Tom Friedman Calls for U.S.-ISIS Collaboration

Israelis appeared to have given Benjamin Netanyahu his fourth term as prime minister. Assuming the vote was free and fair, commentators are forced to draw the conclusion that Netanyahu's anti-Arab fear-mongering in the campaign's final days was the key to Likud's success. Bibi raised the alarm that Israeli Arabs were voting in "droves," and he pledged that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch. How else to explain the reversal in momentum for Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni of the Zionist Union which was recorded by the last opinion polls conducted before yesterday's election?

Thomas Friedman in his column this morning, "Go Ahead, Ruin My Day," does not shy away from this conclusion -- that Netayanhu's racist appeals found a willing audience in the Israeli electorate:

Let’s start with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party pretty well trounced the Labor Party leader, Isaac Herzog, in the race to form Israel’s next government. Netanyahu clearly made an impressive 11th-hour surge since the pre-election polls of last week. It is hard to know what is more depressing: that Netanyahu went for the gutter in the last few days in order to salvage his campaign — renouncing his own commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians and race-baiting Israeli Jews to get out and vote because, he said, too many Israeli Arabs were going to the polls — or the fact that this seemed to work.

Friedman goes on to apologize for Netayanhu, arguing that Likud could easily reverse course and re-adopt a two-state solution. But, in any event, so argues Friedman: "[T]he fact that some 350,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank, makes it hard to see how a viable two-state solution is possible anymore no matter who would have won."

In an upside down reading of contemporary history, Friedman then places all the blame for the toxic divisiveness of Israeli politics on Hamas for starting last summer's war in Gaza. Friedman seems to forget that it was Netanyahu's crackdown on the West Bank following the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers, a crackdown whose real goal was to re-arrest Hamas activists released earlier from prison after a negotiated settlement. Netanyahu was interested in stirring up trouble and driving a wedge between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza had announced a unity government.

Friedman should ask himself, "Was it Hamas rockets that repeatedly targeted UN sanctuary schools?

What Friedman does -- and he has been doing it for a long time in his Wednesday-morning foreign affairs column -- is gussy up whatever the dominant elite wisdom is on the New York City to Washington D.C. I-95 corridor. For instance, for a long time he was a shameless pitchman for U.S.-led techno-capitalism and financialization. Then, when U.S.-led techno-capitalism and financialization led to the meltdown of the global economy, he moved on to something else to pitch, say, the Arab Spring, with never a word, an apologia, a mea culpa, a reassessment of his errant opinions. He was a booster of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And when the U.S. began its roll back of the Arab Spring, Friedman did an about-face, albeit with some qualifications.

Friedman exists to buttress whatever the prevailing paradigm is in the U.S. capital(s).

That is why it is illuminating that in this morning's column Friedman is advocating for U.S. collaboration with Islamic State:

O.K., so we learn to live with Iran on the edge of a bomb, but shouldn’t we at least bomb the Islamic State to smithereens and help destroy this head-chopping menace? Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

This is nothing new. At the end of last spring Friedman warned against hurting the Islamic State jihadis too much for fear that doing so would empower Iran.

Friedman continues:

ISIS, with all its awfulness, emerged as the homegrown [!] Sunni Arab response to this crushing defeat of Sunni Arabism — mixing old pro-Saddam Baathists with medieval Sunni religious fanatics with a collection of ideologues, misfits and adventure-seekers from around the Sunni Muslim world. Obviously, I abhor ISIS and don’t want to see it spread or take over Iraq. I simply raise this question rhetorically because no one else is: Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq? Because the Shiite militias now leading the fight against ISIS will rule better? Really?

Friedman as an oracle of the power elite is telling us what should be readily apparent to anyone who reads the news everyday. The enemy is not Islamic State. The enemy is Iran. It is a very difficult argument to make. Iran and its allies don't go around burning people in cages, crucifying, beheading, etc. Iran is civilized. A similar pivot was accomplished in the invasion of Iraq when a confused America public was made to believe that a Baathist Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to Al Qaeda's 9/11. Can lightning strike twice in the same benighted collective consciousness?

One of the false arguments that is frequently repeated by people like Friedman is that ISIS is homegrown. This is contradicted by reporting found in Friedman's own paper. The leadership of Islamic State, given that al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi, is predominantly foreign -- a lot of fighting commanders come from the Caucasus.

We're approaching endgame. Netanyahu's victory is a harbinger. Will the public allow itself to be herded into this "clash of civilizations"?