Let’s segue from the subject of my previous post, Greg Sheridan, to Thomas Friedman. Naturally, Greg hearts Tommy:
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman is a deep sceptic about the ability of the world to do anything about greenhouse gases. He sums up his argument by reference to Doha and Dahlian (a city in China), which have recently built mini-Manhattan skylines. Anything the developed world did on climate would be vastly outweighed by the developing world’s growth. Not that the developed world will do much.
But Greg and Tommy have some other things in common as well, like their assessment of the wondrous event that is the Iraq invasion. As Antony Loewenstein notes, Tommy’s latest missive laments the foolish loss of regard for the United States among the rest of the world. He is, justifiably, critical of China and Russia’s vetoes of the recent Security Council resolution regarding Zimbabwe. But he still manages to gloss over the kind of thing that might have actually diminished the United States’ own moral standing:
We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.
But America is not and never has been just about those things …
Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate.
Sounds like something the Gruen Transfer might come up with – “America: We Still Have Some Moral Backbone.”
“We should have done better in Iraq.” Perhaps it was going in there with this mentality that was the problem:
