>> Friedman speaks for me perfectly on Afghanistan
So, like Friedman, you supported the Iraq War? (For the record, the comments on the Iraq War were pretty much what I posted here around the time the Iraq War started, and are the reason the Iraq War, NOT the Afg. War, was the "IMPORTANT" war. The "NECESSARY" war.
TF is a liberal and as such we're usually on different sides of the fence, and until this article, he has run from his support for the Iraq War AFAIK. But he does nail the issue: Obama was wrong about the Iraq War all along.
The Iraq War was the "Good War". It is good to see a liberal getting onboard with it.
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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.
Still, the Iraq war may give birth to something important — if Iraqis can find that self-sustaining formula to live together. Alas, that is still in doubt. If they can, the model would have a huge impact on the Arab world. Baghdad is a great Arab capital. If Iraqis fail, it’s religious strife, economic decline and authoritarianism as far as the eye can see — the witch’s brew that spawns terrorists.
Iraq was about “the war on terrorism.” The Afghanistan invasion, for me, was about the “war on terrorists.” |
