Seeing Is Believing

New York Times: By Thomas Friedman

“My fellow Americans, ask yourselves this: What will convey to you, in your gut — without anyone interpreting it — that the surge is working and worth sustaining?” My answer: If I saw something with my own eyes that I hadn’t seen before — Iraq’s Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders stepping forward, declaring their willingness to work out their differences by a set deadline and publicly asking us to stay until they do. That’s the only thing worth giving more time to develop.

But it may just be too late. Had the surge happened in 2003, when it should have, it might have prevented the kindling of all of Iraq’s sectarian passions. But now that those fires have been set, trying to unify Iraq feels like doing carpentry on a burning house.

I’ve been thinking about Iraq’s multi-religious soccer team, which just won the Asian Cup. The team was assembled from Iraqis who play for other pro teams outside Iraq. In fact, it was reported that the Iraqi soccer team hadn’t played a home game in 17 years because of violence or U.N. sanctions. In short, it’s a real team with a virtual country. That’s what I fear the surge is trying to protect: a unified Iraq that exists only in the imagination and on foreign soccer fields.

Help Wanted: Peacemaker

New York Times: By Thomas Friedman

So let’s get this straight: Iraqi parliamentarians, at least those not already boycotting the Parliament, will be on vacation in August so they can be cool, while young American men and women, and Iraqi Army soldiers, will be fighting in the heat in order to create a proper security environment in which Iraqi politicians can come back in September and continue squabbling while their country burns.

Here is what I think of that: I think it’s a travesty — and for the Bush White House to excuse it with a Baghdad weather report shows just how much it has become a hostage to Iraq. ...

President Bush baffles me. If your whole legacy was riding on Iraq, what would you do? I’d draft the country’s best negotiators — Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, George Shultz, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross or Richard Holbrooke — and ask one or all of them to go to Baghdad, under a U.N. mandate, with the following orders:

“I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you’ve reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.”

The last point is crucial. Any lawyer will tell you, if you’re negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you’ll never walk away, you’ve got no leverage. And in Iraq, we’ve never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.

That’s why the Iraqi Parliament is on vacation in August and our soldiers are fighting in the heat.

Justice Secures His Place As a Critic of Integration

New York Times:By NEIL A. LEWIS

In the context of higher education, Justice Thomas said earlier that affirmative action programs cruelly deceived black students admitted to elite law schools under special programs who then found that they could not compete.

''These overmatched students take the bait,'' he wrote in 2003, ''only to find they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition.''

Justice Thomas was himself admitted to Yale Law School under a set-aside program for minority applicants, although his limited public comments on the subject suggest he has resisted accepting that he was given special treatment.

The new biography of Justice Thomas raises the idea that his skepticism about integration is a product of his own unhappy journey through integrated school situations. ...

Mr. Merida and Mr. Fletcher add, ''But almost every step of the way, he has been nagged by doubts and has burned with anger at slights, real and imagined.''

Justice Thomas's own coming memoir, ''My Grandfather's Son,'' is expected to provide his perspective on events like his time at Yale.

''People who see affirmative action programs as being a benefit to the African-American community are taken aback when they see Thomas opposed to them,'' said Mr. Schmoke of Howard, who is also the former mayor of Baltimore. ''They say, 'Wait a minute, didn't he get on the Supreme Court by race-based decision-making?' ''...

Christopher Edley Jr., the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, said no one had seriously argued that just putting black children alongside white children made them learn better.

''The central claim for integration today is aspirational,'' Mr. Edley said. ''How do we build a society that is free of the poisons of color?''

Mr. Edley, who served in the Clinton and Carter administrations and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, argued that ''public education is the single best opportunity to promote understanding across our most dangerous divisions.'' He said Justice Thomas's views provided ''shelter'' for his fellow conservative justices who wanted to end all efforts at maintaining diversified schools.

In or Out

New York Times: By Thomas Friedman

As we move into the endgame, though, the public needs to understand that neither Republicans nor Democrats are presenting them with a realistic strategy.

Obviously, President Bush’s stay-the-course approach is bankrupt. It shows no signs of producing any self-sustaining — and that is the metric — unified, stable Iraq. But the various gradual, partial withdrawal proposals by many Democrats and dissident Republicans are not realistic either. The passions that have been unleashed in Iraq are not going to accommodate some partial withdrawal plan, where we just draw down troops, do less patrolling, more training and fight Al Qaeda types. It’s a fantasy.

The minute we start to withdraw, all hell will break loose in the areas we leave, and there will be a no-holds-barred contest for power among Iraqi factions. ...We must not kid ourselves: our real choices in Iraq are either all in or all out — with the exception of Kurdistan. If those are our only real choices, then we need to look clearly at each. ...

Getting out ... means more ethnic, religious and tribal killings all across Iraq. It will be one of the most morally ugly scenes you can imagine — no less than Darfur. You will see U.S. troops withdrawing and Iraqi civilians and soldiers who have supported us clinging to our tanks for protection as we rumble out the door. ...

...I prefer setting a withdrawal date, but accompanying it with a last-ditch U.N.-led — not U.S. — diplomatic effort to get the Iraqi parties to resolve their political differences. If they can, then any withdrawal can be postponed. If they can’t agree — even with a gun to their heads about to go off — then staying is truly pointless and leaving by a set date is the only option.

This does bring back images of helicopters on the roofs of the Saigon embassy. It also begins the next stage of public debate, on not whether but how we withdraw, taking dead aim at the "staged redeployment" rhetoric of recent days.
I am not necessarily convinced by Friedman's prognostications (his record on Iraq is, to put it very generously, mixed), but the Administration's utter failure to develop a meaningful alternative strategy (e.g., soft partition with negotiated population exchanges), and the utter failure of what passes for an Iraqi central government, may well lead to what Friedman foresees.

