New York Times Death Spiral Watch (Thomas Friedman Edition)
Duncan Black has commanded us to spend tomorrow celebrating our great good fortune in having geniuses like Thomas Friedman shaping our foreign policy thinking, and wonderful newspapers like the New York Times to publish them.
Here's Duncan:
Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of Tom Friedman going on Charlie Rose and telling the world that the Iraq war was fought to tell Iraqis to "Suck On This"... because we could! I hope some of you will find your own creative ways to celebrate this most special of days.
Friedman: I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that [terrorism] bubble, and there was only one way to do it.... What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. Okay. That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could...