese civilians has deterred Hezbollah from launching missile attacks during Israel's Gaza invasion but, in giving a rather skewed history, he glosses over the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas have different political agendas, and also are of different religious sects. And why even if we assume that Hezbollah has been "deterred" from small attacks, that means next to nothing if hostilities again break out between Israel and Lebanon. As Dan Larison has repeatedly argued, if you choose a strategy of disproportionate response, you may deter smaller conficts, but at a significant potential cost:

If every incident, no matter how small, results in a large-scale response, there is nothing – short of their physical annihilation (which may or may not be achievable) – to keep those whom you are trying to deter from making ever larger and more destructive attacks. They will attempt to do the maximum of damage before the inevitable large-scale response comes. The more disproportionate the response now, the less restrained an enemy will be by deterrence in the future.... The disproportionality of response seems effective in pummeling your adversary this time, but it is only truly effective as a deterrent to others if the adversary is wiped out or permanently disarmed (an objective that would currently require an even more disproportionate response than Israel has so far employed).

Perhaps Friedman hasn't been paying attention, but by all appearances Hezbollah has rearmed and has better, longer-range rockets and missiles and better defenses than ever before. And it's political standing in Lebanon seems undiminished. For what use does Friedman imagine Hezbollah has amassed its new arms, and how much of a popular uprising have the battered civilians of Lebanon managed to present in order to prevent its rearming? Meanwhile, let's look at an important international relationship - Israel's relationship with Turkey. How his all of this going over in Turkey? (Don't you hate it when facts get in the way of armchair chest-thumping?)

A Reminder from Thomas Friedman...

Of what the Israel-Palestine conflict is ultimately about:

If you believe, as I do, that the only stable solution is a two-state one, with the Palestinians getting all of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab sectors of East Jerusalem, then you have to hope for the weakening of Hamas.

It would be refreshing, though, if he would spend a column or two explaining why he reached that conclusion and how such a two state solution might be implemented, rather than treating it as a throw-away line. I recognize that it's easier to write a column that preaches of the threat of Iran, Hamas rejectionism and radical Islam. But how many people aren't already in that choir?

Well Go Figure

Don't tell Thomas Friedman, but here's a little footnote from history.

Though [Isaac Newton] never managed to turn base metal into gold in an experiment, later in life he became Warden of the Mint - the man in charge of making the country’s money. Here, he oversaw the production of gold and silver coins, and ensured that they were made more exactly than they had ever been made before. He also went after counterfeiters, several of whom were hanged.

That's the best and the brightest for you. Always trying to make a mint in banking.

Because That's What They Would Be Doing?

Thomas Friedman sings a tired old refrain,

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money - rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

Now, I'm not saying that people who become MBA's or lawyers couldn't have productive lives as engineers and computer programmers. But how many of them do you suppose wanted to enter those professions? Friedman also seems to believe that pretty much all of the "best and the brightest" want nothing more than to chase the almighty dollar. Not everybody chooses to work for Wall Street or BigLaw.

I suspected long before I reached that point, but my second semester of organic chemistry sent home the message that I wasn't going to be spending my career in a chemistry lab. Please, don't judge chemistry by organic chemistry alone - a tedious bore of a subject that is best "mastered" through rote memorization - but for goodness sake, not everybody who is good at crunching numbers on Wall Street would be particularly useful in scientific or engineering fields. Maybe they would be accountants or lawyers, or economists, or politicians.

For that matter, who says the people who crashed and burned the world financial system are "the best and brightest" at all? Friedman seems to be falling for a pretty typical American conceit that anybody who makes a lot of money is among the "best and brightest", even if they can't change a light bulb unassisted. What makes the people who crashed Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and WaMu any better than the people who crashed Chrysler and General Motors? If it's such a big deal that GM is gushing red ink to the tune of $74 billion over four years "yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job", what's the body count over at Citigroup? It's the auto companies that are "giant wealth-destruction machines"?

