New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman tells Iraqis: "Suck on this"

New York Times foreign-affairs columnist and author Thomas Friedman is a favourite of centrist media types, who enjoy his sunny views on globalization and his glib theories in such books as The World Is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. For instance, he has suggested that two countries with McDonald’s restaurants won’t go to war.

More recently, he has discovered the energy crisis, which is the subject of his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Fix America.

But he’s deeply loathed by left-wing anti-imperialists, who despise his support for the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq in 2003.

In this clip from a Charlie Rose interview on YouTube, Friedman maintained that he still feels that the war on Iraq was justified.

Friedman explained that there were three big “bubbles” of the 1990s: the "NASDAQ bubble" (which culminated in the dot-com crash); the "corporate-governance bubble" (which culminated in corporate criminals such as Conrad Black and Bernie Ebbers going to jail): and the "terrorism bubble".

Friedman claimed that the first two bubbles were based on creative accounting; the third was grounded in moral creative accounting.

According to him, the terrorism bubble suggested it was okay to fly planes into the World Trade Center. It was okay for preachers to support this idea in Muslim countries. It was okay for charities to raise money to finance this terrorism. And, Friedman emphasized, this so-called terrorism bubble was a “fundamental threat to our open society”.

And that’s why he felt America needed to burst this bubble because otherwise, the terrorists would feel they could use suicide bombers to  level the balance of power between them and the United States.

The only way to do it, Friedman added, was for the United States to go into the Muslim world.

“What they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ”˜Which part of this sentence you don’t understand? You don’t think we don’t care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy--we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this. Okay’,” Friedman said. “That, Charlie was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”