Many people are unhappy about some recent pensées from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal KingdomOpens in a new tab.” Friedman explains that “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.” He informs us that Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are like caterpillars in which this wasp lays its eggs, and those eggs are the “Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.”
This is imperialistic blather straight out of the 19th century, except horribly written — imagine Rudyard Kipling after an anvil fell on his head. But the column is useful because it reconnects us to a 1982 incident that illustrates how, when it comes to the Middle East and Israel, the management of the Times has sometimes been to the right of Friedman.
The same thing is true for the Times itself. Somehow it is simultaneously the worst and best newspaper on earth. On the one hand, it runs crimes against human cognition about the insects living in the Middle East. On the other hand, it also regularly produces brilliant investigative reporting, sometimes even about IsraelOpens in a new tab.
This complexity is extremely cold comfort for the people who are brutalized by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, it’s important to comprehend if we’re trying to understand reality — something we should want to do, no matter how difficult and frustrating it can be.
Source: Thomas Friedman and Journalism’s Red Lines on Israel–Palestine
olddogthoughts 
Whether or not they realized it, the anything-but-a-tabloid-magazine New York Times helped manufacture enough American consent for the Iraq War/invasion through then-VP Dick Cheney’s self-citing via the Times’ website but then claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was really at fault. The same Times that otherwise insists upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers’ anonymous information sources. [And was there not a huge monetary benefit/incentive for the U.S. via vast Iraqi oil fields, which were accessed by American industry, including Dick Cheney himself?]
The Times seems to have jumped on the atrocity-prone Iraq-invasion bandwagon, likely in no small part due to their close proximity to the massive 9/11 blow the city took only a few years prior. There was plenty of that particularly bitter bandwagon going around in Western circles back then. Quite memorable was Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s appearance on the Charlie Rose show (May 29, 2003) in which he ranted about the Iraq War/invasion being justified and successful:
“And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically uhm, and, uh, uhm take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said ‘we’ve got you’ this bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don’t care about life, we’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your hummers.
“And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad uhm, and basically saying which part of this sentence don’t you understand. You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go, well suck on this. Ok. 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. And that’s the real truth.”
It’s as though it was decided: ‘Just to be on the safe side, let’s error in favor of militarily assaulting, invading and devastating Iraq and especially its people’. … What astonishes me is when such morally challenged news-media men like Friedman are nonetheless able to sleep well at night, and look his little children/grandchildren in the face everyday. I know I couldn’t. And I’m not just trying to be mean.
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