Drought in Kansas raised food prices which sent the people into the streets:
I’VE spent the last few months filming a Showtime documentary about how climate and environmental stresses helped trigger the Arab awakening. It’s been a fascinating journey because it forced me to look at the Middle East through the lens of Arab environmentalists instead of politicians.
Right off the bat, we have "I'm so important" prose that make it seem like this is a Friedman op-ed generator piece. It continues this way until we get a Chauncey Gardiner-like conclusion about the ecosystem diversity so important to land use and culture.
Never mind that government "green" policies to shift crops from food to fuel seems far more at fault in the trigger role if you see this as a food-shortage issue, you have to explain why it was an "Arab" spring rather than an African spring or a Chinese spring or a Southeast Asian spring or a Latin American spring.
Even if a drought in Kansas played a role in triggering regional unrest, the root cause of the unrest was something completely different. And despite the fact that Islamists have exploited the unrest, the initial calls for "democracy" by the people on the street rather than for "bread" gives a hint of their objectives.
But what really cracks me up is that the left conventional wisdom (and Friedman is nothing if not the leading voice of conventional leftist wisdom) is that a decrease in Kansas wheat harvests led directly to riots and war in the Arab world.
Yet the domino theory for fighting in Vietnam was stupid, they said. Never mind that the loss of South Vietnam led to Cambodia and Laos falling to communists. Never mind that a decade earlier, the loss of South Vietnman could have had communist ripples from India to Japan--and perhaps even all the way to Western Europe.
Never mind that the dominoes fell rapidly in 1989 after Hungary tipped the first Warsaw Pact domino by opening their border to the west--dominoes that fell from Berlin to the rest of Eastern Europe, and then into the Soviet empire itself.
Never mind the dominoes that flowed from either Tunisia or Iraq (depending on your state of BDS, perhaps) to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria--with others feeling the strain as well, in that Kansas-caused Arab Spring.
But no, the domino theory in foreign politics--which is nothing more complex than saying success breeds more success--is stupid, while a hot summer in Kansas causing the Arab Spring to break out is just environmental good sense.
I'm sure they even have a model for it.
But this is Thomas Friedman. I'm not saying you can't drown in a pool of his wisdom. But you would have to be drunk and face down to do so.
Lord, have I sinned to be tormented by two Friedman pieces in the space of a week?
NOTE: Yes, I know that "global weirding" wasn't directly mentioned. But when Friedman goes in for the full "climate and environmental stresses" routine, you know it is ManBearPig territory.
