Friedman initially hocks the possibility of a democratizing war on Iraq as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,”10 based on a variety of fluctuating reasons, such as that “install[ing] a decent, tolerant, pluralistic, multireligious government in Iraq … would be the best answer and antidote to both Saddam and Osama.”11 However, Friedman himself reiterates that the real threat to “open, Western, liberal societies today” consists not of “the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables—the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society.”12 No compelling justification is ever provided for how a war against deterrables whose weapons are not the problem will solve the problem of undeterrables who are the weapons and who by definition cannot be deterred anyway. As for Friedman’s speculation in a 1997 column that “Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles,” this is not entirely reconcilable with his suggestion in the very same article that Saddam be eliminated via “a head shot”—not generally a setting on such weaponry.13
Though he never disputes the idea that war on Iraq was a “legitimate choice,”14 Friedman gradually downgrades his war aims to “salvag[ing] something decent”15 in said country, while appearing to forget for varying stretches of time that the U.S. military is also still involved in a war in Afghanistan. Given the prominence of Friedman’s perch at the New York Times, from which he is permitted to promote—and to disguise as pedagogical in nature—bellicose projects resulting in over one million Iraqi deaths to date,16 it is not at all far-fetched to resurrect the comparison with Columbus in order to suggest that the designated heir is also complicit in the decimation of foreign populations standing in the way of civilization’s demands.
The foundations of Friedman’s journalistic education consist of a tenth-grade introductory course taught by Hattie M. Steinberg at St. Louis Park High School in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1969, after which Friedman claims to have “never needed, or taken, another course in journalism.”17 Following a BA from Brandeis University and a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford, Friedman worked briefly for United Press International and was hired by the New York Times in 1981. He served as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem in the 1980s before becoming the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C., and then, in 1995, its foreign affairs columnist. He has written five bestselling books, dealing variously with the Middle East, globalization, and the clean energy quest: From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002), The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), and Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America (2008).18
Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law.19 The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”20
In the case of Friedman’s musings on the Arab/Muslim world, the reduction process produces decontextualized and often patronizing or blatantly racist generalizations, such as that suicide bombing in Israel indicates a “collective madness”21 on the part of the Palestinians, whom Friedman has determined it is permissible to refer to collectively as “Ahmed.”22 Criticism of Israeli crimes is largely restricted to the issue of settlement-building; generalizations about the United States meanwhile often arrive in the form of observations along the lines of: “Is this a great country or what?”23 This does not mean, however, that the United States is not in perennial danger of descending into decisive non-greatness if it does not abide by Friedman’s diktats on oil dependence and other matters, such as the need to expand U.S. embassy libraries across the globe because “you’d be amazed at how many young people abroad had their first contact with America through an embassy library.”24
Complementing his reductionist habit is Friedman’s insistence on imbuing trivial experiences abroad with undue or false significance, often in support of whatever “meta-story” he is peddling at the moment. The “tiny Vietnamese woman crouched on the sidewalk with her bathroom scale” in Hanoi in 1995, to whom Friedman gives a dollar to weigh himself each morning of his visit, thus becomes proof that “globalization emerges from below, from street level, from people’s very souls and from their very deepest aspirations.”25 The Pakistani youth wearing a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” on Friedman’s Emirates Air flight in 2001 becomes a sign that Pakistan is either the Titanic or the iceberg.26 The presence of pork chops at Friedman’s cousin Giora’s bar mitzvah in Israel prompts deep reflection: “I thought about the meaning of Giora’s pork chops for several days. They seemed to contain a larger message.”27
Friedman begins The Lexus and the Olive Tree with a detailed recounting of a 1994 experience in a Tokyo hotel in which his room service request for four oranges results first in four glasses of orange juice and then in four peeled and diced oranges, all transported by a Japanese serviceperson unable to correctly pronounce the word “orange.” Only after almost two pages do we learn that the point of this citrus saga, plus another one in a Hanoi hotel dining room involving tangerines, is that Friedman “would find a lot of things on my plate and outside my door that I wasn’t planning to find as I traveled the globe for the Times.”28
That these extensive travels have not produced a more relevant introductory anecdote to a book about globalization is curious, especially since Friedman boasts in Longitudes and Attitudes that he has “total freedom, and an almost unlimited budget, to explore,”29 and especially since he criticizes writers who eschew shoe-leather reporting in favor of “sitting at home in their pajamas firing off digital mortars.”30 It perhaps does not occur to our foreign affairs columnist that, in the era of online publications, most writers do not have access to the funds that would enable them to fire off digital mortars about the “Russian breakfast” option on the room service menu at the five-star Meliá Cohiba in Havana,31 or to arrive at conclusions regarding the root causes of poverty in Africa by going on safari in Botswana.32 It should be noted, however, that Friedman’s coverage of the Lebanese civil war and the first Palestinian Intifada—though often plagued by untruths as well—was more readily classifiable as shoe-leather reporting, perhaps because he did not define his job at the time as “tourist with an attitude.”33
Friedman additionally reveals in Longitudes and Attitudes that the “only person who sees my two columns each week before they show up in the newspaper is a copy editor who edits them for grammar and spelling,” and that for the duration of his columnist career up to this point he has “never had a conversation with the publisher of The New York Times about any opinion I’ve adopted—before or after any column I’ve written.”34 It comes as no surprise, of course, that said publisher feels no need to reign in an employee whose last failure to toe the paper’s editorial line appears to have occurred in 1982, when Friedman’s reference to indiscriminate Israeli shelling of West Beirut as indiscriminate launches a battle ultimately resulting in a $5,000 raise and an “emotional lunch” with New York Times executive editor A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, who “threw his arms around me in a big Abe bear hug, told me all was forgiven and then whispered in my ear: ‘Now listen, you clever little !%#@: don’t you ever do that again.’”35 Friedman’s confirmed immunity from most kinds of editing meanwhile explains his continued ability to churn out incoherent metaphors, the terms of which he himself tends to lose track.
Consider, for example, his pre–Iraq war advice to George W. Bush to throw his steering wheel out the window in a vehicular game of chicken with Saddam Hussein, immediately