Friedman of the Times declares war on FranceBy Bill Vann
20 September 2003--snip--
Not only does Friedman blame France for the failure of the US occupation, but for the war itself. Paris insisted, he claims, on “making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war.”
It is one thing to lie; it is another to think that no one will remember the lies you wrote before. The Bush administration never had any intention of avoiding a war with Iraq. On the contrary, everything it did—from fabricating evidence about weapons of mass destruction, to the false claims concerning September 11 and the maneuvers within the UN itself —were aimed at implementing a plan for war that was worked out well before Bush even entered the White House.
What about Friedman? One would imagine from his latest column that he spent the months preceding the US invasion longing for a peaceful solution to the Iraq question and was dismayed that the French forced Washington into a war.
It is worthwhile reviewing some of his pacifist essays for the New York Times in the run-up to the US invasion. Last December 1, he drafted a column advising the Pentagon that the best way to prepare a war against Iraq was to kidnap Iraqi scientists and force them to say that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons.
On January 5 he provocatively headlined his column “A War for Oil?” Replying to his own question, he wrote: “My short answer is yes. Any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be—in part—about oil. To deny that is laughable.”
On June 4, he dismissed the growing body of evidence that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. “The real reason for this war,” Friedman wrote, “which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” He continued, “Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason:
because we could.”
This last statement aptly sums up the gangster mentality that reigns within the Bush White House. The retroactive claim that if only the French had backed an open-ended resolution legitimizing a US invasion, war could have been avoided is ludicrous.
--snip--
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/frie-s20.shtml
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