Especially when the Pulitzer Prize winner is calling for America to effectively ally itself with ISIS in Syria.

The definition of a “chicken hawk” is relatively straightforward. It’s a person “who strongly supports war or other military action, yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age.” And, according to Wikipedia, “generally the implication is that chicken hawks lack the moral character to participate in war themselves, preferring to ask others to support, fight and perhaps die in an armed conflict.”

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/384780-friedman-nyt-isis-support-us/

For the second time in as many years, Thomas Friedman has explicitly advocated that the United States use the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a proxy force against Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. The New York Times foreign affairs columnist made this suggestion in his Wednesday column, “Why Is Trump Fighting ISIS in Syria?” 

...

According to one 2015 poll by Virginia-based research firm ORB International, 82 percent of Syrians and 85 percent of Iraqis believe ISIS to be a creation of the United States. Indeed, the New York Times has spent considerable incheshand-wringing about why these type of “conspiracy theories” are so widespread in the Muslim world.

Perhaps, one can imagine, they would be less so if Western columnists weren’t casually cheerleading for using the extremist group as a bludgeon against America’s enemies.

read more:

http://fair.org/home/thomas-friedmans-perverse-love-affair-with-isis/

Friedman does not care about the dead or the injured in wars... Being like the modern times Frank Burns, he does not rise above being in charge of the rubbish dump and making a nonsense of himself with military pompish rectitude while fleeing under the table when the first bomb falls a kilometre away.

Thomas Friedman does not care if globalisation destroys people as long as there is a MacDonald in every towns, big and small, of the world. He can't see that globalisation is not for everyone. He can't see that globalisation is a system designed by the rich, by which the rich can suck the poor of the world dry and maintain worldwide supremacy. And anyone in the road of "globalisation" has to be "flattened", destroyed, removed, but then the Thomas moron has the gall to align himself with Green technology as the flavour of the month... Piss off man, you are a disgrace to your newspaper which is a disgrace to itself anyway for having supported the war on Saddam for which it "apologised" but never ever fully explained the deceit of the Bush Government, nor will it explain the deceit of the Obama administration (and Hillary's), and that of Trump the idiot.  Friedman is a great populist writer of fiction, but a dangerous dreadful thinker. 

Actually, he could be right... The US should get out of the Middle East and let Syria deal with Daesh... Knowing the Russians very well, Gus can assure you that they would win this war within the next three weeks should the US not be in the way. Would this be acceptable to Mr Frank Burns? I don't think so...

social and economic impacts of climate

For centuries, thinkers have considered whether and how climatic conditions influence the nature of societies and the performance of economies. A multidisciplinary renaissance of quantitative empirical research has begun to illuminate key linkages in the coupling of these complex natural and human systems, uncovering notable effects of climate on health, agriculture, economics, conflict, migration, and demographics.

Past scholars of climate-society interactions were limited to theorizing on the basis of anecdotal evidence; advances in computing, data availability, and study design now allow researchers to draw generalizable causal inferences tying climatic events to social outcomes. This endeavor has demonstrated that a range of climate factors have substantial influence on societies and economies, both past and present, with important implications for the future.

Temperature, in particular, exerts remarkable influence over human systems at many social scales; heat induces mortality, has lasting impact on fetuses and infants, and incites aggression and violence while lowering human productivity. High temperatures also damage crops, inflate electricity demand, and may trigger population movements within and across national borders. Tropical cyclones cause mortality, damage assets, and reduce economic output for long periods. Precipitation extremes harm economies and populations predominately in agriculturally dependent settings. These effects are often quantitatively substantial; for example, we compute that temperature depresses current U.S. maize yields roughly 48%, warming trends since 1980 elevated conflict risk in Africa by 11%, and future warming may slow global economic growth rates by 0.28 percentage points year−1.

Much research aims to forecast impacts of future climate change, but we point out that society may also benefit from attending to ongoing impacts of climate in the present, because current climatic conditions impose economic and social burdens on populations today that rival in magnitude the projected end-of-century impacts of climate change. For instance, we calculate that current temperature climatologies slow global economic growth roughly 0.25 percentage points year−1, comparable to the additional slowing of 0.28 percentage points year−1 projected from future warming.

