That's... Okay
I pointed to this video in the previous post, but I have to comment on it a bit further.
The bubble Friedman is talking about here is a fantasy. I was a staunch Republican back then, and nobody thought this way. Nobody. It's completely revisionist history. Nobody ever said terrorism was okay. It never happened. There was never even a moment during the 90's when American culture said terrorism was anything other than heinous. Even Bill Clinton was blowing up aspirin factories to appease Americans who feared and hated terrorism, even if they had no real concept at the time of where the terrorism really was.
What Friedman is mistaking for a bubble of terrorism acceptance was something different. It was compassion and empathy for people. It was an attempt to separate terrorists and the people they lived among. It was a driving desire to retain our humanity in the face of inhumanity, and not assume everyone wearing a turban or praying to Allah was a dangerous fanatic who wanted to kill us. I wasn't part of that bubble. I really wasn't. I thought that bubble stemmed from naiveté and misguided attention-seeking. Now that the bubble has burst, and all vestiges of that enlightenment have been swept into the fringes of the 'liberal America-haters', I realize that I was wrong. I was an asshole. I was the problem.
Now, we live in a country where a supposedly respectable columnist can get on television and defend the war with the same rationale most of us originally used to oppose it. It was punitive aggression. The target was chosen arbitrarily. It was just an attempt to spread fear of American force, and establish American dominance in the region. It had nothing to do with 9/11. It had nothing to do with spreading democracy. It had nothing to do with overthrowing a dictator. It was just flexing a muscle that needed flexing, even if it meant the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
And that's... Okay.
The bubble Friedman is talking about here is a fantasy. I was a staunch Republican back then, and nobody thought this way. Nobody. It's completely revisionist history. Nobody ever said terrorism was okay. It never happened. There was never even a moment during the 90's when American culture said terrorism was anything other than heinous. Even Bill Clinton was blowing up aspirin factories to appease Americans who feared and hated terrorism, even if they had no real concept at the time of where the terrorism really was.
What Friedman is mistaking for a bubble of terrorism acceptance was something different. It was compassion and empathy for people. It was an attempt to separate terrorists and the people they lived among. It was a driving desire to retain our humanity in the face of inhumanity, and not assume everyone wearing a turban or praying to Allah was a dangerous fanatic who wanted to kill us. I wasn't part of that bubble. I really wasn't. I thought that bubble stemmed from naiveté and misguided attention-seeking. Now that the bubble has burst, and all vestiges of that enlightenment have been swept into the fringes of the 'liberal America-haters', I realize that I was wrong. I was an asshole. I was the problem.
Now, we live in a country where a supposedly respectable columnist can get on television and defend the war with the same rationale most of us originally used to oppose it. It was punitive aggression. The target was chosen arbitrarily. It was just an attempt to spread fear of American force, and establish American dominance in the region. It had nothing to do with 9/11. It had nothing to do with spreading democracy. It had nothing to do with overthrowing a dictator. It was just flexing a muscle that needed flexing, even if it meant the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
And that's... Okay.
Labels: Iraq, Thomas Friedman
posted by Zafrod at 6:23 PM
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