Tom Friedman Has Gone Round the Bend

At times in the past, New York Times Op/Ed columnist Tom Friedman has seemed stubborn, misguided, naive and unrealistic. He has tirelessly backed the US invasion of Iraq. But it was understandable. As a journalist who was based in the Middle East and who has lived in the Middle East, Friedman longs for peace in an area of the world for which he has a deep understanding and affection. But he has never sounded silly. Until this morning. His column is imbecilic. We may lose in Iraq, he says, “because the Bush administration is so hated around the world that any opponents will be seen as having justice on their side”. We may lose “because most Europeans, having been made stupid by their own weakness, would rather see America fail in Iraq than lift a finger for free and fair elections there”. We may lose for the same reasons that “Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum so rightly pointed out to me, ’These so-called insurgents in Iraq are the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age.They are a tiny minority who want to rule Iraq by force and rip off its oil wealth for themselves.'” We may lose because “many conservatives would rather fail in Iraq than give liberals the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Rumsfeld sacked.” Mr. Friedman, take a deep breath, sit down and listen. The mess in Iraq is not winnable because the Bush administration lied us into a war. It’s not the insurgents (bad guys that they are) that want the oil for themselves. It’s the Bush administration that wants to control the oil in Iraq. The Europeans are not weak or stupid. They rightly saw that the reasons given for attacking Iraq were bogus and they wanted no part of the false charade the US presented for its attack on Iraq. The US is hated around the world because we are hateful. We are mean aggressors. We are self-absorbed. We are stingy and grasping and greedy. We won’t give aid to countries desperately needing aid because we have squandered our capital on an unnecessary war. Plus the fact that Republicans don’t want to really give aid in the world, they merely want to be perceived as giving aid. The real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age are exactly those who have been accused of those crimes--the Bush administration, the Bush White House, the Bush Pentagon, the Bush Republicans in Congress. The real fascists control the United States of America. It is true that Rumsfeld should be canned. But whether he is canned or not, the war in Iraq and the plans for democracy are doomed to fail because the premise for the war was false. The war in Iraq was built on the sand of lies and it has become a sinkhole. Tom Friedman concluded his article by saying he’s a “Blair Democrat”. He quoted from Tony Blair’s recent speech. "On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq." Wrong again, Tom/Tony. On the one side, we have Blair and the White House killing thousands and thousands of people in Iraq, including at least 1321 American soldiers for wrong-headed reasons and blatant lies. On the other side we have the rest of the world saying Blair and the US White House are wrong. Blair Democrat? Must be a party of one.