Global Paradigms

Thanks to Dr.Strauss for drawing my attention to a report issued by Fair (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) : Tom Friedman's Flexible Deadlines Iraq's 'decisive' six months have lasted three and a half years 5/16/06 New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman is considered by many of his media colleagues to be one of the wisest observers of international affairs. "You have a global brain, my friend," MSNBC host Chris Matthews once told Friedman (4/21/05). "You're amazing. You amaze me every time you write a book." Such praise is not uncommon. Friedman's appeal seems to rest on his ability to discuss complex issues in the simplest possible terms. On a recent episode of MSNBC's Hardball (5/11/06), for example, Friedman boiled down the intricacies of the Iraq situation into a make-or-break deadline: "Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcom...

Now... if Castro had a nuclear program we might have been opening an embassy in Havana... Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmpolitan challenges the conventional wisdomabout ourour new love affair: If President Bush’s immigration speech was an attempt to divert attention from his failures in Iraq, then Condi Rice’s announcement this week that the U.S. would restore diplomatic ties with Libya — and that Iran and North Korea should take note — may have been a useful distraction of attention from the fact that in the course of a single week, she’d suffered two significant diplomatic setbacks (on the quest for Iran sanctions and on the attempt to financially throttle the Palestinian Authority). Most of the media seemed to lap up her explanation that Libya had been suddenly cowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq into renouncing terrorism, WMD and seeking to rehabilitate itself in the international community. That revisionist account, of course, ignores the fact that Libya had been strenuously attempting...