When we look at the decline of the nation's newspapers, including the New York Times, can we turn a mirror on Friedman? Friedman likes to look down on GM, but what about his own employer? At what point do we declare that newspapers have "become giant wealth-destruction machines", and insist that it's ridiculous to pay people six figure salaries to write syndicated columns when they could be out inventing something?

I know, I know.... "That's different."

Externally Imposed Business Models

Remember that externally imposed business model that some people and politicians, including Thomas Friedman, want to impose on the Big 3? Greener, more fuel efficient cars, with hybrid engines? Here's a bit of market reality to remind us that the Prius isn't quite the same as Friedman's "iPod of luxury SUV's", the Lexus RX400h.

No, potentially the worst piece of [U.S. economic] news passed by almost without notice: the decision by the Japanese carmaker Toyota to hit the brakes on its construction of a new factory in Mississippi. That decision wrapped up the past and future prospects for the US into one unhappy package. If Toyota cancels its plant, the US economy won't collapse, of course. But it is more than just a bad omen. It's a warning of what is to come for the Federal Reserve and the incoming Obama administration.

Toyota's new car plant wasn't just any assembly line. It was to be the first US factory to make the famous Prius hybrid. Toyota had already invested $300m in it – but it may prefer to kiss that money goodbye than commit the extra $1bn needed to open it.

Prius sales are way down - "in November 2007 Toyota sold more than 16,000 Prius models. Last month it sold just 8,000." But that's not just because gas prices have dipped; it's also a symptom of the bad consumer credit market.

All You Need Is A Perfect Product!

After months of describing how the Big Three need to be forcibly reinvented, and required to build cars under government-imposed environmental and fuel efficiency standards that don't apply to their foreign competitors, Thomas Friedman has shifted course. Sort of.

Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: “We have to make the cars people want.” That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.

It says something about Friedman's candor that he writes "Toyota" instead of "Lexus", and "hybrid" instead of "SUV hybrid". There's a world of difference between Toyota's least fuel efficient hybrid and the Prius. Had Friedman wanted a roughly equivalent vehicle at a slightly lower price, with slightly greater fuel efficiency, he would have purchased a Highlander hybrid. Was he paying extra for the additional power of the Lexus, even at the expense of fuel efficiency? Real wood trim instead of plastic?

I have a Toyota hybrid. It's nice, it's quiet, it has very low emissions, it's... fuel efficient for a car with its feature set, but hardly the most fuel efficient vehicle on the market. Could I live without it, or easily substitute another vehicle for it? Sure. It's a car. I would love to hear Friedman explain why he can't live without his hybrid, rather than having him simply suggest that it rounds out his life like his... iPod. The fact is, Friedman can easily afford a luxury SUV. He can easily afford the gas that fills it, and could easily afford it at $4, $6, or $10/gallon. When he has argued for higher gas taxes to force consumers to buy vehicles like... his? He sounds a bit like a modern Marie Antoinette.

As for building the cars people want to buy, let's go back a year ago to Friedman's et tu, Toyota, after that company joined the Big Three in opposing more stringent CAFE standards.

Now why would Toyota, which has used the Prius to brand itself as the greenest car company, pull such a stunt? Is it because Toyota wants to slow down innovation in Detroit on more energy efficient vehicles, which Toyota already dominates, while also keeping mileage room to build giant pickup trucks, like the Toyota Tundra, at the gas-guzzler end of the U.S. market?

“Toyota wants to keep its green halo and beat G.M. in the big trucks, too,” said Deron Lovaas, vehicles expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Friedman has consistently conflated two different questions - what vehicles consumers want, and how gas prices affect their choices. Remove gas prices from the equation and, as I quipped the other day, it appears that Americans want a vehicle the size of a small house that does 0-60 in less than 10 seconds and is available for a price between $20-$30K. Toyota's ability to produce vehicles that people want in an era of high gas prices comes, in no small part, from the fact that their domestic market has faced very high gas taxes, and thus very high gas prices, for many years. They, like the Big Three, also wanted to be able to take advantage of U.S. consumer preferences for large, low MPG vehicles.

