Juan Cole/Informed Comment: April 10, 2005 Part 2

Friedman's Slander of Middle East Studies and How it is Wrong and Ignorant

On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote:

' Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.

In the West, it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies -- to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an "Orientalist" or an "essentialist." '

I don't know Tom Friedman well. I once had dinner with him and Lee Bollinger, just after September 11, at the university president's house here at the University of Michigan, so I can say I've met him. I remember some of our conversation at that time. I argued, at a time when it seemed clear that the US would go to war with Afghanistan, that simply bombing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would not be enough. I said that the US had a responsibility to do nation-building in Afghanistan. Not only did we owe the country for helping devastate it by using it in as a proxy in our war with the Soviets, but if we did not help it out, it might well fall back into chaos and generate forces that might hit us again. Tom absolutely disagreed and, on free market grounds, argued that no attempt at government state building should ever be undertaken. I explained why I thought it was not only desirable but inevitable. He said, "Well, someone would have to show me how it could be done." I am glad to say that I clearly won this argument after the fact, and Tom seemed rather more enthusiastic about US nation-building a year later, when considering Iraq. Indeed, he now seems to want the US government to engage in vast social-engineering projects throughout the Middle East. Tom, I was just talking about Afghanistan. Even if I convinced you, I didn't mean you to go quite this far.