I suspect that Tom Friedman knows better. But he became a cheerleader for the Iraq War. And now he seems to be more in denial about what a disaster it has turned out to be than many members of the Bush Administration. We know after Rummy's famous memo on the problems of the war leaked a couple of weeks ago, even Rummy recognizes at some level that it a mess. Probably an irredeemable mess for American foreign policy.
But here's poor Tom Friedman, spinning rhetorical fantasies: The Chant Not Heard New York Times 11/30/03. After complaining that antiwar protesters against Bush and Blair's policies in London didn't have enough slogans that echoed Bush and Blair's justification for preventive war against Iraq, he declares:
<< First, even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to an unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot. >>
This just makes me want to say, Tom, what are you smoking? Even Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle isn't this much of a true believer. Hello? Halliburton? Weapons of mass destruction (that didn't exist)? "One of the noblest things this country has ever done"? Tony Blair's worried about being indicted by the International Criminal Court for waging what the Nuremburg principles called "aggressive war." And Tommy Friedman is pretending the whole thing is like a giant Peace Corps project. Wow!
He goes on to advocate escalation in Iraq. Which would require soldiers that we don't have, counterinsurgency training that they don't have, a draft that Bush is not going to institute until after the 2004 elections and/or allies that we don't have. Then he says that nurturing opposition to al-Qaeda's type of terrorism is our "real goal in Iraq."
He probably knows better. But blind faith seems to have taken over.
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