Both current and future losses can theoretically be avoided if populations adapt to fully insulate themselves from the climate—why this has not already occurred everywhere remains a critical open question. For example, clear patterns of adaptation in health impacts and in response to tropical cyclones contrast strongly with limited adaptation in agricultural and macroeconomic responses to temperature. Although some theories suggest these various levels of adaptation ought to be economically optimal, in the sense that costs of additional adaptive actions should exactly balance the benefits of avoided climate-related losses, there is no evidence that allows us to determine how closely observed “adaptation gaps” reflect optimal investments or constrained suboptimal adaptation that should be addressed through policy.

Recent findings provide insight into the historical evolution of the global economy; they should inform how we respond to modern climatic conditions, and they can guide how we understand the consequences of future climate changes. Although climate is clearly not the only factor that affects social and economic outcomes, new quantitative measurements reveal that it is a major factor, often with first-order consequences. Research over the coming decade will seek to understand the numerous mechanisms that drive these effects, with the hope that policy may interfere with the most damaging pathways of influence.

Both current and future generations will benefit from near-term investigations. “Cracking the code” on when, where, and why adaptation is or is not successful will generate major social benefits today and in the future. In addition, calculations used to design global climate change policies require as input “damage functions” that describe how social and economic losses accrue under different climatic conditions, essential elements that now can (and should) be calibrated to real-world relationships. Designing effective, efficient, and fair policies to manage anthropogenic climate change requires that we possess a quantitative grasp of how different investments today may affect economic and social possibilities in the future.

read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6304/aad9837

No matter how hard White House officials try, they cannot construct a coherent ‘Trump doctrine’ that would make sense amid the chaos that has afflicted US foreign policy in recent months.

However, this chaos is not entirely the making of President Donald Trump alone.

Since 1945, the United States has vied for total global leadership. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, gave it complete global hegemony.

The US became the force that stabilized and destabilized any region in the world, as it saw fit – which always served the interests of the US and its allies.

Political opinions and ideological strands in the US, but also globally, were formulated around this reality. Often unwittingly, we are all pushed into one of two categories: pro- or anti-American.

For decades, many critical voices warned of an uncontested unipolar world. Conformists fought back against the ‘un-American’, and ‘unpatriotic’ few, who dared break rank.

In the late 1980’s, Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the end of history’, now that the US and its western allies managed to defeat communism. He prophesized the end of ‘sociocultural evolution’, where a new form of a single human government can be formed.

It appeared, however fleetingly, that all the obstacles before the American vision of total domination have been subdued. Thomas Friedman of the ‘New York Times’ imagined such a world in his bestselling book, ‘The World is Flat’.

He wrote, with the wisdom of a sage and the triumphalism of a victorious war general, “Communism was a great system for making people equally poor – in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

But history never ended. It just went through a new cycle of conflicts, problems and alliances of enemies and foes. Unchecked consumerism was hardly a triumph for the neoliberal order, but a defeat of a delicately balanced planet, where global warming emerged as the world’s greatest enemy. American military power could hardly wait to rearrange the Arab world, as once promised, by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Since then, the so-called ‘New Middle East’, has become a horrifying nightmare that traversed many countries and destabilized the entire region.

Worse still, the US economy has crashed, taking down with it the global economy and reducing some of the smallest, most vulnerable countries into abject poverty.

The rise of Donald Trump to power is, in fact, an outcome of the chaotic years that preceded his advent.

By the end of his second term, former President Barack Obama spoke of his success in stabilizing the economy and creating more jobs in a process of swift recovery, contrary to real evidence.

A US Federal Reserve survey last year concluded that nearly half of all Americans “did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense.”

Americans did not elect Trump simply because they are ‘racist’, as some have presumed, but because they are desperate.

read more:

http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/07/06/the-world-is-not-flat-trumpism...

...

The title of Friedman’s piece takes the form of a directive: “General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He’ll Drag You Down.” Friedman begins, as he so often does, by quoting himself at length. In an earlier column, he had instructed Trump’s generals—Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster—to “stand up and reverse the moral rot that has infected the Trump administration from the top.” They failed to comply.

Now desperate, Friedman summons Mattis as “the last man standing—the only one who has not been infected by Trump’s metastasizing ethical cancer, the only one who has not visibly lied on Trump’s behalf, and who can still put some fear into Trump”—to seize control of the situation and save the Republic from the individual elected to the presidency less than a year ago.

“Secretary Mattis,” Friedman writes, “we don’t need any more diagnosis of the problem. We need action.” The necessary action is this: Along with Kelly and McMaster, Mattis should tell Trump “that if he does not change his ways you will all quit, en masse.”

“Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway—not his,” Friedman writes, certain that the threat of collective resignation will bring Trump to heel. In effect, he is urging Trump’s generals to coerce their commander-in-chief into relinquishing the authority that is rightly his according to the Constitution. They will make the decisions. Trump will sign the necessary paperwork.

Friedman insists that he is “not talking about a coup.” This, too, is sheer, indeed contemptible, dishonesty. He is, in fact, not only “talking about” a coup but using the nation’s newspaper of record to advocate a coup. Friedman wants our civilian commander-in-chief to take his marching orders from the generals. Well, welcome to the junta.

What does it say about the state of public discourse that views such as these appear in what is ostensibly the nation’s most influential publication? You decide. But I think it says that the crisis facing our country is much bigger than Trump.

Andrew J. Bacevich is The American Conservative’s writer-at-large.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/times-twofer-mccain-and-...

Read from top. Trump is still laughing his head off...

President Trump’s steadfast reluctance to say anything negative about Russia is so striking that a former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, once observed that Vladimir Putin manages Trump as if he we were a Russian intelligence “asset.” He may be. But if I were a Russian citizen, I’d be asking this question: Is Putin a U.S. agent?

Why? Because Putin has undertaken so many actions in recent years that contributed to the weakening of Russia’s economy and human capital base that you have to wonder whether he’s secretly on the C.I.A.’s payroll.

Beginning around 2007 or 2008, Putin appears to have decided that rebuilding Russia by nurturing its tremendous human talent and strengthening the rule of law was just too hard — it would have required sharing power, holding real, competitive elections and building a truly diverse, innovation-based economy.

Instead, Putin decided to look for dignity for Russia in all the wrong places: by tapping his oil and gas wells, not his people; by strengthening the Russian military, instead of the rule of law; and by enriching himself and his circle of oligarchs while wrapping himself in a cloak of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism that appealed to his base.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/putin-cia-weakening-russia.html?

Yep, and Donald Trump is Jesus Christ of the second serve — or last resurrection coming... That's why 70 per cent of Russians love Putin because he neglects "his" people... Friedman you're a dork...

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Tom Friedman repeats an oft-recited canard in a recent column:

The [IRGC] Quds Force now more or less controls — through proxies — four Arab capitals: Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad and Sana.

Indeed, Iran has become the biggest “occupying power” in the Arab world today.

This is wrong or misleading on pretty much every count, but it is probably most obnoxious with respect to Yemen because it echoes Saudi propaganda used to justify their atrocious war on that suffering country. The problem with these statements is that they completely ignore local actors and interests and mistakenly treat indigenous groups as mere puppets of Tehran. 

As for supposedly being an “occupying power,” Iran is supporting the Iraqi and Syrian governments at their request. We may not like that support, but that is not what occupation looks like. The Saudis and the UAE and their allies are the ones occupying parts of Yemen, and Yemen’s “legitimate” government is run out of Riyadh because it has no backing at home. Iran doesn’t occupy any part of Yemen. Friedman’s statements may be good for fear-mongering and stoking hostility, but it is garbage analysis of the sort we have come to expect from him. Unfortunately, this gross exaggeration of Iranian “control” over other countries’ capitals is a commonly-held view that misinforms policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Iran’s influence in Yemen has modestly increased since the Saudi-led intervention started three years ago, and the relationship between Tehran and the Houthis is closer than it was, but that is a measure of how stupid and pointless the Saudi-led war has been. The Houthis were not Iranian proxies before the coalition intervention started, and they still are not. Iran does not control Sanaa through proxies or in any other way. That doesn’t fit the story that supporters of the Saudi-led war want to tell, but it happens to be true. In point of fact, the Iranian government advised the Houthis not to take the capital back in 2014, which was an odd thing for a supposedly “expansionist” government “on the march” to do. Maybe some hard-liners in Iran wished they had the sort of extensive influence and control ascribed to them, but it is just a wish.

This matters because Friedman is using his high-profile position to spread bad analysis and misinformation about conflicts that Americans already understand poorly or not at all. He already wrote an embarrassing love letter to the Saudi war criminal Mohammed bin Salman, and now he is echoing the Saudi government’s talking points about Iran and the war on Yemen. The war on Yemen is already so rarely covered and poorly understood in the U.S. that every piece of misinformation about the conflict there does much greater damage than usual. Anyone that makes the mistake of reading his columns would come away with a worse and more distorted understanding of this part of the world than he had before he started.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/friedmans-fear-mongering-...

