Stupid or Criminal?

By Zam Armatay, April 22, 2007

After listening to the Wolf Blitzer's interview with The New York Time's foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman in the CNN's Late Edition, I sat on my couch and wondered how stupid a prominent New York Time's columnist can get. In the response to Wolf Blitzer asking:

Wolf Blitzer: "You are not very optimistic right now? ... I remember that column you wrote after the war, you described yourself as a worried optimist . You supported the war, going into the war, you thought it was a just war, later you called yourself a worried optimist. How would you describe yourself right now?"
Thomas Friedman: "Oh, I'm a sort of just worried right now, Wolf. Just worried."

Four and a half years after the occupation of Iraq, that has resulted in the death of more than 600,000 people, nearly four million refugees and internally displaced persons, a deeply divided nation and a highly unstable region, the guy has just began to worry. Amazing.

Thomas Friedman was one of the so many journalists in the main stream media and official press, who supported the Iraq war and called it a just war. Well, back in 2002 and 2oo3 before the US invasion of Iraq, it didn't require a very bright mind and a high intelligence to see and realize that the rationals made by the Bush administration and his hawkish neo-conservatives, were built upon cheap lies and manipulated intelligence.

Calling the war as a just war by a prominent journalist was incredible. And what was more incredible was that all the mainstream media in the west followed in the footsteps of Bush and his fellows in fixing the intelligence around their catastrophic policy and in making a "good" case out of one of the biggest disasters since World War II.

Writers and journalists supporting the Iraq war could be divided in two different groups; those who supported the occupation of Iraq, because they really believed that the Iraq war was good and necessary and just and those who supported the warmongers in spite of knowing that the rationals behind the war was all lie and based on false intelligence.
Well, the first group are simply a bunch of simple minded, ignorant and naive people who should seek other professions to make carrier in, and the second group are people who has no pride and no respect for the noble profession of writing, has no respect for human life and are at best criminals.

Now I'm not sure which group Thomas Friedman, Judith Miller, Michael R. Gordon and many others of the kind belong to, but what is clear is that these people in The New York Times have been such disappointing failures.

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger 1916