Dancing in the hurricane

Image via.

That's Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Archmustache of Cloudberry, taking a new provisional book title out for a test drive, perhaps.

He was in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, guest-of-honoring the annual Sulaimani Forum at the American University of Iraq (he doesn't mention it, but it's not hidden, and Dr. Google and I got there in under a minute), and offering them some Friedmaniacal gnomic advice:

he pointed out how the world is changing ever faster, mainly as a result of the dominance of The Internet in all aspects of life, comparing this rapid change to a hurricane. “You can dance in a hurricane when you stand in the eye,” he told his audience, “but then you need an anchor of good governance and good communities” -- then wishing his “good friend Barham Salih [MP and former prime minister in the Kurdistan regional government, founder of the American University of Iraq in 2006] good luck in building an eye to the hurricane.” (via rudaw.net)

I think part of the problem is that if the hurricane is Internet-driven socioeconomic change, then the eye is either where you can't get online or change isn't occurring or both, so if you focus on dancing in it, you're going to be missing a lot. Also, you need to be aware that the eye of a hurricane is moving, and if you just stand there dancing, you'll be back in the wind in a couple of hours.

Anyhow, he was still there as the news on the Brussels bombing came out and the moment arrived for him to file the copy for his Wednesday column, and he found himself deeply disturbed, wondering, "Does Obama Have This Right?"

Obama’s primary goal seems to be to get out of office being able to say that he had shrunk America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevented our involvement on the ground in Syria and Libya, and taught Americans the limits of our ability to fix things we don’t understand, in countries whose leaders we don’t trust, whose fates do not impact us as much as they once did.... 

so we need to stop wanting to invade the Middle East in response to every threat. That all sounds great on paper, until a terrorist attack like the one Tuesday in Brussels comes to our shores. Does the president have this right?

Wait, does he mean he now thinks maybe we should fix things we don't understand in countries whose leaders we don't trust and keep wanting to invade the Middle East in response to every threat? Not exactly.

...sitting here also makes you wonder if Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hand’s-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for U.S. power to tilt this region our way — without having to invade anywhere. Initially, I thought Obama made the right call on Syria. But today the millions of refugees driven out of Syria — plus the economic migrants now flooding out of Africa through Libya after the utterly botched Obama-NATO operation there — is destabilizing the European Union.

Because, as George W. Bush might have put it, rarely is the question asked: "Is millions of refugees destabilizing our EU?"

And I don't even want to think about how that apostrophe found its way into "hand's-off". But if you get out your machete and try to cut your way through the luxuriant syntactical undergrowth, what Tom seems to be arguing is that Obama should stop being defensive (which is obsessed), passive (which is dangerous), and opportunity-missing, and start tilting something, without having to invade anywhere, or do something to Syria without using his hands, possibly according to the rules of soccer.

Or, shorter: while Friedman used to think Obama was right to keep his hands off Syria and not invade everywhere, now he is taking the subtly different point of view that Obama needs to do something not amounting to putting his hands on Syria or invading anywhere. What that something is is left to the reader's imagination.

It's comical that Friedman should start wondering about this the day before John Kerry arrives in Moscow to begin discussing the next phase of stabilizing the situation in Syria after a cessation of hostilities that has reduced violence by as much as 85 or 90% ("some say," says Kerry). I don't know whether the president "underestimates the opportunity to tilt this region without having to invade", but he seems to think he can do something.

Can't you at least wait six months, Tom?

But the fact is Tom's not talking about Syria, or the refugee crisis, or the Brussels bombing (is it helpful to remind the reader at this point that the Brussels bombers, like November's Paris bombers, were Belgian-born citizens of Europe, not refugees?). What he's talking about, as it eventually turns out, is sending money to Tunisia and Iraqi Kurdistan so they can build some democracy for themselves, especially Kurdistan, where they have built this nice university "because they want to emulate our liberal arts" (whereas Friedman wants the US to emulate the Chinese educational system and focus on STEM, but let that pass).

The Kurdish government, which was allowing a strong opposition party to emerge and a free press, is now backtracking, with its president, Massoud Barzani, refusing to cede power at the end of his term, and the stench of corruption is everywhere. The Kurdish democratic experiment is hanging by a thread. More U.S. aid conditioned on Kurdistan’s getting back on the democracy track would go a long way.

Yes, I'm sure that would fix everything, as money always does. When the Americans are passing around the Benjamins with democracy conditions, nations everywhere leap into line to do the right thing, and the stench of corruption quickly disappears. Happens every time.

And giving it to the unrecognized nation of Kurdistan would no doubt thrill the Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian governments no end, doing wonders to unite the region's proxy-warring factions. And Obama could probably do it all by himself with one of those cute executive actions he's grown so fond of?

No, you idiot, he couldn't. Only Congress can do that. (Which it certainly should, as regards Tunisia anyway; for some reason I'm feeling a little less enthusiastic over the Kurds than usual today.) Only Congress can help with the refugee situation, too, by allocating money and enabling more Syrians to come to the US. And Congress won't. And—

I beg your pardon, what liberal-arts–friendly university was that you mentioned just now? Wouldn't by any chance be that American University of Iraq, would it, the one that just paid Tom Friedman whatever the rate is—not a Clintonian $225K, I don't suppose, but not chopped liver either (apparently around $75,000 as recently as 2009, and those fees don't go down over time)—to share his fascinating hurricane metaphor? Of course it was, children!

So there you have it, the solution to today's mustached mystery. The reason Tom's pulling out such a remarkable number of stops—Brussels, Syrian refugees and the immigrant crisis, Tunisia, "Sheikh Abdullah Humedi Ajeel al-Yawar, head of the giant Shammar tribe, centered in what is now ISIS-occupied Mosul,... in his elegant robes", and Libya came into it too, and a sudden sarcastic dismissal of an Obama attitude he was perfectly happy with a week or two ago—is just to make a friendly gesture to his charming hurricane-eye–building hosts! It's a Friedmanian bleg!

Image via Iraq-Business News. Don't let this building go to bed hungry, President Obama!

So last time he was in Sulaimaniya was 2014, when he delivered a "keynote speech" at the university, and his pal Barham Salih, apparently running for president of Iraq, the country, was too. When our rudaw.net correspondent recalled,

Flashback to 2007, when three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote: "Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the US invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq. Imagine if we had triggered a flood of new investment into Iraq that had gone into new hotels, a big new convention center, office buildings, Internet cafes, two new international airports and Iraqi malls. Imagine if we had paved the way for an explosion of newspapers, even a local Human Rights Watch chapter, and new schools. Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq, with public parks, where women could walk unveiled and not a single American soldier was ever killed — where Americans in fact were popular — and where Islam was practiced in its most tolerant and open manner. Imagine ...Well, stop imagining. It’s all happening in Kurdistan, the northern Iraqi region, home to four million Kurds.”...

Nearly seven years later, the superstar journalist returned to Kurdistan to check back in on the university and deliver the keynote speech -- a coup for the young school which is still trying to achieve accreditation....

It helps to have talented Barham Salih steering the ship. Enormously popular with the students, he could scarcely move for hours after the ceremony as students swarmed around him in hope of a photo. In a glowing paean to her boss, [university president Dawn] Dekle called Salih her “mentor,” and likened him to US President Theodore Roosevelt. She certainly wasn’t the only one to notice how presidential Salih looked, as Kurdish Parties search for a successor to Jalal Talabani.  (rudaw.net)