This is an excerpt from today's
Tom Friedman:
Let's get real. What the people who blew up the Red Cross and the Iraqi police fear is not that we're going to permanently occupy Iraq. They fear that we're going to permanently change Iraq. The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because -- unlike many leftists -- they understand exactly what this war is about. They understand that U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the cold war. They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched -- a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.
Is Secretary of State Friedman right? Have we missed the essence of the Democracy message because we can't stand the messenger? Is there ever anything Dubya does that we'll agree with?
Today, for example, the economy is "growing at a blistering 7.2% in the most recent quarter, best since 1984". Is it good for America or bad because it's good for the boy king?
Or is Tome right only about the last paragraph (see below)... that Junior is simply too incompetent to pull it off in Iraq and in the U.S.?
More from Secretary Tom:
Many liberals oppose this war because they can't believe that someone as radically conservative as George W. Bush could be mounting such a radically liberal war. Some, though, just don't believe the Bush team will do it right.
The latter has been my concern. Can this administration, whose national security team is so divided, effectively stay the course in Iraq? Has the president's audacity in waging such a revolutionary war outrun his ability to articulate what it's about and to summon Americans for the sacrifices victory will require? Can the president really be a successful radical liberal on Iraq, while being such a radical conservative everywhere else -- refusing to dismiss one of his own generals who insults Islam, turning a deaf ear to hints of corruption infecting the new Baghdad government as it's showered with aid dollars, calling on reservists and their families to bear all the burdens of war while slashing taxes for the rich, and undertaking the world's biggest nation-building project with few real allies?
I don't know. But here's what I do know: If Mr. Bush doesn't treat the next year as his second term, when he must do all the right things in Iraq without regard to politics, it is the only second term he's going to see.
