Free Republic

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom Friends right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving. This administration needs to undertake...

I was at a dinner the other night and was introduced to a lovely Lebanese woman. We started reminiscing about the good old days in Lebanon and I asked her where she lived in Beirut. She said it was in a building off "Rue John Kennedy." I stopped her immediately. "Rue John Kennedy?" I said, rolling over the words in my mind. "I forgot there was a time when they actually named streets in the Arab world for an American president." Will there ever be a street in Baghdad named after George W. Bush or any U.S. president? The fact...

Losing Our Edge? was just out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation. Several executives explained to me that they were opening new plants in Asia — not because of cheaper labor. Labor is a small component now in an automated high-tech manufacturing...

At first, I thought I'd write a column that just ripped President Bush for declaring that the United States — after decades of neutrality — has decided to oppose the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel as part of any final peace settlement. Why is the president dragging America into the middle of this most sensitive Israeli-Palestinian issue? You're telling me that just because Ariel Sharon has to persuade the right-wing lunatics in his cabinet to undo the lunatic settlement mess that Mr. Sharon himself created, America has to pay for it with its own standing in the...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. MEXICO CITY -- I hadn't been to Mexico since 1996, so it definitely caught my ear when I started to hear two non-Spanish words on this trip that I'd never heard here before: "China" and "India." Mexicans are increasingly aware that these two countries are running off with jobs and markets that Mexicans once thought they owned. You have to feel sorry for the Mexicans: They are hearing "the giant sucking sound" in stereo these days - from China in one ear and India in the other. Worse, they seem stuck,...

COMMENTARY Imagine our leaders stepping outside of themselves By Thomas L. Friedman | New York Times News Service Posted March 30, 2004 I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9-11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story. Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9-11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence; it was a...

I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story. Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked...

The new Spanish government's decision to respond to the attack by Al Qaeda by going ahead with plans to pull its troops from Iraq constitutes the most dangerous moment we've faced since 9/11. It's what happens when the Axis of Evil intersects with the Axis of Appeasement and the Axis of Incompetence. Let's start with the Axis of Evil. We are up against a terrible nihilistic enemy. Think about what the Islamist terrorists are doing: they are trying to kill as many people in Iraq and elsewhere as possible so the U.S. fails in Iraq, so Iraq collapses into civil...

Nandan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian software giant Infosys, gave me a tour the other day of his company's wood-paneled global conference room in Bangalore. It looks a lot like a beautiful tiered classroom, with a massive wall-size screen at one end and cameras in the ceiling so that Infosys can hold a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S. innovators, its Indian software designers and its Asian manufacturers. "We can have our whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time," holding a virtual meeting, explained Mr. Nilekani. The room's eight clocks tell the story: U.S. West,...

<p>BANGALORE, India -- I've been in India for only a few days and I am already thinking about reincarnation. In my next life, I want to be a demagogue.</p> <p>Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues -- like outsourcing of jobs to India -- without any reference to reality. Unfortunately, in this life, I'm stuck in the body of a reporter/columnist. So when I came to the 24/7 Customer call center in Bangalore to observe hundreds of Indian young people doing service jobs via long distance -- answering the phones for U.S. firms, providing technical support for U.S. computer giants or selling credit cards for global banks -- I was prepared to denounce the whole thing. "How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.</p>

ANGALORE, IndiaYamini Narayanan is an Indian-born 35-year-old with a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oklahoma. After graduation, she worked for a U.S. computer company in Virginia and recently moved back to Bangalore with her husband to be closer to family. When I asked her how she felt about the outsourcing of jobs from her adopted country, America, to her native country, India, she responded with a revealing story:"I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to India and he made a T-shirt that said, `I lost my job to India and all I got...

Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to...

BANGALORE, India -- We grew up with the hippies in the 1960s. Thanks to the high-tech revolution, many of us became yuppies in the 1980s. And now, fasten your seat belt, because you may soon lose your job to a "zippie" in the 2000s. "The Zippies Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine Outlook. Zippies are this huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the information revolution and turning itself into the world's service center. Outlook calls India's zippies "Liberalization's Children" and...

