by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
With his background and enduring interest in the Middle East, Friedman continued to report on political and economic developments in the region. But in his books and columns, references to the Middle East and his numerous anecdotes from the region often serve as “exceptions” that highlight his putative “rules” about global change. These writings illustrate Rogers’s observation that “when difference is put in exceptionalist terms . . . the referent is universalized.”24 In Friedman’s depiction, the Middle East is the last great battleground where the forces of globalization have yet to claim victory, and he sees this struggle as the key to understanding all major political changes and processes in the region. He often tells his readers, “If you want to see this war between the protected and the globalizers at its sharpest today, go to the Arab world.”25 Tracking political change in the region, he announces that “the internet and globalization are acting like nutcrackers to open societies and empower Arab democrats.”26
Friedman collapses the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise of political Islam, and growing challenges to the American projection of power in the region into the same binary struggle between neoliberal economic policies and statist economic systems. Through this lens, Arab supporters of peace with Israel and democracy advocates are understood as motivated by the same logic as economic globalization. He repeatedly explains the widespread opposition to a broad set of trends (mostly American policy objectives) as a reflection of the endemic Middle Eastern resistance to globalization. When he encounters Arabs who challenge or disagree with his ideas about globalization or the peace process, he declares that they suffer from “systematic misunderstanding” because they follow a framework of understanding that fails to correct itself when exposed to more information.27 In a similar fashion, however, Friedman with little imagination seems to view all processes and struggles in terms of a binary framework defined by a vision of a universal future with no room for alternative possibilities.
Although Friedman sometimes blames access to oil resources for the lack of globalization in the region, suggesting that when the oil runs out there will be no further resistance to economic reform and democratization, he constantly invokes a cultural basis to the region’s exceptionalism. For no other region does he make claims such as in “the Arab-Muslim world . . . cultural attitudes. . . have become a barrier to development” and constantly observe how “there is huge resistance to . . . modernization from the authoritarian and religiously obscurest forces within the Arab-Muslim world.”28 He often returns to the notion that “traditional societies” as found in the Middle East cannot cope with the freedom that globalization offers. He also complains that people in the Arab world fail to correctly understand globalization; for them “it is a challenge that is devoid of any redemptive or inspirational force.”29
When discussing the cultural backlash against globalization, Friedman notes it is “most apparent in the Middle East” where people are still caught up in fights over territorially rooted symbols and resist globalization under the battle cry of “I don’t want to be global. I want to be local.”30 These people are “ready to go to war to protect their culture from the global.”31 Along with the French, he asserts that Arab culture is “intuitively hostile to the whole phenomena” of globalization.32 Writing an imagined memo from Bill Clinton, he complains that “what troubles me most about the mood on the Arab street today is the hostility I detect there to modernization, globalization, democratization and the information revolution.”33 In 2001, as the Oslo peace process collapsed (an event that had little to do with globalization), he viewed its decline and the rise of regional opposition to the post-9/11 policies of the George W. Bush administration as signs of the failure of the forces of globalization to transform the region. Rather than recognize these trends as the product of local political forces with rival interests, he cites his friend Stephen P. Cohen and announces that “we are heading back to . . . an era characterized by . . . the Arab world’s isolation from the dominant trends in global economics and politics.”34
AFTER 9/11: THE MIDDLE EAST, GLOBALIZATION, AND TERRORISM
With the help of Friedman and others, in the wake of September 11, 2001, the geopolitical imaginary of Middle East exceptionalism shaped popular images and policy options largely because it offered a ready lens that seemed to explain the causes of the attacks and suggest what the United States should do to prevent future ones. The popularity and pervasiveness of this lens are enhanced for most Americans because it does not require specific knowledge of the Middle East. It claims the Middle East generates abnormal threats because its political, social, and economic conditions are abnormal. This imaginary operates without any reference to U.S. policies and interests in the region.
In American post-9/11 debates, efforts to explain the attacks and consider appropriate American responses often ignore geopolitical issues, such as American alliances and its military presence in the Arab-Muslim world. Instead, American media commentators, think-tank scholars, and policy makers quickly come to argue that the attacks of September 11 were due primarily to the failure of the states of the Middle East to globalize and expand economic opportunities and political liberties for their peoples. Although these are, to a large degree, fair characterizations, they do not in themselves explain Middle East politics and the rise of international terrorism networks. These observers portray the Middle East as a region of dysfunctional states, economies, and societies with little awareness or appreciation of the geopolitical factors that may account for such conditions.
