Friedmanic Depression

Image via YouPouch.

Just days, it seems, after thrilling the world with his conviction that the Obama administration could make a crucial difference in the Middle East by funding, um, tertiary education and whatnot in Iraqi Kurdistan (devastated by the collapse of oil prices), land of advanced democracy and place where Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Archmustache of Dreamland, is quite often invited to share his wisdom, Tom himself, filing another column from Iraq, suddenly seems deeply down in the dumps, in part, apparently, because he's just learned how complicated the Kurds are:

If you think there is a simple answer to this problem, you ought to come out here for a week. Just trying to figure out the differences among the Kurdish parties and militias in Syria and Iraq — the Y.P.G., P.Y.D., P.U.K., K.D.P. and P.K.K. — took me a day.

Did he really only find out about that this week? Oh dear.

What he's saying, though, starting with the headline, "When the Necessary Becomes Impossible", is pretty well informed, and pretty grim-and-ironic, though it's pretty odd that it should be coming to him as a surprise after all these years:

Crushing the Islamic State, or ISIS, is necessary for stabilizing Iraq and Syria, but it is impossible as long as Shiites and Sunnis there refuse to truly share power, and yet ignoring the ISIS cancer and its ability to metastasize is impossible as well. See: Belgium.

And....  because we need Turkey’s air bases and cooperation to foster a modicum of democracy in Iraq tomorrow, we are silent on Erdogan destroying democracy in Turkey today.

(My bold. I'm not going to get stuck on that cancer metaphor there, but quotation does not imply approval.)

What happened in the course of the week to move Friedman from a state of manic enthusiasm to this realistic but hopeless depression? Oh.

I've joked before about Friedman being on or off his meds, but I'm wondering if there isn't something broader at issue here, not that he himself literally suffers from bipolar disease but that maybe the neoliberal style of thinking does, a cyclic way of swinging between two profoundly different styles, in the same way neoconservatism is psychopathic or just 24/7 delusional.