It's been a long time since I read Thomas Friedman mostly because he is completely lame and otherwise due to firewall issues. But his column on Suleimani's death is amnesiac and misguided and pathetic.
we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.
Except that isn't at all what happened. Hezbollah got a toehold and developed in Lebanon in the wake of the Israeli invasion, as they were the only real organized resistance to the nearly two decade occupation of half the country, and a large part of the reason for the Israeli withdrawal.
Similarly Iraq fell into Iranian influence not because of a lack of freedom or women's education, but because of the US invasion and occupation. In fact the very chaotic freedom we gave them meant the Shiite majority took over and naturally aligned with Iran.
Iran doesn't control Yemen like Friedman and others in the US seem to believe.
I guess you can try to make a case that the Arab Spring was the result of such forces and Syria a belated entrant. But of course, propping up the Syrian Gov't isn't much different to how the US supports the Saudis and others. But as Iraq shows, more freedom rapidly introduced is more a plan for chaos and score settling than any kind of progress.
Friedman's game has always been that everyone should be like us and then they'd be prosperous and modern and happy. Ignoring that many don't want to be like us, wouldn't likely reach economic success even if they were, and ignoring the very real dysfunctions of US style freedom and modernity.
Women's rights is a laudable goal imo, but a major cause of the Arab uprisings is that half the populations are under 30, and even under 25 in some cases, and there isn't close to enough economic development and jobs to absorb them. How adding large numbers of females to the job pool would help is beyond me.
Anyway,
if you read the full column the US is barely mentioned, as though it's played next to no role int he ME this century, while Suleimani has been responsible for everything. It's silly ahistorical stuff. Besides I think Trump was likely to side with Bibi and punish the Iranians no matter what Suleimani or Iranian proxy forces did.
Taking Suleimani out was an interesting gamble. Nobody really knows what comes next. But the fact that Iran does have many proxy forces means they can try to hide any role in whatever retaliation goes down. It's still unclear who took half the Saudi's oilfields off line with drone attacks. But there's little doubt some escalation is coming.
I said much earlier that Trump might go for some Iranian bombings to up his approval and win re-election. Sure seems like that's part of the trajectory we're on.
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