Civilians are civilians, and state-sponsored terror is still terror.
Columnist has the glass-house problem
Drew Hamre
It's tempting to make excuses for Thomas L. Friedman. After all, his old high school is just down the street, he writes with verve, and he is the reigning king-of-all-media for foreign affairs.
But the atrocities that Friedman ascribes to the Sunni (Star Tribune, Oct. 14) are tactics he himself has advocated in the New York Times. Friedman has urged terror bombing to force regime change in Serbia ("Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does," April 6, 1999) and arguably in prewar Iraq ("bombing Iraq, over and over and over again," Jan. 31, 1998).
Friedman has advocated bombing electrical grids, knowing full well the mortal damage that results when refrigerators and filtration pumps die ("It should be lights out in Belgrade," April 23, 1999; "Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week," Jan. 19, 1999).
In Friedman's latest, he cries "genocide" in the context of a mosque bombing; he conflates a group of female war critics with mass murderers. All in all, this is a particularly nasty work.
Drew Hamre
It's tempting to make excuses for Thomas L. Friedman. After all, his old high school is just down the street, he writes with verve, and he is the reigning king-of-all-media for foreign affairs.
But the atrocities that Friedman ascribes to the Sunni (Star Tribune, Oct. 14) are tactics he himself has advocated in the New York Times. Friedman has urged terror bombing to force regime change in Serbia ("Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does," April 6, 1999) and arguably in prewar Iraq ("bombing Iraq, over and over and over again," Jan. 31, 1998).
Friedman has advocated bombing electrical grids, knowing full well the mortal damage that results when refrigerators and filtration pumps die ("It should be lights out in Belgrade," April 23, 1999; "Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week," Jan. 19, 1999).
In Friedman's latest, he cries "genocide" in the context of a mosque bombing; he conflates a group of female war critics with mass murderers. All in all, this is a particularly nasty work.
