A "foul wind" is blowing in the Middle lEast that "poses a fundamental threat" to the state of Israel, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman told an overflow crowd at a Davenport College master's tea.
The United States must do much more to help diminish that threat and the escalating violence in the region, said the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who visited the campus Feb. 22 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism. He gave a formal lecture at the Yale School of Management's Leader's Forum earlier that day and answered questions from audience members at the afternoon tea.
Friedman had just returned from a week-long stay in Saudi Arabia, a country he described as a "ticking bomb." He noted that 40% of the Saudi population is under age 20, and said this next generation of Arabs is barraged with "distorted" news about Israel in the media and on the Internet, which are constantly "beaming incredible ugliness ... showing Israel in the worst light" as tensions and violence escalate in the Middle East.
"[Y]ou have this whole new generation of Arab youth being Arabized into this conflict," said Friedman, who then went on to describe a scenario that he believes will likely be the common result of this escalation of hatred. "A youth will say, 'Dad, there's a guy here from Pakistan with a bomb in his suitcase. I'd like to carry it to Tel Aviv,'"the journalist said.
The "fear, mistrust, anger" and other negative feelings that are mounting in both Israelis and Arabs have resulted in a lack of political will in both communities to work toward peace, Friedman commented.
"It's the most foul wind I've ever smelled in my 25 years of traveling to that part of the world," he told his audience.
While Friedman acknowledged that there is no easy solution to the longstanding conflicts between Israelis and Arabs, he said the Bush administration is not engaged enough in helping to reduce the rising tensions in the Middle East and has not revealed a long-term strategy for the region. The administration's current approach to the Middle East, he asserted, "is all about one option -- the military option of winning a short war -- and is nothing about the whole rest of the strategy that you need to really consolidate a victory....
"We shouldn't be sitting on our hands," Friedman continued. "I believe that the Secretary of the State of the United States of America should be over there, or we should appoint a real envoy to be there. ... We should be there every day, tirelessly, to bring this violence to an end, to get things to a stable cease fire and resume [peace] negotiations."
He asserted that a "multi-faceted, multi-pronged" American approach to dealing with conflict in the Middle East should include foreign aid to Middle Eastern nations and a well-formulated trade strategy that would help bring globalization to the economically isolated countries. Describing the Arab world as "a region that has been on vacation from globalization," he said that external forces will act to change that. "The only way to create enough jobs for [all the young Arabs] under age 20 is to open up the economy and attract foreign investment," he said.
Foreign trade, he stated, would also allow for greater access to information and an increased exchange of ideas.
"People who don't trade in goods don't trade in ideas," Friedman said. "The Islamic world was at its most rich intellectually when it was most active commercially, in trading with the rest of the world."
In response to questions, Friedman also spoke about some of the issues facing specific nations. Noting that the nations of Egypt, Syria and Iraq, among others in the region, are all "illegitimate authoritarian regimes," Friedman said, "In the Arab world, not a single leader has been elected in a free and fair election. This is the only region of the world that has been completely resistant to democracy."
The journalist said that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarek's failure to cultivate a successor is a reflection of his own insecurity and of a "drift and lack of direction" in that country. He called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's likely successor, his son, "a bigger psychopath than his father," and said of the current leader, "Hussein is an awful man who's done an awful thing to his own people."
He continued, "Iraq is a country that probably has more potential, more natural resources, more of an educated population than any country in the Middle East. It's also a country which has been raped by one man, Saddam Hussein, for 20 years now."
Iran is also politically volatile, said Friedman, commenting on the power struggle between its reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, and its fundamentalist religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This struggle, said Friedman, is akin to a "low-grade civil war." He advocated that the United States follow a strategy that will help "strengthen the Khatami forces in Iran."
Friedman, who is Jewish, acknowledged his cultural kinship with Israeli but said that in his years as a New York Times reporter, he always attempted to be fair in his coverage. His concern about the stories he wrote on the Arab/Israeli conflict, he added, actually served as an advantage. "I care about getting it right; I care about not twisting it," he explained. "This story doesn't go around me. I'm related to it tribally. This story goes right through my heart, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse."
His current hope with regards to the Middle East, Friedman said, is to offer newspaper columns that help others understand what is happening in the region.
"The situation is so grim; it is so dark right now that my feeling is that if I can in my own little way bring any sanity and light into this picture, I will try to do that."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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