Twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman was a standing joke for his conversations with imaginary cab drivers, his ever-retreating predictions of imminent victory in Iraq, his toxic metaphors, his faux sincerity that everyone could see right through…but he had his sinecure at the NY Times, he spent every Sunday doing the rounds of the pundit talk circuit, he was the darling of every saggy-jowled talk show host. He’s been doing this for decades without justice slapping him upside the head. For all I know (he may be writing and talking, but I’m not reading or listening) he could still be talking about achieving an honorable peace in Iraq in just six more months.
Except now he has latched onto a brand new bloody war and is cheerleading for that from the sidelines. This is all we need, more conservative assholes flatulently gassing the body politic with new poisons and new bad ideas and more demands that we treat a sociological/cultural/religious/political conflict with 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs. Here’s his new metaphor, filtered through a column by Ben Burgis, so you don’t have to give any clicks to the NY Times.
According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.
We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
Ugh. What the ever-loving fuck? The Times just published an opinion piece calling for the incineration of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and no one stopped to suggest that maybe comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects and calling for their fiery extermination was a bad idea? Of course not. This was the same vicious plan he had decades ago, and no one in the media seems to be able to notice how that turned out.
I have a son who, along with a lot of other soldiers, is going to be doing a tour of duty somewhere in that region (they keep the details from us) in the Spring. I’d like to hope that it is a peace-keeping mission to maintain stability there, and would rather it not become a hostile sweep to exterminate parasitic invertebrates, that is, the native population of human beings in those countries.
What was that? It does not fit his metaphor, nor does it fit reality. Most of those places are desert, not jungle.
‘To save the village we had to destroy it.’
Is Friedman another old pundit in a cognitive tailspin? Iran and Iraq have been at each other’s necks for decades and Iran is fighting an undeclared war in Syria. It’s almost like Friedman doesn’t know the differences between any of those countries he mentioned.
The dehumanising rhetoric is horrible – a textbook case – but the underlying unchallenged assumptions are the most chilling part as far as I’m concerned.
The assumption here is that any of this is the business of the United States. That the US has some right to go interfering in anyone else’s country because they don’t like what is happening there. That the US has somehow been appointed to manage and regulate the situation half a world away.
One might just as easily take a look at the rapacious corporate parasites that have eaten the US body politic alive and declare that bombers from the RAF and French Air and Space Army ought to reduce New York and Silicon Valley to rubble to stop the rot. Divisions of Chinese infantry should scour the Red States to powder to prevent the gun violence and religious extremism from spreading. There is no counterstrategy to all these extremist groups eating way from within, after all.
No? That would be inhumane and horrific? funny that…
I read that differently at first.
If the love of money is famously the root of allevil then dehumanising other people is surely the trunk of all evil.
Also Granny Weatherwax’es quote about treating people as things – or as caterpillars for that matter :
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7289116-what-was-it-that-granny-weatherwax-had-said-once-evil#:~:text=%22Evil%20starts%20when%20you%20begin,thing%20called%20a%20happy%20family.
Sorry, but there are no “peacekeeping” missions the US engages in, unless “peacekeeping” is code for preserving dominance; thing are peaceful as long as there is no resistance or self-determination.
It’s funny that the MAGAverse is busy freaking out about Taylor Swift, when the New York Times is much more obviously a huge deep state mouthpiece. Oh, maybe they don’t read and are just worried about football.
IMO the real news is why are there still US troops in Iraq and Syria? We put on a big show of asking the Iraqis “what do you think?” Until they said “we think you should leave.” Then there was the bloody and useless “rebellion” in Syria, which was openly supported by the CIA and US proxies until it failed, but apparently we built a few bases there from which we could shout loudly about Russia’s ignoring Ukrainian soverignty. Not that I support Russia’s actions but the height of our moral high ground is nonexistent.
His list isn’t even complete.
Those militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are sponsored and supported by Iran. He did mention the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but who knows who they are? I had to look them up. They are an additional army in Iran.
It’s part of a long running struggle between two branches of Islam, Shiites and Sunnis.
It’s been 1,400 years since the two sects split.
I don’t think a few bombs are going to solve anything here.
We’ve already tried that with a few tens of thousands of bombs and it didn’t solve much of anything. Google says we dropped 30,000 bombs on Iraq during our invasion.
In Syria, the U.S. is in the Kurdish regions, who want them there to shield them against Turkish attacks. Trump ordered pulling back from some regions, at the behest of Turkey, which promptly invaded.
In Iraq, the U.S. was invited by Iraq to help fight ISIS. Iraq is thinking it’s time to wind that up now.
raven: Persian polities playing Arab and Levantine peoples against each other predates Islam by more than a thousand years.
@9 Raven
Religious differences are certainly one factor in the clusterfuck that is the Middle East. But a far more important cause was colonialist meddling of European and North American powers in the last century. For example under Mossadegh Iran was on its way to become a secular republic, but that was inopportune for the UK and the US.
Some “-isms” are okay and some are not, I guess….
One of the people who made the situation in the Middle East a whole lot worse was of course, President Donald Trump.
.1. The entire world had a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran that by all accounts was working. They weren’t going to build nuclear weapons.
