Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has always set my teeth on edge, combining as he does my least favorite aspects of two cultures in which I spent some formative years. A native of Minneapolis, he's got the aw-shucks, self-satisfied over-optimism of the born upper Midwesterner AND the airy disregard for the people and institutions of the U.S. --- as anything but political counters or symbols --- that suffuses the national media. In his Sunday column, Friedman manages to invoke the need for "the Arab-Muslim world" to embrace "modernity" (meaning modern American culture) to "make it less angry and more at ease with the world" (like Mel Gibson and the Christian coalition, I suppose), while evincing a near total lack of concern for the damage that his darling Iraq War has done to the institutions that made political modernity possible in the U.S. and Great Britain. 

Friedman claims to be taken aback by "the degree of European-style anti-Americanism and anti-Bushism" he finds in Britain, "which Mr. Blair's personal and overt pro-Americanism has disguised." Of course, this "disguise" was effective only to a mind inclined to equate nations with their elites and to place little value on demonstrable public opinion. An occasional glance at British press web sites supplemented by chats with, quite frankly, any random selection of actual British people would have prepared Friedman for the shocking discovery that many or most of them do not seem to approve of their prime minister's special relationship with Bush's posterior. 

Friedman rosins up the bow for Tony Blair, who wanted to join George's dragon-slaying mission but knew the British public was even less likely to buy it than the American public would have been without the Bush administration's fictionalization of Saddam Hussein as a supervillain on the brink of world domination. Had the case for immediate war on Iraq been made in terms that were even close to reality, I suspect a lot more Americans would have wondered whether Iraq was really something worth sidelining the economy, short-shrifting the actual war on terrorism, and scrapping age-old foreign policy traditions for. The real case would made the Iraq War seem optional as opposed to immediately imperative: "Listen there's this evil dictator who looked like he was going to be big back when he was our ally, but these days, after a crushing defeat and a decade of isolation, he's got only the most hypothetical ability to threaten neighboring countries, much less us. No, he didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and hates Islamic extremists even more than we do. He's just really, really evil, and it sucks that he is still around after we kicked his ass before. Whacking him now would be ever so much cooler than guarding airports and poking around mountains and deserts looking for terrorists, who are freakin' hard to find."  

In the time-dishonored fashion of the 20th-century foreign policy intellectuals and pundits, Friedman really couldn't care less how decisions are made or whether the citizens of a nation understand or support them, as long as they are the correct ones in some grand strategic or ideological sense, as determined by the great minds of foreign policy intellectuals and pundits. During the Cold War, the deceptions and secrets and bold strokes were a breeze to rationalize, what with the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation and all. What really bugs people of this mindset is how very hard it has become justify the grand strategy, imperial military forces, and superpower outlook they love in the absence of another superpower to compete with us.  

Friedman calls the Iraq War, "a war of choice" -- "but a good choice," he insists, as though fighting a war that Friedman now admits was not absolutely necessary could ever be a good choice. He defines the Bush-Blair lies as their solution to a p.r. problem; they needed to make Iraq seem like "a war of necessity," because "people in democracies don't like to fight wars of choice." What fuddy-duddies we are! 

I am not a pacifist, but it does seem to me that there are reasons that democratic republics have made war a special case --- not just another policy option, but an extremely serious collective decision that must controlled by law and avoided whenever possible. At a basic level, democracy and republicanism are rooted in a commitment to the supreme value and dignity of the individual human life, to the idea that people have rights, that they deserve some say in decisions that affect their lives. Respect for a person's life and for their wishes go together, it seems to me. Dictators and absolute monarchs are not required to regard the latter, and in practice have shown equally little concern for the former.  If there really is a democratic tendency to balk at merely optional violence, that is something to cherished and nurtured, not crushed with lies. link