Tom Friedman Today

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Don’t Build Up
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 27, 2009
It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.


Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.

The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after Israel’s Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide Hassan Tuhami. Both countries decided that they wanted a separate peace — outside of the Geneva comprehensive framework pushed by Mr. Carter.

The Oslo peace accords started in Oslo — in secret 1992-93 talks between the P.L.O. representative, Ahmed Qurei, and the Israeli professor Yair Hirschfeld. Israelis and Palestinians alone hammered out a broad deal and unveiled it to the Americans in the summer of 1993, much to Washington’s surprise.

The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was preceded by an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. The U.S. surge gave that movement vital assistance to grow. But the spark was lit by the Iraqis.

The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to finally fight their own Taliban in Waziristan — because those Taliban were threatening the Pakistani middle class — were all examples of moderate, silent majorities acting on their own.

The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own futures, we win. When they won’t, when we want them to compromise more than they do, we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes.

That’s how I see Afghanistan today. I see no moderate spark. I see our secretary of state pleading with President Hamid Karzai to re-do an election that he blatantly stole. I also see us begging Israelis to stop building more crazy settlements or Palestinians to come to negotiations. It is time to stop subsidizing their nonsense. Let them all start paying retail for their extremism, not wholesale. Then you’ll see movement.

What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.

And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.

My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence. We simply don’t have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 — and we desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter. Let’s finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.

Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but expanding there will, too. I’d rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America.

Music, Music, Music

Since October 1, life has been full of beautiful music. Some performed by Laura Federici in her Weil Recital Hall debut, then again over the last two weekends in her role in Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito. On Sunday afternoon we went to see the final performance of an Argentinian musical based on the tango, called Tangurea. Talk about excitement. We could not contain ourselves for an hour and a half of dancing bliss and some of the most passionate music played on the planet: the music of the tango. Finally last evening we heard Renee Flemming and Susan Graham in Strauss's The Rose Cavalier at the Met Opera House. All splendid and very successful.

There is so much good music available every where in the world and I urge you to get out and hear it. Music sooths the soul, mind and body like no other balm. It need not be classical; only good.

I am amazed at how many homes I go into that are not filled with good music or books. This is not a criticism, merely an observation. Have you found that? Is your home filled with some art form? If so please share it with our readers here. Make recommendations.

Finally exhausted, Sunday evening we watched a Netflix film called, " I served the King of England". A Czech film with English subtitles that is extraordinarily good.

Takes place in Eastern Europe in the run up and after WWll.

Stunning character development and explanation of the culture of the era.

With all the horrors going on in the world today, please find time to be good to your self and enjoy some of the inspiring things in life

The Value of Relationships

When I began this blog I promised not to preach nor have my own opinions too visible. I hear from those who read the blog that they are comfortable with what I have presented to date. I am pleased as well that readership is growing and that I am able to publish your thoughts too. So please feel free to send me things you want to share.

This has been an extraordinary week for appreciating relationships.

My wonderful nephew and niece, Michele and Robert Federici, showed us how to define parenting, love, caring, courage and personal strength. Deb Philips hosted and executed a funeral service for a close friend and once again showed how to express love to the world. I contacted Rob Berkley and asked him to support a scholarship I am sponsoring at his personal cost. He never even blinked and said yes.

Laura Federici continues to amaze and please us with her artistic skill with her wonderful performance in the Mozart opera, La Clemenza di Tito.

After the performance, a gang of us went to have food and drink to celebrate her success. I ordered hundreds of dollars of food and wine only to find that the restaurant did not accept a debit card. I leaned over to another of my life's mates, Joan Ginsburg, and asked, you have $200? She did not interrupt her conversation, merely reached into her wallet, took out the cash, handed it to me and continued to tell her story.

Two hours prior to Laura's performance, I attended a 50 year reunion of some 40 or so classmates and fraternity bothers. A man, Roger Elowitz, found all the people, organized the event, created a website to honor us and then hosted and emceed the evening. People came from all over the U.S. and guess what? No one had changed very much. Sure they appeared older but the spirit and charm of what had brought us together 50 years ago is still very evident: the value of relationships and love.