.2. Trump unilaterally pulled out of it.
His stated aim was to overthrow the Iranian government instead.
.3. Which we didn’t do.
We didn’t even try very hard.
It was never going to work so why bother?
.4. Which leaves Iran free to build nuclear weapons if they want.
They aren’t hard to make. Such powerhouses as North Korea have done it.
Based on 1940s technology and you can find a lot of design information on…Wikipedia.
.5. AFAICT, the only thing stopping Iran from making nuclear weapons is what happens next.
The day after they test a nuclear weapon, the Saudis start their nuclear weapons program.
If you think about it, they almost have to.
It’s what happened when India started testing their “peaceful nuclear explosives” for making large craters wherever you want them. Shortly afterwards, Pakistan set off three of their nuclear bombs.
We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
And WHY, exactly, do we not have such a counterstrategy, despite being keenly aware of the threat since well before 9/11? The neocon chickenhawks who gave us the Iraq war were the ones who have been promising such a counterstrategy (and calling Democrats pussies when we questioned them). So if we have no counterstrategy after all the time the Republicans had, since 9/11 alone, to put one into action, that’s entirely the fault of ignorant-assed chickenhawks like this Friedman guy and all the “hyperpower”/”democracy on the march” twits who got discredited before him.
The Saudis won’t have to have a nuclear program, they have ours. All they need is to shave a few dollars of the price of oil and they will get whatever they say they need.
Ah yes, the old Friedman Unit. 6 months, abbreviated as an FU.
cartomancer @ 4, don’t be silly! We don’t need all of that, we only need some Space Marines.
The only thing holding that back is creating Space Beer…
As for moron milk drinker, his analogy falls apart, as silkworms aren’t incessantly consumed by parasitic wasps, so obviously there is an effective strategy for controlling those wasps.
As for the Levant, there is a solution, drop Friedman on them from high altitude.
As for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the have their own uranium mines, their own processing plants and their primary medical radioisotope reactor requires high enriched uranium to operate. If I’ve got all of the fixings for a good salad in my garden, whyinhell would I want to order a salad from that expensive restaurant down the street? Had they wanted to make nuclear weapons, by now they should have a couple of thousand of the damned things!
Don’t get me started on anything nuclear and Saudi. In general, there is an abominable habit of getting state of the art facilities, such as refineries set up with skilled staffers, then gradually replacing the skilled staff with cheaper labor, with predictable results. Maybe, just maybe if the plant is an intrinsically safe, walk away safe plant.
Well, I can tell you who is a parasite: Netanyahu and the entirety of the Israeli Terrorist Force.
Considering that Israel was only founded in 1948 and its the one busily killing its hosts and sucking off the American taxpayer I think he’s got his parasite taxonomy wrong.
The NYT now IS Thomas Friedman. TF is what imitates the heart and mind of the NYT and its still-dominant breed of American journalism, unctuous and servile.
Seems to me the parasitical wasp metaphor falls apart in that, horticulturally speaking, this is a desired outcome of Integrated Pest Management. Invite the wasps to the garden with nactar-producing flowers and the wasp will lay its eggs in the pestiferous caterpillars like the tomato hornworm. Why is the Moustache of Understanding characterizing caterpillars as innocent victims?
Just a note. The metaphor is not a particularly good one, and is poorly expressed, but I don’t think he is “comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects”. As the quote notes, “[Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq] are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp.” That is, his claim is that “the inhabitants of four nations” are -victims- of a parasitic infestation.
@ ^ idontknowwhyibother : So the human beings and leaders and civilians of four entire southwest Asian nations aren’t one sort of insect but the larval stage of another weaker (lesser) type of insect then?
Oh yes, that is much better isn’t it? (Do I really need a sarc tag?
Population of Lebanon = 5 million people
” ” ” ” Yemen = 33 million humans
” ” ” ” Syria = 18 million individuals
” ” ” ” Iraq = 43 million men, women and children
Figures from wikipedia and no doubt approximations.
NB. For the record the (lesser) there was meant to have a question mark after it. (Lesser?)
I don’t think butterflies and moths (Lepidopterans generally) are actually “lesser” than Ichneumonid wasps. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichneumonidae ) They’re just different critters that are different and fascinating an all part of the base of our food chain. Was kinda noting the predator – prey rel’ship betwixt them there as if hierachial tiers but anyhow..
Insects and their larval stages are not actual people (let alone nations) so it is not a good idea and literally dehumanising to call people insects compare and to say the metaphor is “not particularly good” is,well, not particularly good and dehumanising as an understatement.
^@SteveoR – the claim was that the author was “comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects”. That is incorrect. The claim of the author is that the inhabitants were -suffering- -from- parasitic behaviour.
If you want to make an argument that one should never use insects as a metaphor for humans, then that is fine, but that is not what I was talking about.
“… and no one stopped to suggest…”
Um, are you asking if the NY TImes used an editor on a column from Tom Freidman? Why would you think they would ever do that? The inherent stupidity and lunacy in the column is the point, and it’s totally intentional that this sort of stupidity and lunacy is presented without comment or correction. The NY Times is not interested in journalistic truth. They are interested in distraction and deception long enough for their major corporate partners to maximize profits.