[PAA-Discuss] FW: Amazing--a useful op ed by Tom Friedman

[Lee Loe]

Very clever!! Lee/Mom

  _____  

From: Professor Schwartz' symposium on the Iraq war
[mailto:IRAQVIEWS-L at lists.sunysb.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Schwartz
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 7:12 PM
To: IRAQVIEWS-L at LISTS.SUNYSB.EDU
Subject: Amazing--a useful op ed by Tom Friedman


I guess every dog has  his day, though he has spent many years baying at the
moon before he finally wrote something actually worth reading.  You don't
even have to hold you nose to read this one.   He provides a nice sense of
what the Chinese might be  saying  behind closed doors about recent American
foreign policy:
 

New York Times

November 30, 2010


>From WikiChina


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/tho
maslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers,
I couldn't help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see
what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? I suspect the
cable would read like this: 

Washington Embassy, People's Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign
Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today. 

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically
polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the
U.S. as the world's most powerful economy and nation. But we're particularly
optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things. 

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has
all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over
things like - we are not making this up - how and where an airport security
officer can touch them. They are fighting - we are happy to report - over
the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the
Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are
going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian
cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and
America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl
of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America's and blocking Senate
ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his
wife for dinner at Mr. Kao's Chinese restaurant to praise him for his
steadfastness in protecting America's (read: our) interests. 

Americans just had what they call an "election." Best we could tell it
involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from
businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies
on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to
him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to
fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational
performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new
talent. 

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train - the
Acela - from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to
Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours - and
it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his
embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls - again, we
are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: "When someone calls
you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone
calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from
China!" Those of us who worked in China's embassy in Zambia often note that
Africa's cellphone service was better than America's. 

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they
don't see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy
find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how "exceptional" they
are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The
Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah
Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying "American
exceptionalism." The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with
talking about how exceptional they still are. They don't seem to understand
that you can't declare yourself "exceptional," only others can bestow that
adjective upon you. 

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from
Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so
America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America
will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on
North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America's chain
every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm
things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the
Afghans will surely hate them so much that China's mining companies already
operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan's rare
minerals. 

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their
scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America's politicians
are mostly lawyers - not engineers or scientists like ours - so they'll just
say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It's good. It
means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which
is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to
dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be
challenged by America. 

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying
Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that
speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly
buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America. 

Thank goodness the Americans can't read our diplomatic cables. 

Embassy Washington. 

 

 

 
 
MS
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology
University at Stony Brook
Stony Brook NY 11794
Phone: (cell) 516 356-4078
 
 
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