Quotes – Thomas Friedman

“Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around… Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance… It should be lights out in Belgrade (Yugoslavia): Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.”

“Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge… The U.S. has to make clear to Iraq and U.S. allies that… America will use force, without negotiation, hesitation, or UN approval.”

“It turns out many of those Afghan ‘civilians’ were praying for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.”

“We need to go into the heart of their world [Palestinians] and beat their brains out, in order to burst this bubble.”

“U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo.”

“Any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be about oil.”

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist-McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

“Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war [in Afghanistan] a chance.”

“The most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investments is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for this era of globalization, just as the British navy did for the era of globalization in the nineteenth century.”

“I believe globalization did us all a favor by melting down the economies of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil in the 1990s.”

“It [Iraq War] might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush?”

“Thomas Friedman’s collected works constitute a veritable dictionary of the market-populist myths of the age, awesome in its inclusiveness: Enthusiasm for the “rebranding’ of Britain, pointless ponderings about the physical weight of each country’s GNP, facile equating of Great Society America with the Soviet Union. Each of them is preposterous in its own way, but thrown together they make a truly dispiriting impression… This is what the ruling class calls thinking, that this handful of pathetic, palpably untrue prejudices are all they have to guide them as they shuttle back and forth between the State Department and the big think tanks, discussing what they mean to do with us and how they plan to dispose of our country.”
– Thomas Frank

“The weakening of labor pleases Thomas Friedman, who mentions this as one of Thatcher’s accomplishments. He regards Reagan’s breaking the air controllers strike in 1981 as his finest achievement, “helping break the hold of organized labor on the U.S. economy’.”
– Edward S. Herman

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