On Monday, Addie & Gary Tomei, Lawrence & Margaret Ryan-Paolella and I journeyed to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. We have known each other well over 50 years and wished to continue the momentum of the Saturday evening class reunion. The love, respect,good will and hysterical laughter at no one's expense evidenced as we traipsed through the gardens, ate our way through China Town in Brooklyn, coffeed and desserted in Bensonhurst's Italian section was incredible. Eight hours together in a Prius for the journey was not enough.

On Tuesday evening, Margaret & Lawrence arranged for Laura and I to accompany them to the 22nd season premier of Steven Blier's, "New York Festival of Voices". An important New York classical music scene that presents some of the best classical music singers in the world. Mr. Blier is related to Margaret so we also had the joy of meeting him after the performance. Get this, folks, Steven is mid forties, a power in the U.S. music scene, the impresario of the NY Festival of Voices, the piano accompanist for the ensemble as well as many of the world's leading singers, translator to and from English of many of the pieces presented and confined to a wheel chair. Muscular dystrophy ravishes his body but not his mind nor spirit. Talk about love, relationships, appreciation of people, I urge you to go to their website, pick a performance and spend an evening with him and the ensemble.

Some finals notes of love and caring this week. Daughter Yoanna called me cause I said I had a bit of a stomach thingie, wished to stay away from Laura this week so I would not contaminate her( La Clemenza performance this coming Saturday)and asked me to come stay with the Connecticut Federici clan for some care and feeding. "Every one here is sick so what's one more virus" is what she lovingly said.

Anna and Chris Wyant welcomed 7.5lb Lilly into the world. Jack Kreisberg turned 7! and Fred Henry celebrated his 72 birthday today. HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRED! A pretty good week, folks, if you are paying attention. I bet if you looked at your week you could find as many wonderful things as I have just taken you through. I know, stuff happens, but I(and so should you please), always remember the good things.

The Nobel Peace Prize

The President says he is humbled and surprised at the award. He freely admits that the gap between his rhetoric and accomplishments is huge. The banking system is still running a muck e.g.Citigroup just sold its energy trading business rather than renege on the $98mm bonus it promised the head of the operation.

Barney Frank is gutting his consumer protection legislation in order to produce a bill that will pass. Not only pass; but appease the bank lobby and conservative democrats.

Treasury, the Federal Reserve and all the "watch dog agencies" continue to allow the financial industry to behave as they did before the meltdown instead of applying existing law and true over-sight. Unemployment will clearly go to 10-12% and last through 2010. Any one see any of the $700 billion stimulus money to date?

We remain in Afghanistan despite the fact that every occupying nation since Alexander the Great has failed to tame that place. An aside: one probelm is that no one seems to get that Afghanistan is not a country in the conventional sense. It is a loose federation of tribes led by strongmen with no allegiance to anyone but themselves and those they need to survive. Central Government, as we know it, is corrupt and ineffectual. We shall see this become Mr Obama's war very shortly.

Healthcare Over-haul? Let's Make Sense. Without competition,it seems that the Insurance Industry lobby has won the day. Coops either private or state run have not been studied fully and their success or failure determined. So why create a federal plan based upon inconclusive evidence? The only plan we have seen work on a national basis is Medicare. And it is not bankrupt nor about to be bankrupt despite what the fear mongers say. We must,however, stop using its revenues to fund other congressional projects!

The issue is that here again the administration is walking away from Tort Reform, Cost of Drugs and other major drivers of cost for any system in order to produce some acceptable legislation. It appears that Incrementalism is the strategy of choice for the Obama administration.

So much to do, so many competing agendas, yet a prize for being a man of peace. Perhaps it is as the Wall Street Journal and The NYTimes report: applause for the absence of George Bush in the world and a desire on the part of the Europeans to encourage the diplomatic efforts of the current president.

In any case,it seems he did not lobby for it and it was freely given. Let us respect our president be proud of this recognition of America and take him at his word: it is a call to action.

