Shorter Thomas L. Friedman, "Arsonists and Firefighters: Who is Setting the Sectarian Fires in the Middle East?" New York Times, June 20 2014:
The problem in the Middle East isn't some kind of intrinsic ethnic or religious hostility, ancient hatreds that can never be wiped out, it's bad people starting trouble for their own apparently psychopathic purposes. No, I don't have any mirrors in my house, why do you ask?I deposited the following in the comments:
David Bloom
New York, NY
Not so bad as far as it goes, but as many readers have noted there is an awfully big elephant in the room and it is us. We could argue forever about who out there is good and who out there is bad, but nosce te ipsum! We must always ask whether we are putting out flames or spreading them. Too much of what the US has done in the Middle East, especially since 2001, has made things worse in ways that were entirely predictable and indeed predicted because the policy makers thought they were firefighters and didn't understand their hoses were filled with gasoline instead of water.
For one thing, to push the analogy a little harder, firefighters concern themselves with life before property, and get everybody out of the building before they save the building itself. We should be assuring the safety of refugees before we even think about contributing to military action that inevitably endangers civilians. The fact that we have done so little for Syrian and Iraqi and going back to Palestinian refugees convinces the world that we aren't serious about our compassion. Thomas Friedman is himself regarded by many as an egregious arsonist for his support for the Iraq invasion of 2003.
