Friedman's Return (sigh)

Yeah, Friedman is back. We can now leave Chomsky and company to their pointless rants and at least concentrate on someone who has a sometimes reasonable mind. Not this time though. Friedman starts out:

I don't know what is salvageable there anymore. I hope it is something decent and I am certain we have to try our best to bring about elections and rebuild the Iraqi Army to give every chance for decency to emerge there.

So we're unsure what is salvageable? The implied disaster is just that, implied. The left has this uncanny ability to assume the fact of failure in Iraq. If they can't actually call it Bush's Vietnam (because that would be too easy) they can at least imply that it's like Vietnam. VDH dismisses this failed analogy concisely: "Notwithstanding 49,000 fewer American dead, no nuclear Soviet Union or China in the neighborhood, and no army of three million insurrectionists under the banner of worldwide socialist revolution."

Friedman continues:

But here is the cold, hard truth: This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever.

So what were the mismanaged failures is Iraq?

... while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: "Just enough troops to lose." Donald Rumsfeld tried to prove that a small, mobile army was all that was needed to topple Saddam, without realizing that such a limited force could never stabilize Iraq.

First of all, since when did overwhelming force become the "Powell doctrine"? Secondly, as Mac Owens points out about force sizes: "a number of very smart people agree with [the] claim that the force employed in the war was too small to stabilize the situation after the capture of Baghdad. I concede that the decision to launch the attack with the smaller force was risky, but so was a decision to wait for a larger force. There is no such thing as a risk-less alternative. If there were, war would be easy. The fact is that the president weighed the risks associated with both courses of action and decided to accept the risk of the earlier attack. In fact, by choosing this alternative, the Coalition force prevented a number of things from happening that were predicted, e.g. torching of the oil fields." [source]

Owens goes on to point out that the State department's failure to win the support of Turkey may be the convincing failure in this whole thing. With Northern Iraq getting the word of Saddam's collapse by word of mouth (not by brute force) a northern front on the war was the one missing piece.

Anything else Tom? Apparently not.

...each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.

The criticisms from the right are hardly absent here. The base of necons has had one major complaint against the war, not enough force. But Friedman's complaints are different: "you lowered taxes", "you didn't fire Rumsfeld over Abu Gharib", "you didn't apologize", "you didn't raise gas taxes." These are hardly military criticisms? How do any of these issues actually help win the war? Friedman continues his rant:

What I resent so much is that some of us actually put our personal politics aside in thinking about this war and about why it is so important to produce a different Iraq. This administration never did.

So because we didn't accept your political afterthoughts (and your one Monday morning military criticism) we're being political?! Go figure.