May 04, 2005

Today's Friedmanism

It's soooo easy to knock him about, how can you resist?

In today's latest bit of wasted column inches in the nation's supposedly most august newspaper he concludes:

The bad guys won't win, but neither will the good guys, and all we will have produced is a bloody stalemate.

If he by "bad guys" he means jihadists, and if by "win" he means create some sort of Sunni fundamentalist government in Iraq - well, duh. Of course not. NO ONE thinks that will happen. But the thing is, there are lots of bad guys. I tend to agree that most of the most radical forms of Sunni Islamist politics are in decline at the moment, but that started happening ages ago. You can read Gilles Kepel's Jihad for a good run-down on the decline of Islamist political movements (though it also might be worth looking at Kepel's latest book for a discussion of how our actions in Iraq are strengthening them, something that even US military commanders and Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss have acknowledged). But you see those are not the only bad guys. And if we leave thousands dead, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of billions spent, and end up with a bloody stalemate that features some very bad guys holding powerful positions in the country - to me that's a loss, whether or not al Qaeda is running the country.

Posted by armand at May 4, 2005 10:45 AM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs


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