It was bracing to see Tom Friedman on Hardball the other night. You can tell he really feels it; he’s truly happy about the Iraqi elections, and he thinks they spell big trouble for the mullahs in Iran. People prefer real democracy to sham democracy — so it is Iraq that will be putting pressure on Iran, not the other way around, which had been the conventional wisdom.

But in the Friedman mind, Bush just can’t quite get the credit. Here are the only times he mentions Bush in his paean to Iraqi democracy:

President Bush’s basic gut instinct about the need to do this is exactly right. His thinking that this could be done on the cheap, though, with little postwar planning, was exactly wrong…..[W]hatever you thought about this war, it’s not about Mr. Bush any more.

Here are our questions for Tom Friedman: (1) is there even a 1% chance that a Democrat would have done what Bush has done in liberating the Iraqis? (2) did the Bush administration make more or fewer mistakes in this war than in previous wars — which, of what sort, and how many? (3) is the strategic mistake of the Democrats in wanting to do nothing greater or less than whatever (undefined by you) tactical mistakes the Bush administration has made? (4) if your own party would have done nothing to achieve the glorious outcome with which you are so pleased, and would also have made tactical mistakes in addition to their enormous strategic mistake — why can’t you, just for a minute, cut Bush some slack for what he has done with a little more generosity than “basic gut instinct.” You make his foreign policy choices sound like a gastrointestinal event, and you make yourself look small.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 at 7:43 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, New Media, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.