Blair is alternately praised as the only adult in the room during UN deliberations about Iraq and as someone who is “always leav[ing] you with the impression that for him the Iraq war is just one hammer and one nail in an effort to do tikkun olam,” a Kabbalah concept meaning “to repair the world.”165
The socialization of losses incurred via the adult-like forcible expansion of world-repairing freedom becomes a dubious business, however, when the columnist proposing it acknowledges that “in deciding to throw in Britain’s lot with President Bush on the Iraq war, Mr. Blair not only defied the overwhelming antiwar sentiment of his own party, but public opinion in Britain generally.”166 What is even more intriguing is that Friedman intends this as a reason Blair should be enshrined in history as a top British leader, and salutes his tenacity: “He had no real support group to fall back on. I’m not even sure his wife supported him on the Iraq war. (I know the feeling!)”167
The resulting argument is that it is laudable to promote democracy abroad by anti-democratically taking your country to war. Despite initially throwing in the towel on Iraq in 2006, Friedman continues in the midst of global recession to churn out justifications for the price tag of military excess, and announces in 2009 that, “as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems.”168 The evidence is that “few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda,”169 which once again highlights how much better Friedman’s time would be spent were he to cease repeatedly questioning whether Saddam’s personality is a result of the nature of Iraqi society or vice versa and to instead focus his chicken-or-egg philosophical musings on what came first, the U.S. war or Al Qaeda in Iraq.
This brings us to the third impediment to a Friedman apology on Ireland, which is that, in cases where he does accept some degree of personal miscalculation, he still appears to be under the impression that continuous self-contradiction suffices in lieu of a straightforward admission of error. Following his declaration of 9/11 as the onset of World War III, Friedman complains that the United States has become “the United States of Fighting Terrorism,”170 an entity that makes Friedman check his tweezers at the airport;171 he later surmises that he overreacted to 9/11,172 but nonetheless reaffirms the worthwhile nature of the part of the overreaction that involved outrageously expensive and uncertain pluralism-building experiments resulting in the deaths of over a million Iraqis. Reasoning that “if Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?,” Friedman announces: “We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back.”173 He meanwhile goes from declaring in April 2003 that “One hopes Americans will now stop overreacting to 9/11. Al Qaeda is not the Soviet Union. Saddam was not Stalin. And terrorism is not communism”174 to warning, less than nine months later, that “as dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us.”175
No apology ever accompanies acknowledgement of overreaction, nor does Friedman resurrect the details of his prolonged warmongering effort based on “fight[ing] the terrorists as if there were no rules,”176 “us[ing] whatever tactics will make the terrorists feel bad, not make us feel good,”177 and recognizing the occasional Arab need for a “2-by-4 across the side of the head.”178 None of these sentiments is in turn affected by his warning in 2001 that “if we are going to be stomping around the world wiping out terrorist cells from Kabul to Manila, we’d better make sure that we are the best country, and the best global citizens, we can be. Otherwise, we are going to lose the rest of the world.”179 Initial suggestions to Bush regarding the pursuit of optimal U.S. behavior abroad include launching a program for energy independence and donating solar-powered light bulbs with American flag decals on them to African villages, “so when those kids grew up they would remember who lit up their nights.”180
Bush’s response on the global citizen front is, needless to say, largely unsatisfactory, though he does pull through in other areas: “All hail to President Bush for how he has conducted the war against Osama bin Laden.”181 The ensuing upsurge in global anti-Americanism is described as the result of a range of factors, not only the 9/11 transformation of “Puff the Magic Dragon—a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally … into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily,”182 but also the tendency of Arab/Muslim leaders to deflect popular discontent from themselves onto America, as well as “the real reason … that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely,” which is that “they feel that he has taken away something very dear to them—an America that exports hope, not fear.”183
It is debatable, of course, what percentage of people being “militarily touched” by Godzilla have come to the realization that what they are really disgruntled about is Bush’s destruction of their idyllic conception of America. As for European anti-American sentiment, Friedman discovers in 2005 that this is indeed not entirely reducible to “classic Eurowhining,” and that some of the current European discourse vis-à-vis the United States is “very heartfelt, even touching.”184 The following analysis is offered after a round of interviews conducted at a “trendy bar/beauty parlor” in East Berlin: “Europeans love to make fun of naïve American optimism, but deep down, they envy it and they want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be.”185
Again, it is impossible to determine the percentage of U.S. inhabitants who would define even pre-9/11 existence in the country as one of goofily carefree enthusiasm. Severe discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and opportunities, for example, are hinted at in Friedman’s scattered mentioning of things like American “inner cities where way too many black males are failing.”186 This occurs as a side note in an article about his younger daughter’s Maryland high school graduation ceremony in which he transcribes thirty-four student names to highlight their “stunning diversity—race, religion, ethnicity” and announces that he is “not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China” because “our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.”187
Friedman is slightly more subdued the following year when Asian names dominate the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute commencement at which he is speaking, and he warns that “if we can’t educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we’d better make sure we can import someone else’s, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.”188 Friedman sees the “foreigner-embracing”189 nature of the United States, endangered by 9/11, as ensuring continued power and innovative advantage in the midst of the flat-world dichotomy between “high- and low-imagination-enabling countries,”190 and regularly stresses the importance of America’s ability to “skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world.”191 He rues the fact that green cards are not being stapled to the diplomas of foreign students who obtain advanced degrees at U.S. universities, although his magnanimous immigration policy is not limited to the hyper-educated: “I would never turn back a single Haitian boat person.”192
As for black males who have managed to elude failure in inner cities, one of these stars in the concluding paragraphs of The Lexus as proof that “America is not at its best every day, but when it’s good, it’s very, very good.”193 The year is 1994, and Friedman has just attended a Christmastime performance by local elementary school choruses, among them his older daughter’s, which kicked off with the Hanukkah classic “Maoztzur”:
Watching this scene, and hearing that song, brought tears to my eyes. When I got home, my wife, Ann, asked me how it was. And I said to her: “Honey, I just saw a black man dressed up as Santa Claus directing four hundred elementary-school kids singing ‘Maoztzur’ in the town square of Bethesda, Maryland. God Bless America.”194
I highlight such passages not so much to catalog instances of clichéd feel-good nationalism on Friedman’s part but rather because America’s multiethnic identity serves, in his view, as one of the reasons the country is entitled