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Mohammed bin Salman cuts a dashing figure. Here’s a Saudi royal, in his early 30s, who speaks about ushering in an unprecedented transformation of the Kingdom’s fossilized society. His elevation to crown prince in 2017 was interpreted by much of the West as a godsend to modernity, free markets, and 21st-century thinking. American foreign policy elites ate up MbS’s sales pitch like a New Yorker eats pepperoni pizza: with delight in their eyes and joy in their hearts. Finally, a prince from a younger generation was working to bring Saudi Arabia—the land of oil, sword dancing, and Islam’s two holiest cities—towards a brighter future. Women would be driving soon; Western businesses would be investing in something other than the energy sector.

Thomas Friedman, the bestselling author and long-time New York Times columnist, bought MbS’s story hook, line, and sinker. After jetting to Riyadh for an exclusive interview with the crown prince last November, Friedman wrote about bin Salman as if he was the very best Saudi Arabia had to offer. In one of his more naive dispatches, Friedman described Saudi Arabia as being on the cusp of its own Arab Spring. The rich and entitled royals were finally getting punished for stealing from the state’s coffers. “Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive,” Friedman observed in his column. Of course, given that the Kingdom is an absolute monarchy and MbS has a reputation as a petulant child, why Friedman expected anything other than glowing assessments from Saudis is puzzling.

In the last two weeks, by virtue of his actions, the crown prince has demonstrated to the entire world his true character: as intolerant of dissent and as obsessed with blind loyalty as every other autocrat in the Arab world. He is a reckless and bumbling amateur who plunged his country into a self-defeating cycle of mistakes, quagmires, and diplomatic imbroglios; an insulated princeling more in line with a mob boss than the squeaky clean anti-corruption crusader he is trying to sell himself as. Tom Friedman and members of the Trump administration may have largely accepted his narrative, but for the rest of us who have watched the total decimation of neighboring Yemen and the near-starvation of 13 million Yemenis, no public relations firm in the world can polish the giant turd the crown prince has laid at his own Kingdom’s doorstep.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/they-got-saudi-arabia-w...

Read from top... We've been onto silly Friedman even before that date...

Steve Bell :

By Thomas L. Friedman

About four years ago, without asking anybody, I changed my job description. It used to be “New York Times foreign affairs columnist.” Instead, I started calling myself the “New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist.” I even included it on my business card.

It had become so obvious to me that so much of what I’d been doing since I became a journalist in 1978 was reporting or opining about people, leaders, refugees, terrorists and nation-states acting out on their feelings of humiliation and questing for dignity — the two most powerful human emotions.

I raise this now because the success of Joe Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump may ride on his ability to speak to the sense of humiliation and quest for dignity of many Trump supporters, which Hillary Clinton failed to do.

It has been obvious ever since Trump first ran for president that many of his core supporters actually hate the people who hate Trump, more than they care about Trump or any particular action he takes, no matter how awful.

The media feed Trump’s supporters a daily diet of how outrageous this or that Trump action is — but none of it diminishes their support. Because many Trump supporters are not attracted to his policies. They’re attracted to his attitude — his willingness and evident delight in skewering the people they hate and who they feel look down on them.

Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money.

People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you make people feel humiliated, they will respond with a ferocity unlike any other emotion, or just refuse to lift a finger for you. As Nelson Mandela once observed, “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.”

By contrast, if you show people respect, if you affirm their dignity, it is amazing what they will let you say to them or ask of them. Sometimes it just takes listening to them, but deep listening — not just waiting for them to stop talking. Because listening is the ultimate sign of respect. What you say when you listen speaks more than any words.

I’ve seen firsthand the power of humiliation in foreign policy: Vladimir Putin’s macho act after Russia’s humiliation at losing the Cold War; Iraqi Sunnis who felt humiliated by a U.S. invasion force that pushed them out of Iraq’s army and government, stripping them of rank and status; Israeli Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by Ashkenazi Jewish elites, something Bibi Netanyahu has long manipulated; Palestinians feeling humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; Muslim youth in Europe feeling humiliated by the Christian majority; and China questing to become the world’s dominant power, after what Chinese themselves call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers.

When George Floyd was being held down by three policemen, one with a knee on his neck, as he pleaded for his mother and onlookers filmed on their phones, he was not just being restrained — he was being humiliated. Resistance to the daily humiliations of racism has fueled the Black civil rights movement from its inception to Black Lives Matter.

