I Didn’t Read It But

a friend tells me that this New Yorker profile of Tom Friedman gives him a pass on his Iraq War error by not quoting from any of his drum-banging columns back then. I'd have hoped that the author would have scrutinized Friedman's actually brilliant statement in Haaretz about the war being conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals within a mile or so of his office. I imagine not. Also Friedman's famous (to me anyway) statement in Slate that the war was necessary to smash the Arab belief that they could send suicide bombers into Tel Aviv pizza parlors. A grievous error, with a religious root: That is not my war; my country does not gobble Arab land and push Arabs off it. Indeed, my country has now overlooked suicide terrorism–in the country Friedman urged it to occupy– as a political tool. No, the necessary battle among Jews over Iraq-and-Zionism was, I gather, in no wise advanced by the New Yorker–which after all has some dogs in the fight. Dogs with a crushed larynx and a torn ear or two.