FIRST FRIEDMAN PAROLE HEARING

He's spent the past few weeks bashing the anti-war left and Europe, without terribly much context involved. For his appearance on Oprah's show, which I missed, he gets partial, very partial credit.

(via murtaugh and jeanne d'arc):

The latter part of the show consisted of an interview with Tom Friedman, and the interesting thing there was not Oprah's fawning, but seeing what happens to Friedman's suggestion that war with Iraq will have to be followed by a twenty year occupation when it hits the real world. People who follow news religiously – and for the most part, that's not Oprah's audience – have heard the call to imperialism so many times we've become numb to the idea. But when the camera turned to the audience after Friedman's suggestion, you could see the shock on their faces. Mouths open. Shaking their heads. Friedman looked increasingly ridiculous saying that this twenty-year occupation is what Americans have to be prepared for, while (mostly) women looked at him as if he were out of his mind. One man in the audience, in fact, rose to tell him exactly that.

As Murtaugh points out on his blog, we don't hear a lot of this. The supporters of war talk on and on about how Saddam is so evil, how he has been "deceiving, not disarming" as Dubya puts it, and other such things. But you never from them what happens after we boot him out (certainly killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process), and after we get a parade in Baghdad in our honor. We'd be there for years. Osama was pissed at us for having troops in Saudi Arabia, imagine what he and his henchmen would think of a twenty-year US military presence right in the middle of the fertile friggin crescent. Again, how does this help the war on terrah?