When I was last shopping for cars, I really didn't see anything transformational. I saw a lot of sameness from one auto manufacturer to the next - domestic, European, Japanese, Korean.... Within the category of vehicles I was considering (and giant SUV's, trucks and Hummers weren't under consideration), my decision was made in part on fuel efficiency (a hybrid versus a non-hybrid model), but that was well behind issues of vehicle quality and expected longevity on my "wish list". My sentiment is apparently not atypical, and presumably is why Lexus offers Friedman's SUV in a better-selling non-hybrid model, and Toyota offers the Camry and Highlander in better-selling non-hybrid models.

But isn't that the rub? Friedman wants Detroit to develop a one-size-fits-all vehicle, popular with consumers regardless of gas prices, but also green and fuel-efficient. A wonderful concept, but something that nobody in the auto industry, including the most innovative, efficient, environmentally conscious manufacturers, believes exists. You want to force consumer choices in that direction? Go back to arguing for high gas taxes or setting floors on gas prices, such that consumers are compelled to buy the vehicles you want them to buy, but don't pretend that you're arguing for a context in which they will be able to buy the vehicles they want.

Argh, No!

Thomas Friedman again announces how the auto industry must design future products if it is to be rescued:

You want my tax dollars? Then I want to see the precise production plans and timetables for the hybridization of all your cars and trucks within 36 months. I want every bailed-out car company to move to hybrid electric drive trains, because nothing would both improve mileage and emissions more - and also stimulate a whole new 21st-century, job-creating industry: batteries.

Hybrids represent a tiny percentage of the domestic auto market, and represented a tiny percentage even when gas prices peaked. Hybrid technology is expensive. The cheaper, more efficient batteries Friedman wants? They're still vaporware - they don't exist. And there aren't factories lined up to manufacture millions of batteries for new hybrids - with the increased demand for the Prius this past year, Toyota had to disappoint prospective purchasers with long waits because the supply of batteries is limited.

If anything has been vindicated by the fall of the Big Three, it's Friedman's long-standing (and sometimes peculiar) call for higher gas taxes. What happened when gas prices hit $4/gallon? Friedman's dreams came true - the conspiracy between the Big 3 and Congress to carve enormous exceptions to CAFE standards collapsed, and the market for gas guzzling vehicles plummeted. That is to say, until Congress grows a backbone, the better approach to trying to change the vehicles that Americans buy is by hitting them in the pocketbook.

If Friedman's ideas are adopted, domestic autos may be modestly more fuel efficient than imports, but due to the cost of the hybrid technology it will cost about $2,000 more for a roughly equivalent car. People already have the choice of paying a premium for hybrid technology and, in overwhelming numbers, they're keeping that $2,000 in their pockets and buying more fuel efficient, conventionally powered vehicles.

Set an even floor. If it makes sense that every vehicle on the road be a hybrid (and, as the owner of a hybrid, in my opinion it does not make sense), then require that of every car manufacturer serving the U.S. market. Don't handicap the domestic manufacturers at a point in time when they're struggling to stay alive by pricing them into a segment of the market that, even as gas prices peaked, couldn't get more than 3% market penetration. Given Friedman's concern for emissions, it's worth noting that battery technology is pretty dirty - mining and smelting nickel is dirty enough, but Friedman's demand for instant hybrid gratification will probably lead to the wide use of lead-based batteries.

Meanwhile, perhaps Friedman should take a step back and ask, which car company is it that's trying to use breakthrough, cleaner battery technology in a future generation of hybrids. Not that I want to diminish the advances Toyota has made with its NiCad hybrids, but, could it be... GM with the LIon-powered Chevy Volt?

Friedman also presupposes that nothing better will come along. Forcing the domestic auto makers to spend tens of billions locking themselves into a 100% hybrid fleet, and to do it so quickly that they really have no other room for R&D (even assuming Friedman's proposed law permits them to explore other technologies), may make Friedman feel better, but it puts them at a disadvantage in developing other forms of clean, fuel efficient vehicles.

