Friedman on Iran
About a dozen or so years ago I had a friendly disagreement with a talented young historian of American foreign policy on the subject of the NY Times’s Thomas Friedman. I casually opined that Friedman was more than occasionally worth reading; he objected that Friedman was less than occasionally worth reading. I think I was right, and would even go further. For all his limitations (which this post is mostly about), Friedman is usually worth reading. After all, he knows a lot after close to half century of foreign policy reporting, has great access to important sources, and is no dummy. So, I would commend to you his column today on the Iran war, if only to better understand his limitations.
Notably, Friedman has nothing to say about international law, which the US and Israel have flagrantly violated in attacking another sovereign country with no credible defensive justification. Since he has nothing to say about it, it’s fair to infer that he doesn’t think it’s an issue, that he shares the widespread if implicit belief in the American foreign policy establishment that the US has every right to violate international law at will. That we are the biggest and best good guys in the world and so we are the law, even if “we” are the current regime in Washington. I’m sure if pressed he wouldn’t say that in so many words, but really and truly that’s what he thinks.
Accordingly, Friedman just can’t bring himself to condemn the US-Israeli aggression, various concerns notwithstanding. And, he thinks, the war could produce some positive outcomes, like maybe, eventually, a more decent regime in Teheran. But also, and less problematically, the disabling of the Middle East’s biggest trouble-maker. It’s this last claim that I want to focus on, because it reflects the kind of blinkered, one-sided understanding of the world that gets this country into trouble.
Friedman says that “…[T]he Islamic Republic of Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in [the Middle East] since 1979, cultivating proxies to control four Arab states—Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.…” You don’t have to be an apologist for the Ayatollahs to recognize this for the grossly partisan, misleadingly oversimplified claim that it is. Daniel Larison, whose Substack newsletter I heartily recommend, justly laces into it:
It exaggerates the extent of Iran’s influence with the groups it supports, it ignores the independence and local interests of those groups, and it simply ignores the baleful conduct of many other regional actors….
No one who has paid any attention to the region for the last few decades can honestly believe this. There have been other governments in the region that have waged wars outside their borders to occupy and/or steal other people’s land in the last forty-seven years, but Iran isn’t one of them.
Since 1979, Iraq invaded two of its neighbors and sought to swallow one of them, Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied part of its territory for almost two decades, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE attacked and invaded Yemen starting in 2015. In the last two and a half years, Israel has attacked multiple regional neighbors first. As for the U.S., our government launched an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the express purpose of overthrowing its government and installing one more to Washington’s liking. We’re supposed to believe that Iran’s cultivation of proxy groups makes it a bigger imperialist power than any of those?
Some footnotes: One of the countries Iraq attacked was Iran, and the aggressor enjoyed the support of the United States. The US has been similarly complicit in the bloody Saudi/UAE intervention in Yemen. As for Iran’s so-called proxies, none of them was created by Iran, and none is a mere puppet, as Friedman implies. Hezbollah, for example, arose in Lebanon in reaction to Israel’s lengthy illegal occupation of that country. And, as Larison explains, Iran’s ties to the Houthis in Yemen were minimal when the war began, but they increased significantly as a direct result of the war.
None of this is to whitewash the record of the Iranian regime. But Friedman would whitewash the record of the current aggressors. Unfortunately, there are no consequential benign actors in the Middle East, certainly not the US and not Israel. There is no excuse for this war.