File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0312, message 10


Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 00:52:14 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: FYI: NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed: The Chant Not Heard


Cologne 02-Dec-2003

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN is well qualified to speak on Middle Eastern affairs.

Michael

-------- Original Message --------
Betreff: NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Columnist: The Chant Not Heard
Datum: Mon,  1 Dec 2003 18:07:47 -0500 (EST)
Von: artefact-AT-t-online.de
Rückantwort: artefact-AT-t-online.de
An: artefact-AT-t-online.de

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by artefact-AT-t-online.de.


\----------------------------------------------------------/

Op-Ed Columnist: The Chant Not Heard

November 30, 2003
 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN 


I stood on the sidewalk in London the other day and watched
thousands of antiwar, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair
protesters pass by. They chanted every antiwar slogan you
could imagine and many you couldn't print. It was
entertaining - but also depressing, because it was so
disconnected from the day's other news. 

Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown
up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing
or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet
nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading,
"Osama, How Many Innocents Did You Kill Today?" or
"Baathists - Hands Off the U.N. and the Red Cross in Iraq."
Hey, I would have settled for "Bush and Blair Equal Bin
Laden and Saddam" - something, anything, that acknowledged
that the threats to global peace today weren't just coming
from the White House and Downing Street. 

Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding
an antiwar rally on a day when your own people have been
murdered - and not even mentioning it or those who
perpetrated it. Watching this scene, I couldn't help but
wonder whether George Bush had made the liberal left crazy.
It can't see anything else in the world today, other than
the Bush-Blair original sin of launching the Iraq war,
without U.N. approval or proof of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. 

Believe me, being a liberal on every issue other than this
war, I have great sympathy for where the left is coming
from. And if I didn't, my wife would remind me. It would be
a lot easier for the left to engage in a little postwar
reconsideration if it saw even an ounce of reflection,
contrition or self-criticism coming from the conservatives,
such as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who drove this war,
yet so bungled its aftermath and so misjudged the
complexity of postwar Iraq. Moreover, the Bush team is such
a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that
many liberals just want to punch its lights out - which is
what the Howard Dean phenomenon is all about. 

But here's why the left needs to get beyond its opposition
to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and
moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in
Baghdad: 

First, even though the Bush team came to this theme late in
the day, this war is the most important liberal,
revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the
Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq
today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant,
pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I
don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to an
unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest
things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a
moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best
shot. 

Unless we begin the long process of partnering with the
Arab world to dig it out of the developmental hole it's in,
this angry, frustrated region is going to spew out threats
to world peace forever. The next six months in Iraq - which
will determine the prospects for democracy-building there -
are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in
a long, long time. And it is way too important to leave it
to the Bush team alone. 

On Iraq, there has to be more to the left than
anti-Bushism. The senior Democrat who understands that best
is the one not running for president - Senator Joe Biden.
He understands that the liberal opposition to the Bush team
should be from the right - to demand that we send more
troops to Iraq, and more committed democracy builders, to
do the job better and smarter than the Bush team has. 

Second, we are seeing - from Bali to Istanbul - the birth
of a virulent, nihilistic form of terrorism that seeks to
kill any advocates of modernism and pluralism, be they
Muslims, Christians or Jews. This terrorism started even
before 9/11, and is growing in the darkest corners of the
Muslim world. It is the most serious threat to open
societies, because one more 9/11 and we'll really see an
erosion of our civil liberties. Ultimately, only Arabs and
Muslims can root out this threat, but they will do that
only when they have ownership over their own lives and
societies. Nurturing that is our real goal in Iraq. 

"In general," says Robert Wright, author of "Nonzero," "too
few who opposed the war understand the gravity of the
terrorism problem, and too few who favored it understand
the subtlety of the problem." 

For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say:
We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered
to see in London was, "Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it from
here."    

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/opinion/30FRIE.html?ex=1071320067&ei=1&en=2afe9412ad242880


---------------------------------


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company



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