Book Review: Longitudes and Attitudes

Thomas Friedman is a foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times who's won two Pultizers. His new book is The World is Flat about globalization and I'll be reading that soon. But first I read Longitudes and Attitudes which is a collection of his columns from just before 9/11 to April 2003. If you read his column regularly there's no need to read this book, if not, it's really worth while.

Friedman is mostly liberal but did support the war in Iraq, though he feels it was handled badly. As a result he's criticized by both the left and the right. He travels extensively through the Middle East and South Asia and talks with leaders. He comes across as quiet knowledgable about that part of the world.

"The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy, and terrible at diplomacy." He's unhappy at how they handled the Kyoto treaty and ABM treaty, basically that we pissed off the whole world, and then we say in the war on terrorism, you're either with us or against us. He also warned, before the war, that the reconstruction will be hard and we won't be successful if we try to do it alone.

He wonders how there are many unhappy people in the world, and some perform terrorist acts, but it seems only Sunni Muslims become suicide bombers. He says Muslims have a poverty of dignity that while their's is supposedly the most refined take on monotheism, they seem to be behind (economically, techinically, militarily) the Christians and Jews in the modern world. The Arab governments have failed the people in building a viable economy or education system. He thinks that sucessfully bringing democracy to Iraq might help inspire the other Arab nations to change their ways.

He also notes that the extremists don't offer any solutions, only destruction. That bin Laden talks only about destroying the US not about building up anything. As the education system and the culture is intolerant anything other than Islam, he finds lots of hatred for jews and Israel. Some unfounded, like the myth that 4000 Jews where told to stay home on 9/11, and some reasonable criticisms of Ariel Sharon. But he places most of the blame squarely on Arafat who rejected the Oslo accords which offered Palestinians about 97% of what they wanted and in return neither he nor any Arab nation offered a non-violent alternative.

I wondered if it would be odd reading newspaper columns from 4 years ago, but the perceptive of knowing what happened was interesting. The last 70 pages are a diary from his travels. Some of this info went into his columns of the time and that was boring. But other parts were descriptions of conversations with various leaders and average people in that part of the world and those were always interesting. I'm really glad I read this, and I'll be reading his column regularly from now on.