The situation in Iraq is fast approaching the tipping point. The terrorists know that if they can wreak enough havoc, kill enough Iraqis waiting in line to join their own police force, they can prevent the United Nations from coming up with a plan for elections and a stable transfer of U.S. authority to an Iraqi government. Once authority is in Iraqi hands, the Baathists and Islamists have a real problem: They can't even pretend to be fighting the United States anymore. It will be clear to all Arabs and Muslims that they are fighting against the freedom and independence...

he situation in Iraq is fast approaching the tipping point. The terrorists know that if they can wreak enough havoc, kill enough Iraqis waiting in line to join their own police force, they can prevent the U.N. from coming up with a plan for elections and a stable transfer of U.S. authority to an Iraqi government. Once authority is in Iraqi hands, the Baathists and Islamists have a real problem: They can't even pretend to be fighting the U.S. anymore. It will be clear to all Arabs and Muslims that they are fighting against the freedom and independence of Iraq...

This outlook is morally and strategically bankrupt. It is morally bankrupt because 1 percent of America is carrying the whole burden of this war. After the Super Bowl, I went to Tampa, Fla., to visit Centcom headquarters and Gen. John Abizaid and his staff. They run the war in Iraq. I met many soldiers there, from the women serving as analysts in the intelligence center to the strategic planners just back from Baghdad, who had been separated for months from their families or knew comrades killed or wounded in Iraq. Yet their morale, their professionalism and their belief in this...

Tom Friedman is rarely original when it comes to Israel. His mantra for several decades has been that Israel was the primary obstacle to peace with the Palestinians, because of its policy of expanding settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Friedman seems to be unaware of, or doesn't care to consider, the inconvenient fact that Palestinian terror attacks designed to kill Jews and destroy Israel, preceded by decades Israel's victory in the six day war, which first brought these territories under its control. The failure of Bill Clinton's Camp David summit in 2000, and the near immediate decision by...

"Let's not mince words: American policy today toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insane," asserts Mr. Thomas Friedman in his article "War of Ideas: Part 4" (New York Times, January 18, 2004; See http://www.nytimes.com). Well, Mr. Thomas Friedman, I shall not mince words either. American policy is not "insane," but your flawed observations and analyses are. From your first assertion that the Palestinians are "gripped by a collective madness" causing them to "commit suicide", to your cure-all suggestion that an Israel reduced to a nine-mile wide strip will be a more defensible Israel, you have shown yourself to be neither a...

It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history. Personally, I don't believe the Bush team will pay a long-term political price for its faith-based intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Too many Americans, including me,...

If you were asked to name the second-largest Muslim community in the world you'd probably think of Iran, Pakistan or maybe Saudi Arabia. But you'd be wrong. With nearly 150m Muslims, India is believed to have more Muslim citizens than Pakistan or Bangladesh, and is second only to Indonesia. Which brings up another question that I've been asking here in New Delhi: why is it you don't hear about Indian Muslims - who are a minority in this vast Hindu-dominated land - blaming America for all their problems or wanting to fly suicide planes into the Indian parliament? Answer: it...

During the next six months, the world is going to be treated to two remarkable trials in Baghdad. It is going to be the mother of all split screens. On one side, you're going to see the trial of Saddam Hussein. On the other side, you're going to see the trial of the Iraqi people. That's right, the Iraqi people will also be on trial — for whether they can really live together without the iron fist of the man on the other side of the screen. This may be apocryphal, but Saddam is supposed to have once remarked...

While visiting Istanbul the other day, I took a long walk along the Bosporus near Topkapi Palace. There is nothing like standing at this stunning intersection of Europe and Asia to think about the clash of civilizations — and how we might avoid it. Make no mistake: we are living at a remarkable hinge of history and it's not clear how it's going to swing. What is clear is that Osama bin Laden achieved his aim: 9/11 sparked real tensions between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East. Preachers on both sides now openly denounce each other's faith. Whether these...