Although the belief in Middle East exceptionalism certainly does not explain all facets of American post-9/11 policy under George W. Bush, it does help to account for the way American policy makers and much of the American public came to think about the threat 9/11 represented. We can read back to Friedman’s reporting before 9/11 to trace how the logic of Middle East exceptionalism came to define much of the public debate and policy making in the post-9/11 era. In a 1998 column, Friedman explains that one “can’t understand [the American standoff with Iraq] without reference to . . . U.S. hegemony after the cold war and globalization.” By this Friedman meant to suggest that “America’s economic success” was “brewing” “deep resentment against the U.S.” and, more broadly, Americanization-globalization was a “destabilizing force, challenging every traditional society.” At the same time, he warned that “globalization empowers the haters” and, referring to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he expressed fear that the threat the United States now faced was the “super-empowered individual—the super-empowered angry man.”35 Thus even before 9/11, Friedman’s theory of globalization had led him to a rethinking of the geopolitics of America’s relationship with the Middle East. He argued that the United States faced a threat from the Middle East primarily because the Middle East failed to embrace globalization.
In his post-9/11 book on globalization, The World Is Flat, Friedman represents the Middle East as the exceptional space that has remained unfiat.36 He argues that the failure of the region to embrace globalization produces not only some “super-haters” but also many passive supporters of terrorism. These men are often the young living in a “state of half-flatness” who “see that the Arab-Muslim world . . . has fallen behind the rest of the planet.”37 Friedman explains to his readers that “the flattening of the world only sharpens that dissonance by making the backwardness of the Arab-Muslim region, compared to others, impossible to ignore.”38 This logic ignores popular opposition to the projection of American military power in the region since the 1990–91 Gulf War, the primary stated grievance of Osama bin Laden, and portrays various aspects of the American presence in the Middle East—including political, economic, cultural, and military—as simply facets of globalization’s inescapable process of transforming the world and spreading freedom, democracy, and prosperity.
At the same time, another component of American post-9/11 discourse that Friedman articulated years prior to the event was tha
t as globalization collapses distance it gives the forces that oppose both the United States and the forces of globalization new capabilities to threaten the American homeland. Prior to 9/11, most Americans considered the primary regional threat to U.S. interests to be “rogue states” such as Iran and Iraq, which were subject to strategic containment, political isolation, and economic sanctions. After the 9/11 attacks, however, many scholars and analysts in the United States hastily suggested that globalization was refining geopolitics. International relations scholar Robert O. Keohane, for example, concluded, “Globalization means, among other things, that threats of violence to our homeland can occur from anywhere. The barrier conception of geographic space . . . was finally shown to be thoroughly obsolete on September 11.”39 These new threats could only be contained, in Friedman’s view, by ending “the state of half-flatness” in the Middle East. Within the discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, this goal required the elimination of the obstacles that have hampered the forces of globalization from transforming the Middle East and allowing its people to experience globalization and its effects. Friedman not only supported American efforts to bring economic and political transformation to the region but also clearly articulated an influential rationale for the American invasion of Iraq based not on the threat of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons but rather on the need for socioeconomic and political reform.
MAKING THE MIDDLE EAST SAFE FOR GLOBALIZATION
A defining moment in the evolution of American support for the Iraq war came in 2002, just as the Bush administration was articulating a new global strategy based on “preventative war,” termed the Bush Doctrine, that would lead eventually to the invasion of Iraq. In the midst of an ongoing debate about the threat that Iraq posed to the United States, the United Nations published the first in a series of annual Arab Human Development Reports (AHDRs) drafted by a team of well-known social scientists, development planners, and intellectuals from the Arab world.40 American officials, media commentators, and academics broadly approved the report. They read it as a sign that some Arabs had finally correctly diagnosed the maladies of the Arab world. Chapter by chapter, the report surveys topics including economic, political, demographic, health, and educational conditions across the Arab world, noting the vast range of differences between the rich and poor countries of the region. Most American commentators, however, focused on aggregate comparisons between collective data for the Arab states and data for other regions.
Whereas the region does not usually rank the lowest globally in these cross-regional comparisons, it often does on political freedom indicators—such as political and civil rights, independent media, and accountability of rulers to the ruled. And most American commentators focused on this image to view the whole report through the lens of Middle East exceptionalism and suggested that the report explains the reasons that the Middle East is a generator of terrorism and threats to the United States, even though no such claims are made in the report. More critically, although the authors of the report called for internal reform in the realms of human rights, effective governance, women’s empowerment, and improved educational systems, many in the United States, from Friedman to the Bush administration, used this report to justify American policies in the Middle East—from invading Iraq to financing microcredit schemes—claiming they are in the interest of the Arab peoples and would have their backing.