Yes, the Big 3 need to change their ways. Yes, their past contempt for fuel efficiency is part of why they're in so deep a hole. Yes, their past contempt for environmental concerns is reproachable. (And is it ancient history to bring up how they helped destroy public transportation?) But for all of their faults, dictating the details of their future products has the potential to impair their future competitiveness, preventing them from developing fuel-efficient gasoline and flex fuel vehicles, while impeding the development of cleaner, more fuel-efficient non-hybrid vehicles.

At the end of the day, it's a bit like calling on Congress to legislate that the New York Times overcome its financial struggles and create a newspaper for a new century by publishing entirely through Twitter. It's one thing to know enough about something to be dangerous; Friedman's not even quite to the point of knowing that much about cars.

Friedman's Constant Call for Muslim Protests

It's one of those days when Thomas Friedman phones in his column. Yes, again (and again, and again) it's "if only the Muslim world would take to the streets to protest Muslim terrorism" columns. It's not that in a larger sense he doesn't have a point - it would be nice if there were a greater outcry against terrorism within the Muslim world. But it's just plain silly for Friedman - a man whom I doubt has ever participated in the public protest of anything - to keep returning to this notion that the only meaningful Muslim reaction to terrorism would be their taking to the streets with torches and pitchforks.

Friedman complains that if Muslims take to the streets to protest offenses against other Muslims and their religion, they should take to the streets with the same vigor over crimes committed by other Muslims. We'll leave aside for the moment that nobody seems to actually do that - people sometimes take to the streets to protest the actions of their own government, but I can't recall a single instance, anywhere, of people of any religion taking to the streets to protest the actions of terrorists merely because they happen to share their faith or ethnicity. But let's pretend for the moment that Muslims are unique in that respect. Perhaps we should look at how somebody described protests in the Muslim world:

Where Islam is imbedded in authoritarian societies it tends to become the vehicle of angry protest, because religion and the mosque are the only places people can organize against autocratic leaders. And when those leaders are seen as being propped up by America, America also becomes the target of Muslim rage.

It's also worthy of note that those authoritarian regimes take advantage of what one might deem "fake issues" - things they don't really care about, but which stir up the people - as an opportunity to let the people take to the streets and vent rage that might otherwise be directed at the government.

But where Islam is imbedded in a pluralistic, democratic society, it thrives like any other religion.

That, apparently, is why Friedman doesn't call upon the Muslims of India to protest acts of terror by other Muslims. Although it would be easier for them to do so.

What would be the goals of the protests Friedman wants to see? Somebody once suggested,

Throughout history, successful social protest movements have had one thing in common - a clear, simple message and objective. Whether it was the women's rights movement or the anti-Vietnam-War movement, the mere uttering of the name immediately conjured up who the protesters were and what their objective was.

Friedman takes note of Pakistani expressions of concern, anguish and solidarity, but that's not enough for him:

But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.

Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers - and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.

What's the simple message that Friedman expects the protest to convey? "Hey, hey, ho ho, Lashkar-e-Toiba has got to go"? How many Lashkar-e-Toiba members does Friedman believe hang out in Islamabad? How many members of that group do you think care about the opinion of anybody in Pakistan who is not on board with their cause? A protest is going to change that?

The recurrent theme to Friedman's columns is his professed belief that, "Muslim protests against terrorism by Muslims would dry up the pool of recruits." The first problem is, Lashkar-e-Toiba isn't focused on the "three rivers of rage" that somebody sees as the basis of al-Qaeda-type terrorism. Its primary goals are territorial - ejecting India from Jammu and Kashmir. So in this context it's much less like the analogy Friedman makes, to protests against cartoons about Mohammed, and is more akin to the IRA - a conflict that was nominally "Catholic versus Protestant", but was in fact grounded in a territorial dispute. (Need it be said that Friedman never called for the world's Catholics to rise up in mass protest of IRA bombings in London, let alone argued that such protests would dry up the IRA's ability to recruit members?)

