What a sublime thinker Friedman is: “We hit Iraq because we could.” I made an edit for clarity. Rose got his wars confused.

Thomas Friedman — Charlie Rose

Friday 05/30/2003
Pulitzer Prize Winner Thomas Friedman shares his opinion on whether it was worth invading Iraq and and what it means to have won the war.

01:13

Charlie Rose: Let me start with an overview of [the Gulf War]. We won the war. People had criticisms about going in. Now that the war is over and there’s some difficulty with the peace, what is was it worth doing?

Thomas Friedman: Oh, I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that looking back I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about. It’s interesting to talk about it here in Silicon Valley because I think looking back at the 1990’s, I can identify – there are actually three bubbles of the 1990s, there was the NASDAQ bubble, the corporate governance bubble, and lastly there was what I call the terrorism bubble.

And the first two were based on creative accounting, the last was based on moral creative accounting. The terrorism bubble that basically built up over the 1990’s said flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, that’s okay. Wrapping yourself with dynamite and blowing up Israelis in a pizza parlor, that’s okay. Because we’re weak and they’re strong and the weak have a different morality.

Having your preachers say that’s okay, that’s okay. Having your charities raise money for people who do these kinds of things, that’s okay. And having your press call people who do these kinds of things martyrs, that’s okay. And that built up as a bubble, Charlie, and 9/11 to me was the peak of that bubble. What we learned on 9/11 in a gut way was that that bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society.

Because there is no wall high enough, no INS agent smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble. What we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.

There was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said, “we’ve got you.” This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don’t care about life. We’re ready to sacrifice. All you care about are your stock options and your hummers. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

“You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow. Well, suck on this.” That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part ever that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.

Friedman really loved the Charlie Rose show. There are 132 results for him at the site.

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I really hate sites that refuse to make what should be txt - into actual txt. I had to grab an annoying glob of HTML and make it txt myself.