Friedman and others focused on the lack of freedom, with little sense of its historical and geopolitical causes, and read the document as proof of their Middle East exceptionalist narratives, which collapsed notions of the Middle East’s absence from globalization, modernity, and history into a binary framework. In Friedman’s words, the report analyzes the “main reasons the Arab world is falling off the globe.”41 Suggesting that the 9/11 attacks can be explained by reference to internal regional conditions rather than geopolitical struggles or the breakdown of the central state in Afghanistan, Friedman tells his readers that “if you want to understand the milieu that produced bin Ladenism, and will reproduce it if nothing changes, read this report.”42
By the fall of 2002, Friedman had evolved from opining that the United States should care about socioeconomic conditions in the Middle East (because they “produce bin Ladenism”) to arguing that the only way to stop the threat of terrorism “is by administering some shock therapy to the whole region.”43 Suggesting that “replacing Saddam Hussein with a progressive Iraqi regime” might be such a shock, he declares, “If America made clear that it was going into Iraq, not just to disarm Iraq but to empower Iraq’s people to implement the Arab Human Development Report, well, [Arab terrorists] still wouldn’t be with us” but, referring to the broad mass of public opinion, he suggests “the Arab street just might.”44 When time came to take a definitive stand in support of the invasion of Iraq, Friedman explains that though a nuclear-armed Iraq could be deterred, the real threat to American interests was the “undeterrables—the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life.”45 Friedman goes on to reason:
So then the question is: What is the cement mixer that is churning out these undeterrables—these angry, humiliated and often unemployed Muslim youth? That cement mixer is a collection of faltering Arab states, which, as the U.N.’s Arab Human Development Report noted, have fallen so far behind the world their combined G.D.P. does not equal that of Spain. And the reason they have fallen behind can be traced to their lack of three things: freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment. If we don’t help transform these Arab states—which are also experiencing population explosions—to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible media that won’t blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables.46
Although Friedman’s support for the AHDR goals may be laudable, by justifying this support as an anti-terrorism strategy he ignores the means the AHDR authors suggested for promoting internally driven reform, to be supported by intraregional cooperation, increased education spending, a restructuring of the nature of the global economic order, and peacefully ending military occupations over Arab territories. Instead, Friedman portrays the peoples of the region as terrorists and captives in need of liberation, noting “in today’s globalized world, if you don’t visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you.”47 Even after the invasion, when the war was losing support in America, Friedman explains: “The right reason for this war . . . was to oust Saddam’s regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development Report’s prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. . . . The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s.”48 Friedman’s “terrorism bubble” lumps together disparate events such as the 1993 World Trade Center attack in New York and the suicide bombers unleashed in Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. He explains them all in terms of the Arab youth whose “governments and society have left them unprepared for modernity.” 49
A similar logic drove the thinking of Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami. In early 2003, writing in Foreign Affairs, one of the most influential Middle East experts in American media and inside White House policy circles, explains:
For a while, the failures of [the Arab world] were confined to its own terrain, but migration and transnational terror altered all that. The fire that began in the Arab world spread to other shores, with the United States itself the principal target of an aggrieved people who no longer believed that justice could be secured in one’s own land, from one’s own rulers. It was September 11 and its shattering surprise, in turn, that tipped the balance on Iraq away from containment and toward regime change and “rollback.”50
Although concerned about Iraq’s “deadly weapons,” Ajami argues that “the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring
Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab World.”51
THE GEOPOLITICAL IMAGINARY OF “THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP”
In early 2003, while diplomats at the United Nations debated weapons inspections regimes and American and British officials presented frightening images of the threat Iraq posed, a broader discourse defined by Middle East exceptionalism was igniting support for a war with Iraq. Adding to the writings of Friedman, Ajami, and others, security analyst and former Pentagon strategist Thomas P. M. Barnett published a brief essay and a map that graphically depicted a version of this emerging geopolitical imaginary in the March 2003 issue of Esquire.52 Although the specific influence of his iteration of Middle East exceptionalism might be hard to assess, his popular writings clearly represented the ongoing rethinking and redrawing of geopolitical strategies that folded the ideals of neoliberal capitalism into geopolitics and military affairs.53 Barnett argues that the American post-9/11 grand strategy should be defined by the notion that “disconnectedness defines danger.” His vision of a U.S. grand strategy calls for an explicit connection between the muscular use of military power and the promotion of globalization in the Middle East. According to Barnett, his ideas germinated while working at the U.S. Naval War College in the year before 9/11, when he was tapped to join a Pentagon strategic planning team. In the years since, he has disseminated his ideas first through his briefings of government officials and then through his public writings.