"Art of Communications" Guest Response

One reader of the blog responded in a thoughtful way. It follows for your consideration:

I come out on the side of progress, but always with the reservation and the question I ask myself....Will my life be better or worse with the “new” product...because a product it is, and one that we must buy or rent . Economies need an endless supply of new products to keep the consumer spending and happy, and the wheels of economies well oiled....
That is the western way of life...
I will just relate an experience I had a week ago regarding communications...
I went to the post box and retrieved a genuine lettre, with lovely foreign stamps, addressed to me (my full name spelled out), street address, city and country, all there....I cannot tell you the pleasant sensation that washed over me as I held this unfamiliar object in my hand....
I rushed upstairs so that I could discover its content and it’s author...
Well, it was a two page lettre from a dear old friend who teaches at Harvard, and certainly works with technology. The lettre so beautifully written on linen stationary from a hotel in the Italian Alps, and so wonderfully composed that I was deliriously happy and so inspired that I sat down immediately to respond in kind. It took approximately an hour or so of my time to compose and carefully pen my response. That too made me feel....well wonderful??? I took it to the post office the very next day to send it on its journey across the sea, with the hopes that my friend will have the same enjoyment when she receives my post.
I have an entire file box filled with correspondence of the past. When I say correspondence, I do mean those lettres that could qualify as prose, as short stories and poetry....So inspired are their contents, that I could never bear to just toss them away....I began reading some of them, and I can say unequivocally, that I enjoyed reading them as much as I did when I first opened them., they are in a way history, my history..I expressed a little “Ahhh,” and then returned to answering e-mails on the computer, thinking about the publication of lettres between famous and accomplished persons that we, even anonymously, love to read.
I think all of the above is to say that yes, resoundingly, progress should never be ignored, but embraced and refined, but not necessarily at the cost of losing, forgetting or obliterating that which has merit and keeps us in touch with human feelings and emotions.

The Art of Communications?

Much is being said about the new forms of communications and how they do or do not help us to speak and relate to one another. Some complain that nothing worth while can be said in 140 characters-Twittering. Blackberrys enslave us. Facebook supplants real relationships and texting makes us illiterate.

Consider the history. Socrates, it seems, objected to writing in part because this invention eliminated the need to exercise memory.The telegraph, some call Twitter the 21st century version of the telegraph, caused Henry Thoreau to scoff in the 1840s "Maine and Texas may have nothing to say". Three decades later Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, declined to buy the patent rights for the next new thing, the telephone, because it provided no permanent record of a conversation. In 1880, Western Union declined as well asking"whether any sensible man would conduct his business by such a means of communications".

When the typewriter came into wide spread use in the 1930s, The New York Times editorialized against the machine arguing "it usurped the art of writing with one's own hand" It also will give rise to untrained authors flooding the world with opinions they have not the experience to hold. Sounds like the knock on today's bloggers.

When I was lobbying the congress for AT&T in the eighties asking for the right to introduce cell phones to America, I argued that expansion of the cell phone would not be to the detriment of other means of communications. I showed Members the power and what the technology would bring. I used a precursor back then of today's Smart phone. Those industries against the expansion included the newspaper, television and radio industries. Why? Revenues, my friends, revenues.

Turns out the newspaper industry was right as they see their ad revenues fade to the Internet and all manner of PDAs. The TV and Radio industries seem to be holding up. Revenues and the demise of an industry, however, has never been and never will be a reason to block technological growth.

History also teaches that the embedded industry tries to block, complain about,seek protection from and ultimately attempt to own the next new communications thing.

The lecture circuit industry of the 18th and 19th centuries, complained about the introduction of large newspapers. newspapers complained about the growth of radio, radio railed against the growth of TV and they are all worried about or trying to own a piece of the Internet.

Folks, embrace it. In my experience there are only two things not diminished by growth,change or being given away: love and knowledge. There is an endless supply of both.

This Guy Gets It!

The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary.

"My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are, Christmas trees.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu . If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him? I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.

In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her 'How could God let something like this happen?' (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, 'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?'

In light of recent events.... terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said okay.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with 'WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.'

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing yet?

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it.

Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit.

If not, then just discard it... no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don't sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.

My Best Regards, Honestly and respectfully,

Ben Stein"





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