In a much talked-about new book, “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (disclosure: he is a close friend) says “the politics of humiliation” is also at the heart of Trump’s appeal.

“Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” Sandel notes. These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.”

Unless Biden finds a way to speak to the sense of humiliation felt by many working-class voters, Sandel warns, even Trump’s failure to deal with the pandemic may not be enough to turn these voters against him. The reason? “Resentment borne of humiliation is the most potent political sentiment of all,” Sandel explains.

Sandel argues that the polarized politics of our time, and the resentments that fuel it, arise, paradoxically, from a seemingly attractive ideal — the meritocratic promise that if you work hard and go to college, you will rise. But this ideal sends a double message.

“It congratulates the winners but denigrates the losers,” he writes, because it creates the impression that a “college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem” — while devaluing the contributions of those without a diploma. This has led many working people to feel that elites look down on them, creating the conditions for the “politics of humiliation” that Trump exploits.

“Elites have so valorized a college degree — both as an avenue for advancement and as the basis for social esteem — that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate, and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college,” Sandel says.

“One of the deepest political divides in American politics today is between those with and those without a college degree. In the 2016 election, Trump won two-thirds of white voters without a college degree.”

Trump, who himself had been looked down on by New York City elites, understood that the familiar fight between Democrats and Republicans over how to grow the pie and how to distribute the pie was ignoring a deeper sentiment among many white working-class Americans.

These traditional Democratic voters felt that liberal elites were looking down at them, new immigrants were superseding them and foreigners were laughing at them. And Trump became the fist in the face that his voters threw back at all of them.

“Biden is right that Trump botched the pandemic, violated constitutional norms and inflamed racial tensions — all good grounds for throwing him out of office,” argues Sandel. “But Biden could win this argument and still lose the election.” He must find a way to show that he understands those who feel disrespected and are drawn to Trump for that reason — even though most of his policies don’t help them.

How? Sandel and I put our heads together and thought, well, maybe Biden should go on a tour of Trump country, focusing on rural counties and towns in the Midwest, and just listen to Trump’s base, both to learn and as a sign of respect.

Then, at the first presidential debate, Biden should ignore Trump and his buffoonery and speak about what he had learned by talking to likely Trump voters.

Biden could talk about where he agrees with them and where he disagrees with them and why — the ultimate sign of respect. That is how Biden can get at least some Trump devotees to see that “working-class Joe from Scranton” — not “Billionaire Don, born with a silver spoon in his mouth”— is the one who really hails from their side of the tracks and can be trusted (a very important word) to look out for them.

When it comes to politics, a lot of people don’t listen through their ears. They listen through their gut, and Biden, more than any other Democratic leader today, has the ability to connect there.

Trump’s goal in this campaign is to separate Biden from Biden voters by making it as difficult as possible for Biden voters to vote. Biden’s goal should be to separate Trump from Trump voters by showing that he respects them and their fears — even if he does not respect Trump.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/opinion/biden-trump-humiliation.html

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In a retrospective nostalgic article, Thomas L Friedman goes along with Joe Biden's removal of US troops from Afghanistan. There is a lot of self-serving arguments and memories floating past the ghosts of time:

I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens — and less likely to host jihadist groups. But it was also reasonable to fear from the start that trying to graft a Western political culture onto such a deeply tribalized, male-dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan’s was a fool’s errand, especially when you factored in how much neighboring Pakistan never wanted us to succeed because it could wrench Afghanistan from Pakistan’s cultural and geopolitical orbit.

Biden was torn between those hopes and fears from the very start. I know because I was with him on his first visit in early January 2002 to postwar Afghanistan. It was just weeks after the major fighting had subsided and the Taliban were evicted from Kabul.

Biden, at the time the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had invited me to come along with him. I kept a diary in the months after 9/11, including of that trip, and published it in 2002, with a collection of columns from that time, in my book “Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11.”

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/opinion/joe-biden-afghanistan-2002.html

Here, Friedman tends to erase a bit of history. It was DONALD TRUMP who has paved the way out of Afghanistan. Had Donald not done this, would Joe Biden decide to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, without the prior agreement that Donald Trump had made with the Taliban? I don't think so. Joe would have spin for more troops until the dream came true...

Friedman tells us: "Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens." This is loonitude — even America has difficulties achieving this tolerance on its own soil, and shows how little the invaders knew about the tribal system of Afghanistan, even if Friedman acknowledges this system somewhat. 

