from (the lexus world longitudes of) beirut to (the olive tree flat attitudes of) jerusalem

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.
-Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

On Monday night I had the privilege of hearing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speak at the National Press Club as part of George Washington University's The Kalb Report. Friedman was shorter than I would have thought for such an intellectual giant; he was, however, just as articulate, erudite, and thoughtful as I would have expected. He was also, in my opinion, a very classy guy: when asked to comment on NYT's treatment of Judy Miller, he wisely said that he would share any concerns about his supervisors directly with them. And lest you cynics think that he was just trying to shy away from controversy, he later stated in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner, "[Donald] Rumsfeld is a really bad guy."

Friedman began the evening talking about his education and his foray into journalism. The three-time Pulitzer prize winner has only ever taken one journalism class, in high school as a tenth grader. However, the course made "a huge impact,"”he explained, recalling also the teacher's name and classroom number. (This was extremely heartening to me as a former corruptor of young minds.) That year he also made his first trip out of Minnesota (save for the occasional venture into Wisconsin) when his parents took him to Israel, then basking in its post-1967 glory. He would return for the next three of his high school summers to live on kibbutzim. He later attended SOAS on a Marshall Scholarship and went on to earn a master's degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Oxford. One evening, as he walked down a London street, the evening newspaper's headline caught his eye: "Carter to Jews: 'if elected, I will fire Vance.'" The headline mystified him, so he went home and wrote a response to the article. His then-girlfriend (and now wife) knew someone at the Des Moines Register, and the paper eventually published his reaction as an op-ed and paid him $50 for it. The process opened up a whole new world for him, he explained: he was simply amazed that he could read something, think about it, research it, write an opinion about it, and then get paid for it. For his first job as a journalist, he joined UPI's London bureau, on the night shift, but he soon became the organization's second reporter in Beirut, where he was based during the late 1970's. In 1981, he started work at the Times as its Beirut bureau chief, at a time when the paper had never sent a Jew to Israel, let alone Lebanon. In 1989, he served as the Times' chief diplomatic correspondent and traveled with Secretary of State James Baker through the one or two momentous occurrences that year, such as the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and Tiananmen Square in China. He wrote during Clinton's first year in office as a White House correspondent before beginning his role as Foreign Affairs columnist in 1995.

Describing his position at the Times as "a translator from English to English," Friedman then discussed his profession in general. He views his job as an explainer, and his column as a method of managing the complexity of the modern world. He strives for a clear, concise writing style, and, as moderator Marvin Kalb pointed out, doesn't shy away from the pronoun "I." For Friedman, its use is a way of maintaining a personal relationship with his readers, and he makes every effort to have the same with his subjects. To be a good journalist, he claims, "you have to like people, and you have to like listening to the crazy things people say." He took exception to the description of his writing as purely analytical, because he believes the best columnists are first great reporters. It is only after a few days--or even weeks--of reporting that one is able to discern a pattern to analyze.

Inevitably, Kalb asked Friedman about the war in Iraq. As mentioned, he had only scathing things to say about the Secretary of Defense. In particular, his criticism concentrated on the Bush administration's implementation of the war: it ignored the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, Friedman leveled, and thus "prosecuted the war with just enough troops to lose." However, Friedman did not disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq; he took exception only to the Bush administration claim that it would be easy. It was a hard call for him to support to the war, he explained, but he believes there was a reason for war and it was not WMD. In the past, Friedman believes, the U.S. has required only three conditions of its Arab allies: "keep the pump open, keep the price of oil low, and be nice to Israel." As a country we haven't been concerned about human rights violations, or how women are treated, what is taught in madrasas, etc.; Friedman called all of this--everything not included in the conditions--"what goes on out back." He explained the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as the "distilled essence" of the same. And--in an analytical blend of finance and foreign policy, a niche Friedman has carved out for himself--he predicted that the windfall oil profits distributed by autocratic regimes on the population explosions in the Middle East will only worsen the situation. The area needs alternatives for its people, and Friedman believes in "a moral and strategic imperative" upon the U.S. to find these alternatives. He cites as an example India, the world's second largest Muslim country, which maintains no members of Al Qaeda and claims no detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Making an inverse connection between how progressive a country is and the militancy of its population, Friedman made the argument that the context in which people live matters. And there lies the casus belli.

About Iraq itself, Friedman averred that it is the most dangerous place he has ever been as a journalist (including Beirut). He characterized it as a place with no moral boundaries and cited as an example the Sunni Muslim who, on the first day of Ramadan, blew himself up in a Shiite mosque. With the devastating existence of this kind of disregard for even holy places and holy days, the best we can hope for in Iraq is "a decent outcome." His benchmark for a success in Iraq? "When Salman Rushdie can lecture in Baghdad."