The second problem is that Friedman's calls for mass protest within the Muslim world is an assignment of collective guilt. He apparently sees all Muslims, whatever their sect or nationality - and perhaps especially those who live under autocratic regimes - as having essentially the same values, beliefs, and sympathies toward terrorism. Despite arguing that the roots of Muslim terror emerge predominantly from living under autocratic governments that keep their people "voiceless and powerless and prevent them from achieving their full aspirations in a world where they know how everyone else is living" and that Islam will peacefully thrive as part of a "Multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy", his taking to the streets "solution" does nothing to address what he, himself, has declared to be the cause of the problem.

This leaves the question, does Friedman truly believe that the Islamic world is monolithic, such that a terrorist act by a Muslim is attributable to all Muslims unless it is denounced by a "mass demonstration of 'ordinary'" Muslims? That we should assume in relation to Islam (and only Islam) that if there is not a mass protest then there must be mass acceptance?

But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say.

Is this a dodge, "I don't believe that to be true of Islam, but the terrorists do?" If so, it's a distinction that gets past the biggest fans of this type of column. Oh, I know, it's not Friedman's fault if people misunderstand his columns and use them to advance anti-Islamic bigotry - but it's not something he's going to, you know, protest.

In short, Friedman is correct to call on the Muslim world, and perhaps particularly Muslim communities in the free world, to be much more vocal in deploring terrorism that is committed in the name of Islam. If you oppose terrorism that is being committed in your name, quietude is not the answer. If the Muslim communities of the world can take to the streets over blasphemy against Islam from outside of their faith, there's room for demonstration (in not in the form of protests, then at least in the form of public vigils) protesting blasphemy from within - the acts and attitudes of certain Muslims that suggest that terrorism and violence against civilians and "infidels" is legitimate under Islam. When it comes to condemning terrorism, the words of the Islamic community should be loud and sincere. And Friedman is correct that actions often speak louder than words.

At the same time, I disagree with Friedman's implication all terrorist acts committed by Muslims are rooted in religion and are attributable to the collective attitudes of all Muslims. He's also far too simplistic in his suggestion that the type of mass protest movement he demands would have any appreciable impact on terrorist groups, or that even if some protests occurred there would emerge a coherent, sustainable movement.

The type of attitude shift Friedman wants will have to start with the opinion leaders and religious leaders, particularly those within the Islamic communities that are most inclined to spawn terrorists. And it must be facilitated by the political leaders of Arab states - the same autocratic, non-democratic leaders who facilitate and benefit from the status quo that Friedman deplores and describes as the principal cause of Islamic terrorism. It really wouldn't hurt if the U.S. and the regimes of the Arab world started working to dry up the "three rivers of rage" that Friedman sees as the principal causes of Islamic terrorism.

Heads Should Be Rolling

Thomas Friedman, following up on this New York Times article, makes the case that the leaders of the financial industry, now reaping the benefits of the gargantuan, taxpayer-funded bailout, are incompetent or worse:

Why? Because in searing detail it exposed - using Citigroup as Exhibit A - how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.

With due respect to Friedman's acknowledgement that responsibility spreads well beyond those financial institutions, and duly acknowledging his focus on the leaders of finance and that he's not defending Paulson's decision to treat them with kid gloves, how can you argue but that those at the top of the financial industry who were either too stupid or too greedy to put on the brakes should be keeping their jobs, even as they get tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and guarantees for their junk securities?

Also check out Michael Lewis’s superb essay, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” on Portfolio.com. Lewis, who first chronicled Wall Street’s excesses in “Liar’s Poker,” profiles some of the decent people on Wall Street who tried to expose the credit binge — including Meredith Whitney, a little known banking analyst who declared, over a year ago, that “Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust,” wrote Lewis.

“This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt,” he added. “She was saying they were stupid. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale... For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.”

Corrupt? Stupid? Or is it that they are so used to being lionized by a nation captivated by wealth, despite their limited knowledge and skills, and so immersed in a culture where almost anything goes in the name of profits, that they weren't aware that they should even try to look past their greed?

A few months ago, with this crisis looming, Friedman wrote,

Come August, though, I predict both men will be looking for a financial wizard as their running mates to help them steer America out of what could become a serious economic tailspin.

I wish he had "named names", as I am curious as to whether the reputations of the "financial wizards" he had in mind would have survived the past five months.

On The Other Other Hand....

Apparently, at least according to Thomas Friedman, any policy we set in relation to Iraq is a mistake.

It would be a huge mistake for McCain to give up his goal of salvaging something in Iraq. But it would also be a big mistake to assume that the public would tolerate another president’s open-ended commitment there. Similarly, it would be a huge mistake for Obama to now give up his commitment to a phased withdrawal. That is very important leverage on the Iraqis. But it would also be a big mistake not to give Iraq a fresh look and ask: can something decent still be salvaged there at an acceptable cost — something that can still serve our interests, do right by Iraqis and maybe put in place the seeds of an open society that will pay long-term benefits?

Unfortunately, posing that final question is not the same thing as answering it and, as you might expect, Friedman has no answers.

Ah, remember the good old days? When the question was, "Should we enter a war of choice in Iraq?" And it seemed pretty obvious that the Bush Administration was exaggerating Iraq's threat to the rest of the world? And had no plan for the occupation? And had no exit strategy? How did Thomas "Suck On This" Friedman come down on that one, again - "big mistake" or "huge mistake"?

The Charmas Friedhammer Gas Tax

For years, Thomas Friedman has endorsed substantial increases in the gax tax. Recently he took a different tack, suggesting a tax to the level of $4/gallon, something that is perhaps best described as a "windfall profits protection tax" or a "price control". Today, Charles Krauthammer claims, "That's my idea":

For 25 years and with utter futility (starting with "The Oil-Bust Panic," the New Republic, February 1983), I have been advocating the cure: a U.S. energy tax as a way to curtail consumption and keep the money at home. On this page in May 2004 (and again in November 2005), I called for "the government - through a tax - to establish a new floor for gasoline," by fully taxing any drop in price below a certain benchmark. The point was to suppress demand and to keep the savings (from any subsequent world price drop) at home in the U.S. Treasury rather than going abroad. At the time, oil was $41 a barrel. It is now $123.

Sure, because (as with Friedman's version) no players in the market would notice that they could simply increase their profits to the amount of the tax, and all oil companies are based in the United States.

Krauthammer complains that instead of imposing his beloved price control, the federal government attempted various forms of regulation, such as CAFE standards, that he sees as having failed to achieve their goals. It's obviously not the case that Krauthammer opposes government meddling in the marketplace, as his tax proposals and price controls do just that. Perhaps he sees taxation as the best way for the government to mold individual behavior.

Krauthammer no longer sees price controls as sufficient - now he's incorporating Friedman's call for periodic, substantial increases in the gas tax:

Want to wean us off oil? Be open and honest. The British are paying $8 a gallon for petrol. Goldman Sachs is predicting we will be paying $6 by next year. Why have the extra $2 (above the current $4) go abroad? Have it go to the U.S. Treasury as a gasoline tax and be recycled back into lower payroll taxes.

Krauthammer believes that the price of oil on the world market is pegged to the U.S. gas tax, such that oil prices will stabilize if the U.S. imposes a $2/gallon gas tax? Really? And then by recycling the money back into the hands of consumers, they'll what? Buy televisions instead of filling up their cars? Or perhaps they'll notice that public transportation continues to be overwhelmed and underfunded and wonder why, despite their enormous common ground, Krauthammer parted with Friedman on the use of gas taxes to fund and expand public transportation.

Announce a schedule of gas tax hikes of 50 cents every six months for the next two years. And put a tax floor under $4 gasoline, so that as high gas prices transform the U.S. auto fleet, change driving habits and thus hugely reduce U.S. demand - and bring down world crude oil prices - the American consumer and the American economy reap all of the benefit.

