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Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas Loren Friedman, OBE (born July 20, 1953) is an American journalist, columnist, author and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, currently working as an op-ed contributor for The New York Times. His columns, concentrating mainly on foreign affairs, appear on Wednesdays and Fridays. Friedman is known for supporting a compromise peace between Israel and the Palestinians, modernization of the Arab world, environmental issues and globalization, while sometimes remarking on their potential pitfalls to the United States economy and society. His books address various aspects of international politics and major shifts in the future world order, from a centrist, liberal perspective on the political spectrum. Friedman is the recipient of the 2004 Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement and has been named Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Early life

Friedman was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. As a child, he attended a Jewish summer camp where a young Abe Foxman was a counselor. In high school, he wrote for his school's newspaper, including one article in which he interviewed Ariel Sharon, future Prime Minister of Israel, then an Israeli general.

Friedman received a B.A. in Mediterranean Studies from Brandeis University in 1975. He then attended St Antony's College at the University of Oxford on a Marshall scholarship, receiving an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies. He names Professor Albert Hourani among his important academic influences.

Career

Upon graduating, Friedman joined the London bureau of United Press International. He was dispatched a year later to Beirut, where he stayed until 1981. He was then hired by The New York Times, and was soon redispatched to Beirut at the start of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Friedman's coverage of the war, particularly the Sabra and Shatila massacre, won him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

He was assigned to Jerusalem from 1984 to 1988, and received a second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada. Afterwards he wrote a book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describing his experiences in the Middle East.

Friedman covered Secretary of State James Baker during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, he became the Times's White House correspondent. In 1994, he began to write about the intersection of foreign policy and economics, and in 1995 he moved to the op-ed page of the Times as a foreign affairs columnist.

Opinion and stances

Globalization

Further information: The World Is Flat

Friedman first discussed his views of globalization in the 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In 2004, a visit to Bangalore and Beijing gave Friedman new insights into the continuing shifts in the global structure of wealth and prosperity, tilted towards populations from emerging markets that recently joined the global arena. This led him to write a follow-up synopsis and analysis on globalization, The World Is Flat.

One of Friedman's theses is that individual nations must sacrifice some degree of economic sovereignty to global institutions (such as capital markets and multinational corporations) in order to achieve Western-style economic prosperity. He termed these restrictions the "Golden Straitjacket."

While Friedman is an advocate of globalization, he has also pointed out (in The Lexus and the Olive Tree) the need for a country to preserve its local traditions even as it globalizes, a process he termed "glocalization".

Friedman has been praised for his strong stance on America's need to become more energy independent, and to lead in technologies concerning environmental compatibility. He believes this will cause the authoritarian rulers in the Middle East to be coerced out of power as their petrodollars deplete, by a growing and albeit distressed youth population. He believes this is the key to spreading stability and modernization in an autocratic and theocratic region. Friedman also argues that energy independence will strengthen America's economy by basing its energy infrastructure on domestic products, and ease the world tensions caused by burgeoning energy demand, exacerbated by emerging markets such as India and China.

Friedman's position on globalization through free trade has been criticized as being based on faith, rather than fact or data research. He has been quoted for saying "I wrote a column supporting CAFTA. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."

A criticism of Friedman is that he does not consider the purchasing power of domestic labor as a key driver in economic output. However, Friedman argues that by exporting low-skill and low-wage jobs to foreign countries, more advanced and higher-skill technical jobs will open up, creating niches for those displaced by the outsourcing. He theorizes that as long as those whose jobs are outsourced continue to further their education and specialize in their field, they will find better-paying and higher-skilled jobs. Of course, this leads to more and more people doing skilled labor, thus requiring less overall jobs. As the workforce gets more effecient, one of the major things that Friedman boasts will happen, there will be fewer and fewer jobs to compete for, resulting in higher overall unemployment.

Terrorism

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Friedman's writing focused more on the threat of terrorism and the Middle East. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat". These columns were collected and published in the book Longitudes and Attitudes. For a while, his reportings on post-9/11 topics lead him to diverge from his prior interests on technological advances and globalization, until he began to research for The World Is Flat.

After the 7 July 2005 London bombings, Friedman called for the U.S. State Department to begin producing a "War of Ideas Report" that would identify religious leaders and writers who advocate violence, as well as anyone who suggests that "imperialism, zionism, colonialism or Iraq" explains why the terrorists acted. "These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed," he said in his July 22, 2005 column. Critics at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting point to this as part of a wider trend to marginalise and censor critics of U.S. foreign policy.