Afghanistan had been at war since say 1979 till 1992 against the Russians who had been "invited" to help protect the socialist Kabul government, then under attack from extremist religious rebels. The USA supplied these rebels, the Taliban (under a different name), with weapons and cash, including financing Osama Bin Laden's operations. By 1992, the Russians were "not defeated" but had enough of the whole thing — as they knew the US was financing the opposition — and retreated — leaving the Taliban take over the place, though other tribe leaders may not have been so happy. So, in 2001, for the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, the invasion of Afghanistan by the USA was an act of treachery. To this day, though the official record blames Osama Bin Laden for the 9/11 disaster, and other acts of terrorism, there are no proof of such — as Bin Laden was assassinated by the USA (under instructions from Obama, no less) rather than taken to court to face charges. All Bin Laden papers were either burnt or confiscated. Alleluyah! In 2002, Friedman was hopeful:

"That is the sign of a country too long at war — when it is producing postcards of the rubble. And that was the question that Biden and I wrestled with throughout that trip: What were the foundations — physical, cultural, political, economic, religious and social — from which Afghans, with American and NATO help, might build a more decent, less corrupt, modern political system? Could the future bury the past there or would the past always bury the future? There were women and students and new, post-Taliban leaders we met with who insisted that the country could overcome its past; the bookstore library cautioned otherwise. Needless to say, we didn’t resolve that question on that trip. I am not sure we have still."

Yep. A boots and all diplomacy tends to look like "boots and all". It's not going to work, even with the best of intentions. It's a bit like the invasion of France by Germany in 1940... With the US being the best friend to Saudi Arabia — a super-religious fiefdom with the most appalling record on human rights on the planet — it showed that the US empire either did not care much about the people and more about controlling the place, under the false pretences of fighting terrorism (or revenge). Burying the past? The past in Afghanistan is imbued in religious traditions and more than 40 tribes that maintain a certain level of diplomacy between each others (of which the Taliban is less than 15 per cent). 

When foreign (US-Australian-etc) troops came willy-nilly in the middle of the night to invade a countryside compound of Afghani people with no relation with "terrorists" but were terrorised by the US troops, the invaders were not going to smell like liberators. 

Unfortunately, it's the educated including the women who are going to bear the brunt of this "retreat". It is Gus' view that the socialist government of Kabul would have been able to slowly change the "extremist" tribal culture in evolution rather than the hamburger/chewing-gun diplomacy of the regime change alla Americana.

More could be said...

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assange2 

I slammed Friedman above without acknowledging the end of his tirade... But this is what he should have started with to set the scene of where we're at, not where we've been, without pontificating...

So that was Joe Biden’s and my introduction to Afghanistan. When I interviewed him last December, a month after his election as president, we got talking informally about the Middle East and he asked if I remembered our trip to Afghanistan and all the craziness at the end.

I never forgot it, I told him. Clearly, neither had he.

Our nation’s effort there was worth a try; our soldiers and diplomats were trying to make it better, but it was never clear that they knew how or had enough Afghan partners. Yes, maybe leaving will make it worse, but our staying wasn’t really helping.

Our leaving may be a short-term disaster, and in the longer run, who knows, maybe Afghanistan will find balance on its own, like Vietnam. Or not. I don’t know. I am as humbled and ambivalent about it today as I was 20 years ago, and I am sure that Biden is too.

All I know for sure are: 1) We need to offer asylum to every Afghan who worked closely with us and may now be in danger. 2) Afghans are going to author their own future. 3) It is American democracy that is being eroded today by our own divisiveness, by our own hands, and unless we get that fixed we can’t help anyone — including ourselves.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/opinion/joe-biden-afghanistan-2002.html

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW, MR BIDEN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BY Phil Butler

New York Times columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize Winner Thomas Friedman once characterized his high school years as “one big celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.” In his latest piece for the New York Times, the prize-winning writer foresees a similar celebration when Britain, Europe, and the United States completely rule Ukraine.

Interestingly, Friedman spent his high school summers at Kibbutz HaHotrim, in Israel. This Kibbutz, was established in 1953 on the site of the depopulated Palestinian village of al-Tira. Some scholars claim this area near Haifa was the original location of Ancient Tyre, which was once the main city of the infamous Sea Peoples. Some claim these warlike seafarers were the last of the Minoans. Others link them to the Phoenicians. The reason I mention this is, I think it’s very important for us all to begin looking at the origins of our bias, hatred, and misunderstanding. Friedman, like everyone else on this planet, has an agenda based on a rationale. Israel now owns al-Tira, but wars and blood have spilled over this soil since the King of Tyre helped build Solomon’s temple.