Airline flights into the U.S. are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of 5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National Guardsmen are posted at key bridges and tunnels. Happy New Year. What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last...

Where U.S. Translates as Freedom By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: December 28, 2003 Thomas L. Friedman WARSAW I found the cure. I found the cure to anti-Americanism: Come to Poland. After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America — without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven't they gotten the...

By risking their own political careers, Bush and Blair have, indeed, given Iraqis the gift of freedom, writes Thomas Friedman. Of all the fascinating reactions to Saddam Hussein's capture, the one that intrigues me most is the French decision to suddenly offer some debt forgiveness for Iraq. Why now? I believe it's an 11th-hour attempt by the French Government to scramble onto the right side of history. I believe French President Jacques Chirac knows something in his heart: in the run-up to the Iraq War, George Bush and Tony Blair stretched the truth about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -...

If we ever run out of room to store our gold in Fort Knox, I know just the place to put it: the new U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. It looks just like Fort Knox — without the charm. The U.S. Consulate used to be in the heart of the city, where it was easy for Turks to pop in for a visa or to use the library. For security reasons, though, it was recently moved 45 minutes away to the outskirts of Istanbul, on a bluff overlooking the Bosporus — surrounded by a tall wall. The new consulate looks like...

I'd been meaning to write a piece responding to Tom Friedman's November 9 column, "The Humiliation Factor," and now that Saddam Hussein's been captured I have a peg. My difference with Friedman is this: He focuses on the downside of humiliation. I focus on the upside. Here's Friedman: "Why have the US forces never gotten the ovation they expected for liberating Iraq from Saddam's tyranny? In part, it is because many Iraqis feel humiliated that they didn't liberate themselves, and America's presence, even its aid, reminds them of that. Add the daily slights and miscommunications that come with any occupation,...

The man makes his times, or is it the other way around? Philosophers have argued over this conundrum for centuries. But in the heat of partisan debate, we have to sort it out the best we can. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, not the most consistent cheerleader for George W. Bush, makes the provocative suggestion that the president, like his predecessor Abraham Lincoln, has discovered a higher moral purpose in the midst of war, and has changed the emphasis from finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction to liberating Iraq in pursuit of democracy in a miserable part...

Whenever I think of President Bush's invasion of Iraq, the image that comes to mind is that famous scene in the movie "The Shining" where Jack Nicholson, playing a crazed author, tries to kill his wife, played by Shelley Duvall, who's hiding in the bathroom. As Ms. Duvall cowers behind the locked bathroom door, Mr. Nicholson takes an ax, smashes it through the door, and with a look of cheery madness peers through the splintered wood and announces, "Heeeere's Johnny." That's the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In a region where the combination of oil wealth, culture and the cold war...

Tonight at 7:00 PM PST on the Discovery Channel LIBERAL Thomas L. Friedman is presenting a special from Israel/Palestine on the fence. I invite all who have comments to post here.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been pushing Israel to make peace with the Palestinian Arabs. He may have taken things a bit far at a recent dinner in New York City. A Manhattan lawyer says Mr. Friedman shoved him into a small crowd of people and cursed at him,apparently angry over comments the lawyer had made to the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Mr. Friedman — a columnist for the Times since 1995, best-selling author, and more recently a documentary filmmaker for the Discovery Channel — did not respond to calls yesterday asking for comment. “Tom doesn’t usually respond...

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been pushing Israel to make peace with the Palestinian Arabs. He may have taken things a bit far at a recent dinner in New York City. A Manhattan lawyer says Mr. Friedman shoved him into a small crowd of people and cursed at him,apparently angry over comments the lawyer had made to the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Mr. Friedman — a columnist for the Times since 1995, best-selling author, and more recently a documentary filmmaker for the Discovery Channel — did not respond to calls yesterday asking for comment. “Tom doesn’t usually respond...