TWB on Tom Friedman's latest, and earlier

The Capitol Energy Crisis - New York Times: By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When you watch a baby being born, after a difficult pregnancy, it is so painful and bloody for the mother it is always hard to tell the truth and say, “Gosh, that baby is really ugly.” But that’s how I feel about the energy legislation passed (and not passed) by the Senate last week.

I have a long time love-hate relationship with Tom Friedman. I started reading him when he was reporting from Beirut, and then from Jerusalem, decades back, and found his reports stimulating and illuminating. They, along with my university studies and visits to Israel, helped to shape (and to reinforce) my views of the Middle East. I like him less as a columnist, particularly outside this initial area of his expertise. I particularly haven't liked his flogging of a particular (and in my view, limited and distorted) view of globalization. (I'm aware others would apply those adjectives to his work on the Middle East). And then, of course, there is the Iraq War.

Given Friedman's tendency to flog a topic of choice in the runup to and aftermath of his best-selling book on the given topic, I'm relatively pleased that he seems to be moving toward some combination of green/energy themes, and that he--so far at least--hasn't bought into an obvious pro-corporate smokescreen, so to speak, as he largely did on globalization. The energy/environmental nexus needs flogging, over multiple dimensions and a long time. His early columns, including this one, offer some promise.

In my deeply repressed pre-law, pre-bioethics past, I studied economics, with a particular focus on economic development in the third world and on the economics of oil and energy. It wasn't a good fit for me--I was too values-infused and opinionated for a purportedly "value-neutral" (or values hidden), efficiency uber alles academic discipline, or for adhering to the party lines of the time. No regrets--law and bioethics suit me better, and have treated me reasonably well. But the repressed past has made me a more critically informed reader and thinker on the issues I professionally left behind. That was even more so during the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was being ridiculed for proposing energy taxes and floor prices to create incentives to reduce gas consumption and facilitate major investments in innovation and alternative energy technologies, and when I was more hopeful that we could master and control the safety, environmental, and disposal challenges of nuclear power technologies.

That was thirty years ago. Glad to see we have solved all those problems and moved on so successfully. (I was somewhat less cynical about the government/corporate/ lobbying/campaign financing nexus in the days of my naive and innocent youth). I suppose most public issues have a cyclical dimension to them. We thought we cleaned up the augean stable of the imperial presidency with the post-Watergate reforms back in those years, too. (Little inside joke there.)

Where was this going? Does it matter? I'll follow Friedman's newest, uh, Crusade with interest.

Behind the Masks

New York Times: By Thomas Friedman

...But certain habits, especially bad ones, die hard — and they can end up warping your own society as much as your enemy’s. You can see what’s happened here: If it’s O.K. to wear masks when confronting the Jews, it eventually becomes O.K. to wear masks when confronting other Palestinians. If it becomes O.K. to use suicide bombers against the Jews, it eventually becomes O.K. to use suicide bombers against other Muslims. What goes around comes around.

Beyond old habits, though, there is also some new shame. These masks are worn by fighters who not only wish to shield themselves from Israel’s gaze, but also from the gaze of their parents, friends and neighbors.

After generations of Arabs highlighting the justice and nobility of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, there was surely an element of shame that Palestinian brothers were killing brothers, throwing each other off rooftops, dragging each other from hospital beds and generally ripping apart Palestinian society in a naked power struggle. There was nothing noble about this fight, which is why, I would guess, many wanted to wear masks. The mask both protects you against shame and liberates you to kill your brothers — and their children."...

“These masks are the uniforms of the new armies of the 21st century and the new kind of violence,” which in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza “no longer distinguishes between war against the stranger and war against members of your own society,” argued political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “Just as this new violence doesn’t have a front, it doesn’t have a face. It doesn’t have boundaries.”

Friedman may take this metaphor over the top--and I expect he will be criticized for it--but I think there is a core point worthy of notice.

What would (the world) want?

From The New York Times: By Thomas L. Friedman

...when was the last time you saw a U.S. president or politician being held up as a role model abroad? It’s been awhile. And that got me thinking about Mr. Obama. It seems to me that the strongest case one could make for an Obama presidency right now is rarely articulated: it is his potential to repair the broken relationship between America and the world....

The Bush-Cheney team, by its own hand, has undermined its ability to talk about American principles in a way that foreigners will take seriously. They have moral clarity and no moral authority. ... It also lets the foreigners off the hook.

I think Mr. Obama has the potential to force a new discussion. For now at least, he has a certain moral authority because of his life story, which makes him harder to dismiss. And while he is a good talker, he strikes me as an even better listener. It’s amazing what people will let you say to them, if you just listen to them first....

Which brings me back to Mr. Obama. I believe that what has propelled his candidacy up to now — more than anything — is that many Americans have projected onto him their hunger for community, their hunger for a president with the voice, instincts and moral authority to make it so much harder for foreigners to be anti-American or for Americans to be anti-one-another.

Although American Presidents have more impact on the lives of millions of people around the world than their own national leaders, elected or otherwise, foreign nationals have no voice in the (s)election of the American President. And it's been a while since the respect of non-Americans has played any (positive?) role on the selection of an American leader. (Perhaps it made a marginal difference in the very close 1960 election of John F. Kennedy.) It will have an effect on my vote in the coming primaries, for precisely the reasons adduced by Friedman. Barack Obama has the unique background, standing, and persona that could reverse the precipitous decline in American standing around the world resulting from the calamitous policies of the current Administration.

Friedman gets this one right.