Taibbi on Iraq War and Friedman

[ravi <ravi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/4534

[...]

But the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of
ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully
assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking
about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people
raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws
gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar
corporate-executive dads. They went for the war because people they
trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up
running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of
responsibility here at home.

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a
wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all
he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter
his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell
them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the
spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.

So he goes into America's sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star
mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and
sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to
turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a
half-baked international policy analysis -- what's "going on" on "the
Street," as Friedman usually puts it -- that he cleverly makes sound
like the world's sexiest collection of stock tips: "So I was playing
golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me..."

This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling
salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99
Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having
lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about
this amazing opportunity.... And these middle-manager types who live in
Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in
Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman's books, treat his
every word like gospel and before you know it they're all talking about
Israeli politics and "the situation" in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like
they're experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of
people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their
lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know
something about something they actually know nothing about, and next
thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between
rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and
thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive
fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out
of lemonade."

[...]