New York Times Columnist Punches Man at Peace Symposium. According to the editor of an online magazine, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, assaulted a New York attorney at a recent event where he had spoken on the private Middle East discussions in Geneva. Here's the writer's account of what he saw Friedman do: Kick a little somethin' I run over to the stage to catch Tom Friedman for that question-and-answer he promised I'd get after his speech. Harvey Schwartz, a Manhattan lawyer, greets Friedman and with a smile on his face tells him he learned two things from...

Anyone who has listened to President Bush's recent speeches about the need to promote democracy in the Arab-Muslim world can't but walk away both impressed and dubious — impressed because promoting democracy in the Arab world is something no president before has advocated with Mr. Bush's vigor, and dubious because this sort of nation-building is precisely what Mr. Bush spurned throughout his campaign. Where did Mr. Bush's passion for making the Arab world safe for democracy come from? Though the president mentioned this theme before the war, it was not something he stressed with the public, Congress or the U.N....

WASHINGTON America has encountered many surprises since it invaded Iraq, but now that the political process is under way the biggest surprise may be just around the corner, and it's this: The first post-Saddam Hussein democratic government that the United States gives birth to in Iraq may be called "The Islamic Republic of Iraq" - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The challenge of reforming any of the 22 nondemocratic Arab states comes down to a very simple question: How do you get from here to there - how do you go from an authoritarian monarchy or a military...

I stood on the sidewalk in London the other day and watched thousands of antiwar, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair protesters pass by. They chanted every antiwar slogan you could imagine and many you couldn't print. It was entertaining — but also depressing, because it was so disconnected from the day's other news. Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading, "Osama, How Many Innocents Did You Kill Today?" or "Baathists...

Memo to: President Bush From: Saddam Hussein Dear Bush: Well, it's been a while since we last communicated. It's not easy getting tapes out from this basement in Tikrit, but I thought it was time we had a little chat. Heard your speech on Arab democracy on the BBC Arabic Service. I'll give you this, Bush, you and Blair do understand the stakes. It's your willpower I doubt. You see, Bush, this really is "The Mother of All Battles." You may not have meant to, but you have triggered a huge civilizational war — the war within Islam. Who wins...

The Way We Were By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: November 23, 2003 LONDON We've all had our ups and downs since 9/11, but last week's events in London tested even my congenital optimism. I was a participant in the 50th anniversary celebration of the Marshall scholarships. The Marshalls were created by the British government to honor Secretary of State George Marshall and to express Britain's gratitude for the Marshall Plan. Over the last 50 years, some 1,400 Americans have attended Oxford, Cambridge and other British universities on Marshall scholarships, paid for by British taxpayers. Twenty-eight years ago, I was one...

LONDON — So I step off the plane in London and the British customs guy sees on my form that I'm a journalist and asks, "Is it true there are more police to protect your president in London than there are in Baghdad?" Then I pick up The Independent to read in the taxi and I see that London's left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone, has denounced President Bush as "the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen." Then I check out The Guardian, which carried open letters to the president, one of which is from...

You know when I really get mad? It's when my wife tells me I'm not helping around the house — and I have not been helping around the house. There is nothing more enraging than someone exposing your faults — and being right. What is true at home is true in diplomacy. I was reminded of that watching the enraged, hysterical reaction of Israel's ruling Likud Party to the virtual peace treaty — known as the Geneva Accord — that was hammered out by Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli justice minister, and Yasir Abed Rabbo, the former Palestinian information minister....

If President Bush wants to get a better handle on the problems he's facing in Iraq and the West Bank, I suggest he study the speech made Oct. 16 by Malaysia's departing prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to a conclave of Muslim leaders. Most of that speech was a brutally frank look into the causes of the Muslim world's decline. Though it was also laced with shameful anti-Jewish slurs, it was still revealing. Five times he referred to Muslims as humiliated. If I've learned one thing covering world affairs, it's this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation....