War in Iraq

Friedman supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, believing that the establishment of a democratic state in the Middle East would force other countries in the region to liberalize and modernize. In his February 9, 2003 column for The New York Times, Friedman also pointed to the lack of compliance with the United Nations Security Council Resolution regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction:

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Since the invasion, Friedman has expressed alarm over the post-invasion conduct of the war by the George W. Bush administration. Nevertheless, until his piece dated August 4, 2006 (see below), his columns remained hopeful to the possibility of a positive conclusion to the Iraq conflict (although his optimism appeared to steadily diminish as the conflict continued).

In January 2004, he participated in a forum on Slate.com called "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War", in which he dismisses the justification for war based on Iraq's lack of compliance with the U.N. Resolutions:

The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument…

The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity.

Friedman wrote that regime change was the proper justification for the war:

The right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, 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. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.

The neologism Friedman, meaning a period of six months, has been coined in mock tribute to Friedman, based on his repeated optimistic predictions that within six months from the time of his writing, the success or failure of the American project in Iraq would be known.

In a September 29, 2005 piece, Friedman stated that "we are entering the endgame". As a preliminary step towards a subsequent U.S. disengagement, Friedman proposed arming the Shiites and Kurds in order to counterbalance the Sunnis who, in his view, were obstructing a democratic, federalist Iraq:

If come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.

In his August 4, 2006 column for The New York Times, Friedman finally stated that the effort to transform Iraq by military invasion had failed, and that it was time for the United States to admit failure and disengage:

hree years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. … Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening.

Personal life

In November 1978, Friedman married economist Ann Bucksbaum, a native of Des Moines and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University. The Bucksbaum family is reportedly one of the wealthiest in America: Ann's father, Matthew Bucksbaum, is chairman of the board for General Growth Properties, a real estate development group he and his late brother founded in 1954. The Bucksbaums helped pioneer the development of shopping centers in the United States. Forbes estimates the family's assets at 2.7 billion dollars, including some 200 million square feet of mall space.

Ann and Thomas Friedman live in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The July 2006 issue of Washingtonian magazine reports that they own "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." The Friedmans have two daughters: Orly Friedman (b. 1985) and Natalie Friedman (b. 1988). Both were born in Israel while Friedman served as a correspondent for The New York Times, and Friedman has dedicated many of his works to his daughters.

Friedman is an avid fan of golf.

Published works

Original cover of The World Is Flat

Friedman's books have seen considerable commercial success. His latest book, The World Is Flat, has been on the New York Times Best Seller list since its publication in April 2005. Since July 2006, the book has sold more than two million copies.

Bibliography

Documentaries

Friedman has also hosted several documentaries for the Discovery Channel from various locations around the world. In "Straddling the Fence" (2003), he visited the West Bank and spoke to Israelis and Palestinians about the Israeli West Bank barrier and its impact on their lives. Also in 2003, "Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: Searching for the Roots of 9-11" aired on the Discovery Times Channel. This program investigated the reason for Muslim hatred of the United States, and how the Sept. 11th attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon were viewed in the Muslim world. In "The Other Side of Outsourcing" (2004), he visited a call center in Bangalore, interviewing the young Indians working there, and then traveled to an impoverished rural part of India, where he debated the pros and cons of globalization with locals (this trip spawned his eventual bestselling book "The World is Flat"). In "Does Europe Hate Us?" (2005), he traveled through Britain, France and Germany, talking with academics, journalists, Marshall and Rhodes scholars, young Muslims and others about the nature of the strained relationship between Europe and the United States. Friedman's most recent documentary, "Addicted to Oil" premiered at the Silverdocs Film Festival at 5:30 PM on June 16, 2006, and aired on June 242006, at 10 p.m. ET on the Discovery Times Channel. In it he examines the geopolitical, economic, and environmental consequences of petroleum use and ways that green technologies such as alternative fuels and energy, efficiency, and conservation can reduce oil dependence.

External links

Viewpoints

References

  1. The Echo
  2. Sirota, David (2006-08-11). "Where Economics Meets Religious Fundamentalism". San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Communications. p. B6. Retrieved 2006-08-18. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. indexonline.com Indexlonline.com
  4. Vote France Off the Island
  5. Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War: Four Reasons To Invade Iraq
  6. Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War: Four Reasons To Invade Iraq
  7. Needlenose.com,Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
  9. NYTimes.com
  10. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University
  11. Generalgrowth.com
  12. Bloomberg.com, Forbes.com
  13. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University, Notable Names DataBase
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