Tom Friedman is a dangerous idiot

If our armies are defeated, it must be the fault of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the French …
Tom Friedman of the NYT has been the most useful liberal idiot for the Bush Administration all through this war. He is a straight up Blair-type liberal imperialist,who has argued again and again that the Arab world is yearning for a modern democracy brought to it on American bayonets. The new, Friedmanite Iraq will be “a beacon” to the rest of the Middle East. He imagines it will take about 20 years of benevolent American military occupation for the beacon to become properly inviting.

Now that this rather conspicuously isn’t happening, there has to be an explanation. Here it is, from yesterday’s NYT:

What is so amazing to me about the French campaign — “Operation America Must Fail” — is that France seems to have given no thought as to how this would affect France. Let me spell it out in simple English: if America is defeated in Iraq by a coalition of Saddamists and Islamists, radical Muslim groups — from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris — will all be energized, and the forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run. To think that France, with its large Muslim minority, where radicals are already gaining strength, would not see its own social fabric affected by this is fanciful. If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we’re sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.

Let us try an alternative explanation for the French behaviour. It’s not perfidious; it’s realistic and based on common sense. The French do know, as we know, that an American defeat in Iraq will be bad news for Europe. Their memories of Algeria are rather better than American memories of Vietnam. The question is whether such a defeat can any longer be averted.

If it can’t be averted, the question becomes how to minimise its consequences.

If it can be averted, then we need to know how this is possible. No one has come up with any convincing suggestion. The one thing that’s abolutely clear is that it will require very large numbers of troops. The figure of 250,000 was mentioned by General Eric Shinseki before the war, (who was promptly sacked by Rumsfeld for his pains). It seems perfectly reasonable. That is about 100,000 more troops than are there at present. So putting in another 25,000, as Friedman suggests, is merely reinforcing failure. There’s a word for that in French. It’s Dien Bien Phu.

Of course, even the estimate of 250,000 troops may be wildly outdated by now, after a summer of disillusionment and mounting guerilla war. It’s quite possible that a very much larger army would be needed next year — and quite impossible that such an army be found. The troops don’t exist, and even if they did, the Americans can’t afford them.

So, in that case, the thing to do is to minimise the inevitable defeat by getting the hell out quickly, which is what Chirac has proposed the Americans do. Yes, it would seal the fate of the Bush administration. But that is something that the whole world longs for and needs. We — in Europe as well as the USA — would still be left in a ghastly humiliating mess. Even so, that may be the least worst outcome, compared to getting the hell out slowly, after a long, expensive and deeply corrupting war. Perhaps the deepest irony of all this Republican francophobia is that the Bushies have led their country into a disaster from which only an American de Gaulle can rescue it.