The area is now a seaside paradise respite for well-to-do Israelis. I’ve no space for a history lesson, but this Palestinian village was the first populated by Jewish emigrants in from Czechoslovakia and Germany in 1949. The Palestinian and Christian residents fled to Jordan. It’s interesting to look back at what influences people, especially those who influence others. And Friedman’s foundations are built on the framework of the Zionist Utopia. Turn the page to his brilliant ideas for mediating the crisis in Ukraine, and it’s easy to visualize a de-Russified Ukraine.

Friedman’s latest Russophobic fantasy equates the Russian operation to de-nazify Ukraine as a cosmic disaster. The Pulitzer winner visited Kyiv recently and commented on Zelensky’s neat display of destroyed Russian equipment in the piazza of Saint Michael’s Golden Monastery.

“I eventually realized that it reminded me of a meteor, like a meteor that came from outer space and landed on this country.”

As an award-winning journalist, Friedman could not resist worsening a bad situation by mischaracterizing the whole mess. The NYTs writer paints Zelensky and his Gestapo as more heroic and Homeric than the death spiral they’ve created for their country. Meanwhile, the Russians, especially Vladimir Putin, have been dehumanized again. They are hot rocks from outer space. His solution to the Armageddon from the East is like something from a bad movie. The Friedman solution for a world-smashing asteroid does not star Bruce Willis.

He tells his audience that the West needs to engineer a way for Ukraine to become a NATO and a European Union member. He also proclaims that the European Union is “one of the miracles in global history.” As I said, the world of influencers is powered by rational and flawed idealism. Friedman also says, “NATO expansion was never the issue,” for the Russians. The expansion and empowerment of Nazis and fascist zealots, the building of Europe’s largest army, the biolabs, and the fake Minsk agreements designed to stall the Russians – none of that is what mattered to Putin and his countrymen! What did matter?

This NYT’s super sleuth has deduced that the Russians launched a demilitarization operation to stop Ukraine from becoming “an example of a successful Slavic economy.” Read the transcript of his talk here if you do not believe it. His “Bringing Ukraine Into NATO and the E.U. Is the Key to Peace” is the same insanity that caused every major and minor war humans ever saw. This world domination by any means necessary narrative has killed hundreds of millions, made nations into refugees, and imprisoned the Palestinian people in an open-air shooting gallery.

Friedman emphasizes that the world is not buying Russian cars and watches. He fails, however, to mention the economic miracle Vladimir Putin created when the banksters who love Pulitzer writers were trying to carve up Russia. Friedman cannot mention Putin’s “Third Way,” or the Vladivostok to Lisbon protocol that scared Wall Street and the London banksters to death. Free trade, free visas, and a multipolar world cutting loose from the chains of the American hegemony – you cannot get a prize for writing about that. You can get jail, like Julian Assange.

People like Tom Friedman are tools. Since his first Pulitzer for covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He won subsequent prizes for covering the Intifada and a third for his “clarity” on global terror in 2002. This was one of the setup propaganda pieces for the invasion of Iraq in 200, in my opinion. The Progressive takes issue with him in this 2014 piece, “Thomas Friedman’s Iraq Amnesia.” Some may recall that Friedman suggested that the world had to “steamroll” Saddam Hussein. And now he suggests steamrolling Russia, the most powerful armed nuclear force the world has ever known.

Who knows how, or why, highly educated men lose their minds? Does one of the world’s most recognized journalists envision a Kibbutz HaHotrim somewhere in Crimea? Or maybe, with the help of the Swiss or Timex, Russian watches may soon be all the rage in London and New York! Will Ladas made by Peugeot or VW soon plow the chic boulevards of Tel Aviv? Maybe. That is, if NATO and the EU can convince Vladimir Putin of their good intentions. What if America and her allies contributed to modernizing Russia’s autoworks in the same way, Germany’s former Nazi industries were resurrected? If the hegemony returns to its steamrolling strategy, I hope this island of Crete is out of the atomic fallout air stream.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://journal-neo.su/2023/10/02/the-next-pulitzer-goes-to-whoever-cheerleads-armageddon/

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