A new era of glasnost in main stream media?

Stop the presses!

Climb back down from the barricades, if only for a moment to get the latest news.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, after stumbling in the dark for eight or so years, has found the Aladdin’s lamp of Mid East politics. He is undergoing a metamorphis that will surely cost him friends at the cocktail parties where media elites meet on the Upper East side to compare notes and agree that all things liberal are good and all things conservative are by definition bad.

Friedman has discovered the genius of George W. Bush; though he surely never in his lifetime will use those words to describe the man.

For many years those who know me have heard me espouse my theory of why we went to war in Iraq. Friedman's column (in its entirety below) is the first time I have seen this theory mentioned in print; and in the New York Times no less.

Here is the way I saw the world immediately post 9/11.

George W. Bush looked around the world and came to the conclusion that America would continue to suffer terrorist attacks as long as the problems of the Mid East continued to fester. A succession of attacks going back to the Beirut Barracks, the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and the first WTC bombing were clear evidence that the oil rich regions of the world were at war with us, even if our previous leaders refused to accept that state of affairs.

Eschewing the Clintonian police action approach, President Bush was determined to change the dynamic on the ground in the Mid East because it was in America's strategic interest to do so. Failure to fight this war on terror would condemn our children and grandchildren to a world of ascendant terrorism.

I believe President Bush correctly saw the Israeli / Palestine situation as the flash point for terror attacks against America. It is a contentious region where peace cannot be imposed from afar. The people themselves had to want peace before the conditions for settlement on the ground would be ripe.

But Syria, Iran and other Arab States had an interest in keeping the pot boiling on the West Bank as a way of focusing attention away from their own internal problems. Thus there was a constant threat that Arab armies would once again rise up and attack Israel on behalf of the "poor Palestinians”.

For decades the Arab world refused to assimilate the Palestinians and kept them in a perpetual state of unrest in "refugee camps" in the region.

Where else in the world have we ever seen refugee camps that have been in existence for five or more decades? At some point people usually stop being a refugee from one country and start becoming a resident - if not citizen - of another.

Everywhere in the world except Palestine.

Whole generations of Palestinians were born, grew up and died in refugee camps with no alternative in sight except war with Israel.

So against this backdrop of perpetual war, President Bush took the strategic initiative to create the conditions for peace for our children and grandchildren. He recognized that one condition was required to create the change that would break the cycle of terror: a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian situation; and that couldn't happen unless there was "space" (as Mr. Friedman puts it) to let this happen. President Bush correctly saw we needed an American military presence in the region to keep the Arab states from ganging up on Israel.

So we looked around for volunteers, and who should be waving his arm high in the air, but the blustering Sadam Hussein, proclaiming he was not going to comply with the terms of the peace treaty he signed to end Gulf War I, and that he had weapons of mass destruction and wasn't afraid to use them in the "mother of all battles".

Bingo.

We decided to take him at his word, and that was a bad thing for Sadam.

America fought a brilliant war, and then botched an uneasy peace for a while.

But the net effect is there are 150,000 American troops in the region within striking distance of Syria, Iran and Egypt. No Arab army was going to march - or even threaten to march - to the West bank with that very real threat in their backyards.

And that is how the "space" was created to allow a just settlement of the Israeli/.Palestinian issues; admittedly still a work in progress.

Meanwhile, against all the sage advice of the liberal media who wrung their collective elitist hands in unison and proclaimed that democracy could never work among the Arabs, Iraq is slowly emerging as a positive role model for oppressed people throughout the region.

How much do you want to bet that Iranian students are jealous of the freedoms Iraqi's enjoy? The sons and daughters of the Persian Empire are less capable of self governance than the Iraqi people? Never.

And that is the insidious genius of George W. Bush. The democratic self governing genie has been loosed from the bottle in the Mid East and refuses to go back in.

Thank you George W. Bush.

And Mr. Friedman, though you have arrived fashionably late to the party, you have at last arrived.

Clustering as they do in Liberal refugee camps in New York and Hollywood, it may take your mainstream media colleagues a few decades more to get here.





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June 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Winds of Change?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the Middle East, and recently I was thinking of updating it with a new introduction. It was going to be very simple — just one page, indeed just one line: “Nothing has changed.”

It took me two days covering the elections in Beirut to realize that I was dead wrong. No, something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new. Pull up a chair; this is going to be interesting.

What we saw in the Lebanese elections, where the pro-Western March 14 movement won a surprise victory over the pro-Iranian Hezbollah coalition, what we saw in the ferment for change exposed by the election campaign in Iran, and what we saw in the provincial elections in Iraq, where the big pro-Iranian party got trounced, is the product of four historical forces that have come together to crack open this ossified region.

First is the diffusion of technology. The Internet, blogs, YouTube and text messaging via cellphones, particularly among the young — 70 percent of Iranians are under 30 — is giving Middle Easterners cheap tools to communicate horizontally, to mobilize politically and to criticize their leaders acerbically, outside of state control. It is also enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cellphone cameras.

I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!

The evening of Lebanon’s election, I went to the Beirut home of Saad Hariri, the leader of the March 14 coalition, to interview him. In a big living room, he had a gigantic wall-size television broadcasting the results. And alongside the main TV were 16 smaller flat-screen TVs with electronic maps of Lebanon. Hariri’s own election experts were working on laptops and breaking down every vote from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them on the screens.

Second, for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result. Elections in the Arab world were a joke — literally. They used to tell this story about Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad. After a Syrian election, an aide came in and told Assad: “Mr. President, you won 99.8 percent of the votes. It means that only two-tenths of one percent of Syrians didn’t vote for you. What more could ask for?”

Assad answered: “Their names!”

Lebanese, by contrast, just waited up all night for their election results — no one knew what they’d be.

Third, the Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists — Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza.

Fortunately, each one of these Islamist groups overplayed their hand by imposing religious lifestyles or by dragging their societies into confrontations the people didn’t want. This alienated and frightened more secular, mainstream Arabs and Muslims and has triggered an “awakening” backlash among moderates from Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The Times’s Robert Mackey reported that in Tehran “chants of ‘Death to America’ ” at rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week were answered by chants of “Death to the Taliban — in Kabul and Tehran” at a rally for his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

Finally, along came President Barack Hussein Obama. Arab and Muslim regimes found it very useful to run against George Bush. The Bush team demonized them, and they demonized the Bush team. Autocratic regimes, like Iran’s, drew energy and legitimacy from that confrontation, and it made it very easy for them to discredit anyone associated with America. Mr. Obama’s soft power has defused a lot of that. As result, “pro-American” is not such an insult anymore.

I don’t know how all this shakes out; the forces against change in this region are very powerful — see Iran — and ruthless. But for the first time in a long time, the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism have a little wind at their backs. Good for them.