Thomas Friedman’s Qualifications

Not qualifications as in credentials; qualifications as in guardedly hedging your statements. Often how someone qualifies his statement reveals more than what he actually says. Think of the liberals in the 1950s: so fearful of being called “soft on communism,” they often were much more concerned to protest that they had no communist or fellow-traveler sympathies, etc., than they were to criticize the tactics of Joe McCarthy — not to mention the fact that too few of them ever did challenge the pre-cursor McCarthyite programs of President Truman.

Thomas Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times strikes me as a good example of an argument that takes two steps back in qualifications and give-away lines for every tentative step it ventures forward.

I believe Friedman is trying to make the point that the French, and Europe generally (interesting how the United Kingdom is no longer part of “Europe”), overreacted in their opposition to our Iraq policy. But in doing so (if that is indeed what he is doing), he accepts such large chunks of the European view that there’s precious little left of what he, I think, intended to say.

Some examples.

First, he refers more than once to “this unilateral exercise of U.S. power.” Unilateral?

[Chirac and de Villepin] became so intoxicated by how popular their anti-U.S., antiwar stand became across Europe, and in the whole world, that they went from legitimately demanding U.N. endorsement for any use of force in Iraq to blocking any U.N.-approved use of force

Say What?