New York Times columnist Tom Friedman returns from a book leave today with a column that roars its outrage at the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq policy — and then, bizarrely, collapses into a quivering heap of divorced-from-reality bipartisanship.
First Friedman catalogues Bush’s catastrophic choices, in great detail and with the brevity and forthrightness that mark his best work — and minus the catch-phrase coinages that mar his worst. Bush failed to commit enough troops to secure post-invasion Iraq. He relied on the bad word of Rumsfeld’s “Iraqi pals.” He “never established U.S. authority in Iraq.” A “decent outcome in Iraq” is vital, but “this Bush team can’t get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.” Bush couldn’t bring himself to fire “an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army,” or raise taxes on gas, or fire anyone who was responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib. “Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.”
So, obviously, Bush must go, right?
No, I’m afraid Friedman’s conclusion is as follows: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.”
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. America is already deeply fractured — just look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors; at war with itself — look at how insanely close this election is likely to be; and isolated from the world. The nation’s leaders gave Bush bipartisanship in the days after 9/11, and again in the leadup to the Iraq war, and Bush abused and insulted those foolish enough to think he is actually the “uniter” he once claimed to be.
There are just about 30 days to the presidential election. Politics cannot, will not, should not stop at such a moment. Anyone who believes all the points Friedman makes in his column has no choice but to demand that Bush be booted out of office. Why can’t Friedman bring himself to say that?
Time after time in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, we were subjected to the spectacle of this columnist — who’d made an agonizing-in-public call to support the war, but only if it was pursued in certain carefully defined ways — wringing his hands: “Bush said he was going to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Why isn’t he doing all the things he promised to make that happen? Time is running out!”
At this late date, I fail to understand how Friedman thinks there is even an iota of possibility that Bush might suddenly wake up, alter course and salvage something out of his Iraq mess. Perhaps it is just desperately wishful thinking, an involuntary reaction to the awful pit-of-the-stomach queasiness of contemplating just how far off track Bush has led this still-imperilled nation.
However he arrived at his colossal non-sequitur, Friedman, I think, needs to brush up on that old saying about “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.” This line, of course, is probably best known today in its Texas Bushism variant, in which our president got his folklore all tangled up with his Who’s Next song titles. “We won’t get fooled again” are actually pretty good watchwords for anyone whose eyes have been open during the last four years. Tom Friedman, meet Pete Townshend.
BONUS LINK: Doc Searls posts on the same topic, framing the election as a “recall” of Bush.
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