The hunting of the snark

National Catholic Reporter, May 20, 2005 by Richard Thieme

How does one begin to evaluate the accuracy of this extraordinary claim that we were ready to "go nuclear" on Pakistan? As a layperson without access to a private intelligence apparatus, I can only ask those with better connections. A few weeks ago, Bob Woodward and I delivered keynote addresses for Infosec World and I asked Woodward about these claims. Mr. Woodward had never heard of Stratfor or Mr. Friedman but responded to specifics by saying, "Nonsense! I talked to people at CIA and elsewhere about how we put pressure on Pakistan and it never included threats of nuclear attack. Besides," he added, "how would we know where all of their weapons were? That's impossible."

Another weighty claim is Mr. Friedman's assertion that our primary intention in invading Iraq was to force the hand of the Saudis and compel them to resist an al-Qaeda they had funded and supported.

How he advances this thesis illustrates a critical problem with his methodology. A complex scenario with multiple streams of motivation and intention is reduced to a single scenario. Mr. Friedman oversimplifies. Where is the report of neocon strategizing in the '90s, when the Middle East was perceived to be a vacuum after the fall of the Soviet Union? Not mentioned. Where is a judicious discussion of the reasonable belief that Saddam Hussein did in fact pose a serious threat that needed to be neutralized, WMD or not? Not developed.

This is not the first time Mr. Friedman has swept everything into a single scenario. In 1991 he coauthored with Meredith LeBard The Coming War with Japan. Using the breakdown of the Soviet-American alliance after World War II as an analogy, when a common enemy no longer united them, Mr. Friedman predicted that Japan and the United States would go to war over dominance of the Pacific Basin. In an interview on "Booknotes" on C-Span, he made clear that he did not mean economic conflict. He meant a shooting war.

Mr. Friedman's analysis minimized the importance of China, the global Islamist threat and other important factors. The book was often dismissed at the time as preposterous, a verdict that has held up pretty well. You won't find it mentioned in the voluminous PR about Stratfor and its "uncanny accuracy."

'Hyped-up passages'

In a May 30, 1991, review in The New York Times Review of Books, James Fallows wrote: "It is easy to imagine the dilemma the publisher faced when deciding whether to call its new book The Coming War With Japan. The authors are not widely known.... If a book by these two had been published under a title that would accurately sum up its argument--such as, After the Cold War: Diverging National Interests Between Japan and America--few people would have paid much attention to it. By swinging for the fences with an inflammatory title and hyped-up passages every few chapters on the 'inevitability' of war, both the publisher and authors virtually guaranteed that reviewers would say, as I'm about to, that the book does not come close to proving its announced case."