Dear Thomas Friedman: What're You, Nuts?

This morning in your Op/Ed piece, “Let's Talk About Iraq” you outline everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but your conclusion is that we should not give up on Iraq. In every other area of life, had corresponding events taken place, you and any cogent onlooker would say, “This situation is not salvageable” and then you would kick out and/or sue the perpetrators. 1) A relative has an incompetent doctor who doesn't want to waste valuable antibiotics, so he uses half-doses on your relative. Because of this, the relative loses his legs, loses his job, loses his apartment, has to go on welfare, gets mugged, and now is near death. Would you say, “The doctor didn't use good judgment, but my relative can be made whole if we give that doctor more money and better equipment”? 2) Your gardener advises you to tear out your entire garden and let him design and plant a new garden for you. The gardener destroys your garden, uses a cheap fertilizer that renders the soil infertile and charges you $500,000, which you pay. Would you say to the gardener, “You goofed, but let's start over, put in new soil, and here's another $500,000”? 3) You own an apartment building you want to sell. You ask your lawyer to handle the transaction for you. Your lawyer wants $100,000 in advance. You pay him. He hires a senile real estate agent who uses cheap roach bombs, forgets to evacuate the building, forgets to turn off the gas, and the building blows up. Do you say to your lawyer, “The real estate agent used bad judgment, but ask him to find a buyer for the land…oh…and here's another $100,000”? If you think you are a voice people listen to, Tom Friedman, you should be demanding that the Bush administration fire Donald Rumsfeld. You should be demanding an investigation into why Tony Blair and the Bush administration invented reasons to invade Iraq in the first place. Yesterday's American soldier death tally was 1708. And yet we see US Army ads on TV showing a young black man telling his mom that he has found someone who will pay for his education. He wants to be an engineer. “It's time for me to be the man”, he says. He's going to join the army. If you think you are a voice people listen to, Tom Friedman, you should be shouting out against these US army ads. You should be saying, “That young black man will go to Iraq and get killed. He is NOT going to get an education because senile men like Donald Rumsfeld are going to see to it that he re-ups over and over and over and stays in Iraq whether he wants to or not.” You should be reminding gullible young men that the men responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq--President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and fascist spinmeister Karl Rove--all did whatever they had to do to avoid going into the army. First, Tom Friedman, Donald Rumsfeld and all those military men connected with the illegal invasion in Iraq must be fired. Then, columnists like you must start telling the truth about why we got into the war. Then, maybe you can start talking about what can be salvaged in Iraq. Then again, maybe not. After you do your truth-telling, people may just decide, The hell with it.