A new piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will be largely ignored by the MSM because it doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template. Yesterday, Friedman wrote this in an op-ed column entitled “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck.”
Saddam’s Iraq was a temporary iron-fisted bulwark against Iranian expansion. But if Iraq has any sort of decent outcome — and becomes a real Shiite-majority, multiethnic democracy right next door to the phony Iranian version — it will be a source of permanent pressure on the Iranian regime. It will be a constant reminder that “Islamic democracy” — the rigged system the Iranians set up — is nonsense. Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.
Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.
Yes, that appeared in the New York Times.
But don’t expect the MSM to be heralding Friedman’s column as the antithesis of Harry Reid’s statement that “The war is lost.”
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Friedman was never a fully certified member in good standing of the Bash-Bushing gang of Democrat politicians and liberal MSM pundits who pummeled Bush through most of his two terms. In fact, in December 2009, he wrote this:
To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never W.M.D. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Iraq has proved staggeringly expensive and hugely painful. The mistakes we made should humble anyone about nation-building in Afghanistan. It does me.
In February 2007, he wrote:
What is the U.S. interest in Iraq right now? It’s to quell the civil war enough so the parties may eventually reach a negotiated settlement, and if that proves impossible, to get America out of Iraq with the least damage to our interests.
We will not quell this civil war with a surge of troops alone. The only thing that will do that is a power-sharing, oil-revenue-sharing deal between the parties. The only way we will get serious negotiations going is with leverage that America does not now have: leverage on the parties inside and outside Iraq.
So how do we get leverage? The first way to do that is by setting a firm date to leave — Dec. 1. All U.S. military forces are either going to be home for Christmas 2007 or redeployed along the borders of Iraq, away from the civil war.
His timing was too optimistic. But his approach was essentially what happened.
Lastly, way back in May 2003, he wrote:
Friends, whether you like or hate how and why we got into this war, the fact is America — you and I — has assumed responsibility for rebuilding Iraq. We are talking about one of the biggest nation-building projects the U.S. has ever undertaken, the mother of all long hauls. We now have a 51st state of 23 million people. We just adopted a baby called Baghdad — and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce. Because raising that baby, in the neighborhood it lives in, is going to be a mammoth task. If both Republicans and Democrats don’t start looking clearly and honestly at what is evolving in Iraq, we’re all going to be in trouble…
One senses, though, that liberals so detest Mr. Bush that they refuse to acknowledge the simple good that has come from ending Saddam’s tyranny — good for Iraqis and good for America, because it will inhibit other terrorist-supporting regimes. Have no doubt about that. If Democrats’ whole analysis of this war is determined by whether or not it helps Mr. Bush, then they are never going to play the role they must play — constructive critics of how we rebuild Iraq.
Some conservative pundits will say that Friedman has undergone a complete conversion. Not so. In fact, his columns over time indicate that, while he was critical of the method, he was an early adapter to the underlying mission of, and opportunity presented by, liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam.
Consequently, we won’t likely hear his most recent op-ed quoted on MSNBC or any of the other liberal legacy media outlets. Doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template.
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