Thank you Charmas Friedhammer. And once this fantasy comes true, and the public is "thanking" Congress for setting an effective price floor on gasoline at $6/gallon, demand for an overstretched public transportation system is way past its limits, and crude oil prices have continued to climb because (as it turns out) the price per barrel isn't defined exclusively by U.S. gasoline prices, what will Krauthammer say when his "conservative" peers are blasting President Obama (or, if McCain is elected, President Clinton) for for the weaknesses of his plan? That is to say, will Krauthammer join them or will he ignore them - I doubt he would even see a third potential approach.

And am I supposed to overlook Krauthammer's timing here? He didn't propose a $2 gallon gas tax back in 2001. Back then, he claims he "only" wanted a price control that would create windfall profits for gasoline refiners. He still doesn't favor providing states and local governments with the resources they need to upgrade and update their public transportation systems. People will still be stuck driving cars, because his policies don't involve the creation and expansion of alternatives. The poorest workers who are still stuck driving will be paying $75-$100/tank to fill up their cars, and we're supposed to believe that lower payroll taxes will put that back in their paychecks? Krauthammer has an amazing ability to make pretty much any idea regressive and retrograde.

More Truth Than You Can Handle

In case you haven't yet had enough of pundits wishing that politicians would tell the truth as they see it, Thomas Friedman offers us some more truthiness. Friedman opens:

Imagine for a minute, just a minute, that someone running for president was able to actually tell the truth, the real truth, to the American people about what would be the best — I mean really the best — energy policy for the long-term economic health and security of our country. I realize this is a fantasy, but play along with me for a minute. What would this mythical, totally imaginary, truth-telling candidate say?

At this point you're probably already thinking, "I don't know, but I suspect it's something different than what you're about to say." Perhaps you're expecting that it will be yet another call by Friedman for an increased gas tax.

No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever.

This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today.

We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a “price floor” for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today.

Price controls? Friedman is literally suggesting that having "had the courage to tell voters that the McCain-Clinton summer gas-giveaway plan was a fraud", Barack Obama should guarantee windfall oil company profits by preventing the free market from ever leading to a gas price below $4/gallon?

Wouldn’t it be amazing if he took the next step and put the right plan before the American people? Wouldn’t that just be amazing?

It sure would, Mr. Friedman, but (so sorry) your plan isn't the right one.

If It's Not Sustainable....

Scott Lemieux comments on this article,

The apparent defection of Sadr's militias illustrates the fundamental problem: the lack of a legitimate state with sufficient coercive capacity. Iraq still doesn't have one, becuase the temporary security improvements of the surge haven't led to substantial political progress. The U.S. military simply can't create an effective state out of thin air. And this is reflected by the assertions of "U.S. officials" that we'll need to give it some more Freidmans.* Given the strategic objectives, "successes" that require the indefinite presence of high levels of U.S. troops to sustain aren't "successes" at all.

A lot of the measures used to estimate "success" or "failure" of the Iraq War, such as troop casualties, civilian casualties, the frequency of bombings, or levels of sectarian violence, are very poor measures, as those numbers can change very quickly. Genuine political progress is necessary to achieving long-term stability.

Unfortunately, it appears that no such progress is forthcoming. To put it mildly, seeing Sadr's Shiite militias jockeying for power with the government does not reassure me that the Shiite-dominated government can "reconcile" with Sunni and Kurdish factions. Even assuming it wants to. Or that the minority factions truly want to reconcile with a central government.

A significant troop presence can help keep the lid on a pressure cooker but, absent political progress, sooner or later "That thing is gonna blow."

___________

* A "Friedman", "Friedman Unit", or (most cheekily) a "F.U.", is a period of six months, referencing Times columnist Thomas Friedman's willingness to describe "the next six months" in Iraq as the period of time crucial to determining the viability of our goals, while disregarding actual outcomes.