For the past six weeks the news from Iraq has felt like the movie "Groundhog Day." I get up each morning, fire up my Internet and read that a roadside bomb has killed another U.S. soldier. I search for any good news, but rarely find it. Lord knows, we desperately need a new movie, and not "Apocalypse Now." The movie we need is the Iraqi version of "Mr. Chips Goes to Baghdad." Here's what I mean: There is much talk now about the need for "Iraqification" of the police and armed forces, so Iraqis can take over for U.S. troops....

Well, the numbers are in and the numbers don't lie. At the Madrid aid conference, Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion in new loans and credits for Iraq — and Germany and France pledged 0 new dollars. Add it all up and the bottom line becomes clear: Saudi Arabia actually cares more about nurturing democracy in Iraq than Germany and France. Ah, you say, but that's unfair. Germany and France opposed the war, so why should they pay anything more than their share of the paltry E.U. contribution? Actually, it's not unfair, when you remember that before the war France and...

Since 9/11, we've seen so much depraved violence we don't notice anymore when we hit a new low. Monday's attacks in Baghdad were a new low. Just stop for one second and contemplate what happened: A suicide bomber, driving an ambulance loaded with explosives, crashed into the Red Cross office and blew himself up on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This suicide bomber was not restrained by either the sanctity of the Muslim holy day or the sanctity of the Red Cross. All civilizational norms were tossed aside. This is very unnerving. Because the message...

BRUSSELS I've been a long and cranky opponent of NATO expansion, out of fear that it was going to dilute the organization. But now that NATO is expanding to 26 countries, I say: why stop there? Virtually all of NATO's future threats are going to come not from the east and Russia, but from the south — the Middle East and Afghanistan. So if NATO really wants to secure Europe, it can no longer just be in Europe. It needs to help stabilize these other regions. To do that, NATO needs to add three more members: Iraq, Egypt and Israel....

There was a recent headline that grabbed me in The New York Times on Saturday. It said, "Cheney Lashes Out at Critics of Policy on Iraq." "Wow," I thought, "that must have been an interesting encounter." Then I read the fine print. Cheney was speaking to 200 invited guests at the conservative Heritage Foundation -- and even they were not allowed to ask any questions. Great. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al-Jazeera, and Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox. America is pushing democracy in Iraq, but our own leaders won't hold...

There was a headline that grabbed me in The Times on Saturday. It said, "Cheney Lashes Out at Critics of Policy on Iraq." "Wow," I thought, "that must have been an interesting encounter." Then I read the fine print. Mr. Cheney was speaking to 200 invited guests at the conservative Heritage Foundation — and even they were not allowed to ask any questions. Great. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al Jazeera, and Mr. Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox. America is pushing democracy in Iraq, but our own leaders won't hold...

Premier New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman attacked the Fox News Channel on Thursday, comparing the top-rated cable news network to the pro-terrorist Al Jazeera broadcasting company. Using a recent speech by Vice President Dick Cheney to argue that the Bush administration is too narrow-minded in its handling of postwar Iraq, Friedman complained, "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al Jazeera, and Mr. Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox." "Out of fairness, my newspaper feels obligated [to cover the Cheney speech]," the top Times columnist wrote. "But I wish we would have...

As a precondition for helping us in Iraq, the U.N. is demanding that the U.S. hand over "early sovereignty" to an interim Iraqi government and then let those Iraqis invite in the U.N. to oversee their transition to constitution-writing and elections. I too would like to see Iraqis given more control faster and the U.N. more involved. But people are tossing around this idea without answering some hard questions first. Would the U.S. handing power to an interim Iraqi government really stop the attacks on U.S. forces, Iraqi police, the U.N. and Iraq's interim leaders? I doubt it. These attackers...

There is an old proverb that says, "If you're going to sup with the devil, use a long spoon." Does the White House pantry have any long spoons? I ask because if President Bush really wants to achieve his objectives in Iraq, he may have to sup a little with Yasir Arafat, the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. First, let me state my own bias: Iraq is the whole ballgame. If we can produce a reasonably decent, constitutionally grounded Iraqi government, good things will happen all around the Middle East. If Iraq turns into a quagmire,...