The melting pot that is the U.S. military is marveled at time and again, as are the opportunities the institution provides for showcasing the superior U.S. commitment to dismantling traditional gender barriers. At Bagram, for example, Friedman engages in Orientalist exultation over the “mind-bending experience” offered to POWs who have gone from “being in Al Qaeda, living, as James Michener put it, ‘in this cruel land of recurring ugliness, where only men were seen,’ and then suddenly being guarded by a woman with blond locks spilling out from under her helmet and an M16 hanging from her side.”208 In another instance, Friedman advertises a “fascinating article”209 in The Atlantic Monthly about a U.S. F-15 jet fighter with a female bombardier who drops a 500-pound bomb onto a Taliban truck caravan. Friedman summarizes: “As the caravan is vaporized, the F-15 pilot shouts down at the Taliban—as if they could hear him from 20,000 feet—‘You have just been killed by a girl.’”210
Gender-conscious ejaculations by F-15 pilots seemingly unaware that life is not a video game are not, of course, remotely indicative of female empowerment. Undeterred, Friedman collects additional evidence during a visit in 2005 to the U.S.S. Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf that contains not only “blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, [and] Muslims” but also various women officers.211 After speculating as to what local Arab fishermen must think hearing female voices over the Chosin’s loudspeaker and radio, Friedman boasts of U.S. military accomplishments in Iraq: “In effect, we are promoting two revolutions at once: Jefferson versus Saddam and Sinbad versus the Little Mermaids—who turn out to be captains of ships.”212
The fact that the female crew is still conceived of by non-Iraqis in terms of “Little Mermaids” who are simultaneously permitted to serve as ship captains suggests that fundamental obstacles to gender equality still exist in supposedly post-revolutionary societies. Other obstacles to the U.S. army-as-vehicle-for-women’s-rights model include Time Magazine articles that begin: “What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night?”213 According to the 2010 article, the Pentagon estimates that the number of female soldiers sexually assaulted by their male counterparts while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan rose 25 percent from fiscal year 2007–8, and that 80 to 90 percent of sexual assaults in the military go unreported.
Friedman, however, prefers to focus on the cheery cohesion of the armed forces, while devising new ways for America to simultaneously engage in military destruction and societal improvement abroad. Among the most bizarre of these is his “new rule of thumb” proposed in 2010 following a visit to Yemen: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.”214
The new rule of thumb is the product of Friedman’s experience chewing qat—“the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work”215—at a meeting with Yemeni officials, lawmakers, and businessmen, primarily U.S.-educated or with children currently studying in the United States, who complain about the Yemeni education system. Having thus swiftly and scientifically analyzed a country he has never before visited, Friedman urges: “If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”216 It is not explained whether the kindergartens will teach children not to feel anger when Yemeni civilians are killed by U.S. drones.
Friedman’s frequent inclination toward specific cohorts abroad, especially in the Arab/Muslim world, can also be observed in his 2002 publicizing of the existence of “a secularized, U.S.-educated, pro-American elite and middle class in Saudi Arabia, who are not America’s enemies. They are good people, and you can’t visit Saudi Arabia without meeting them.”217 What is implied by such sentence structures is that religious, non-U.S.-educated, and non-elite Saudis are America’s enemies and are not good people, which automatically obliterates the hope that any fragments of human reality might survive Friedman’s prattle.
As for other varieties of U.S.-administered education, Friedman’s solution for quelling the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is to “close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training.”218 He meanwhile swears his commitment to “dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans,” a curious solution in a country that already offers free universal health care.219 The real tragedy of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in Friedman’s view is, of course, that they have exacerbated the lack of “moral authority” on the part of the Bush-Cheney team, which is nonetheless still described in 2007 as possessing “moral clarity.”220
It is important to emphasize that Friedman is often critical of the United States. However, criticism is levied solely to discourage behavior Friedman sees as jeopardizing U.S. power, the maintenance of which remains his supreme goal. For example, his berating of U.S. administrations for failing to launch a green revolution is a result of his conviction that “making America the world’s greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or naïve moral indulgence. It is now a core national security and economic interest,” necessary for restoring the United States to global preeminence.221
As one might expect, Friedman’s view of what qualifies as proper environmentalism is in constant flux. He alternately: demands a Manhattan Project for renewable energy;222 advocates for the import of Brazilian sugar ethanol;223 demands that Europe abandon its opposition to GMOs, “which will be critically important if we want to grow more of our fuel—à la corn ethanol or soy biodiesel”;224 warns against “end[ing] up in a very bad place, like in a crazy rush into corn ethanol, and palm oil for biodiesel”;225 declares that he is “wary of biofuels” and that “what makes sense in Brazil does not make sense in the United States”;226 announces that “all environmentalists have their favorite ‘green’ energy source” and that his is “called coal”;227 cautions: “Let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can ‘clean up’ coal”;228 resurrects the “heretofore specious notion of ‘clean coal’”;229 characterizes a Manhattan Project for clean energy as an “easy sound bite” for politicians and a “cop-out”;230 and advises the Tea Party to improve its image by becoming the Green Tea Party (“I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto”).231 Additionally, he goes from harping on Bush for Kyoto Protocol–related unilateralism, “selfishness and hubris”232 to deciding that Kyoto is unfeasible and that if the United States simply unilaterally stages a green revolution, the world will forget its resentment and follow.
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman proposes, “with tongue only slightly in cheek,” the following bumper sticker formula to express the goal of a Clean Energy System: “REEFIGDCPEERPC < TTCOBCOG.”233 This stands for “a renewable energy ecosystem for innovating, generating, and deploying clean power, energy efficiency, resource productivity, and conservation < the true cost of burning coal, oil, and gas.”234 A response to Google’s proposed formula of “RE < C—renewable energy cheaper than coal,” it is a rare example of an instance in which Friedman’s normal tendency toward reductionism might have proved more effective.235
As for the Friedman formula according to which “the only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market,” the idea that a system that runs on greed and the exploitation of resources and humans in the interest of profit can somehow provide a solution to the very ills it creates is fanciful, to say the least. In 2006 Friedman reasons that “there is nothing wrong about” China’s (not Mother-Nature-friendly) extraction of natural resources from Latin America because “America and Spain did the same for years—and often rapaciously” and because China’s “voracious appetite … is helping to fuel a worldwide boom in commodity prices that is enabling a poor, low-industrialized country like Peru to grow at 5 percent.”236 For an example of what can happen when commodity booms do not benefit poor people who also possess appetites, see the Arab uprisings of 2011.
Friedman applies the logic of greed in his tirade against the “ridiculous” World Trade Organization protests of 1999,