Andrew Northrup Is a National Treasure...
He reminds us of Tom Friedman past:
The Poor Man: [A]t long last, someone in a respectable publication has pointed out that Glenn Reynolds is completely insane.... [Reynolds's] comment...--that the government should be murdering Iranian scientists and religious leaders, because we have been continuously at war with them for thirty years--was a bit blunt, but wasn't really unrepresentative of his views.
Why should this be getting attention all of a sudden? Fans of his oeuvre could probably think of a handful of crazier comments right off the top of their head--in fact, I immediately thought of that time in 2003 when Prof. Christmas opined that, seeing as we were already at war with France and all, we should probably start some nice proxy wars [against France] in Africa....
[Reynolds] was riffing on Thomas L. F------ Friedman, September 2003, NY Times:
It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy. If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq. France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs....
Tom Friedman... was telling us at the time that we needed to invade Iraq because we just had to kill some Arabs. We just had to, OK? Something about a bubble or something, too--you had to be there, man, it all made perfect sense. I know it seems weird now, man, but it was this magical time... The Summer of War!--when we all just knew we were going to change the world. All that stuff our parents told us about Vietnam and all that s---? We were just going to blow that away, man, just tear down their world and build it all up new, like better than ever, like nothing you'd ever seen before!...
