Who Can Really Say?

I saw this over the weekend but didn't get around to blogging anything, so I'll come back to it before it slips into the archives. Tom Friedman started off his 5/30 column like this:

The American public has been treated to such a festival of mea, wea and hea culpas on Iraq lately it could be forgiven for feeling utterly lost. Americans are caught between a president who continues to wax utopian about Iraq and an analytical community that has become consumed by despair. This is no way to run a railroad. There are better ways to think about this problem. A good place to start is by thinking about Russia.

He goes on to explain his "Tilt Theory of History", using Russia as his example. He thinks several Western leaders, Bush I, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Mitterand, et al. helped to tilt the old Soviet Union in the right direction, after it had been tilted for so long in the wrong direction. And he thinks that's a good thing, even though no one would accuse Russia today of being a Jeffersonian Democracy.

Next, he examines Iraq against his Tilt Theory, and says:

"I think this is a good time for sober realism, which means focusing on what is possible in Iraq, and what is the minimum we want from Iraq, not on what we would ideally like in Iraq," notes Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert, whose delightful new book, just out this week, entitled "The Meaning of Sports," contains many parallels between what makes for successful teams and successful countries. "The minimum we want is an Iraq that is reasonably stable, and doesn't harbor terrorists or threaten its neighbors."

As one who believed ? and still does ? in the possibility and the importance of tilting the Arab-Muslim world from the wrong directions detailed in the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Reports to the right ones, I detest the politically driven failures of the Bush team in Iraq. In a panic, the Bush team, having lost its exaggerated realist rationale for the war ? W.M.D. ? has now gone to the other extreme and offered us an exaggerated idealist rationale ? that all Iraqis crave freedom and democracy and we can deliver this transformation shortly, if we just stick to it.

And here is where we hold the phone. First off, politically driven failures because there have been no WMD caches found? How is it that everyone in the WORLD thought Saddam had WMD but when Bush thought it'd be a good idea to disarm him, all sorts of international hand-wringing enused (but no denials of the WMD mind you), and now that we haven't found them, it's a politically driven failure? Friedman says all he ever hoped for was a tilt in Iraq and that the best we could hope for is a country that was stable and didn't harbor terrorists, and threaten others. But will someone please point me to all of those speeches where Bush said something different, said that this wasn't the strategic goal all along? Friedman is choking perhaps, because that's exactly what appears at the moment to be coming to pass. And he's trying to figure out how it must be in spite of, and not because of, Bush.

So to recap. Friedman thinks all we could accomplish is what's being accomplished. But if Bush hadn't screwed things up so badly with his politically driven failures, we'd what -- still have the chance to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish?

Roger Simon has more.