More than a year ago Atrios coined the term Friedman Unit, which refers to the successive 6 month periods that Tom Friedman announced we should wait before declaring the war in Iraq a failure.
it appears from today’s very silly column that Tom might be covertly declaring that he has, for himself, decided that the last Friedman Unit has run its course.
First, the silliness:
You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.
…
Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.
This if fairly nonsensical. There are very good reasons why it sometimes does take expertise to explain things. Indeed, Friedman has been making a living pretending to be the expert who could explain to an increasingly restive public why it should allow one more Friedman unit for success. In today’s column he gives a clear statement of the kind of success he apparently expected:
There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.
How hard could it be? Why won’t those darn Iraqis get past hundreds of years of history and tribal conflict and adopt a governmental system just like the one we pretend to have? Why can’t they all just get along?
But as I say, Friedman is apparently now willing to admit that the Iraqi invasion has been a failure. Not our failure of course, but a failure of the Iraqi people. After all, who could have known that the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would not immediately form a liberal democratic system as soon as we finished blowing the place to bits?
In any event, the last Friedman Unit appears to be over. At least for Friedman. The concept, unfortunately lives on. (Cue Joe Lieberman)
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