That's what passes for Serious Foreign Policy commentary in America -- the Most Serious commentary, actually. World War III has started! We need to be like Tony Soprano, threatening everyone with our big baseball bats. Those Muslims -- we can just pick the targets indiscriminately -- need 2-by-4s across their heads to get the message. And the message we need to convey with our baseball bats and 2-by-4s -- still -- is "Suck. On. This."
If you didn't get it, here's a further excerpt:
Friedman spent months before the invasion of Iraq continuously supporting and cheering it on based on righteous appeals to the transformational values of freedom and democracy. But once the invasion was complete, he unmasked himself, acknowledging in that NPR interview that the real purpose of the invasion was that the U.S. had to send a message to Muslims generally and "sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message."
That admission was accompanied by Friedman's 2003 "epiphany" on The Charlie Rose Show that the invasion of Iraq was "unquestionably worth doing" because "looking back, I now feel I understand more what the war was about." Only once the deed was done did he magically realize that the real purpose of his war was not, after all, that "a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime" in Iraq would "have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world" -- as he continuously claimed while convincing Americans to support it.
No, instead, it turns out that the real purpose of invading Iraq, what made it "unquestionably worth doing," was that we needed to invade some Muslim country -- Iraq was just one of many that would have sufficed -- in order, using his words, to "take out a very big stick" and say: "Suck. On. This." That comes from one of the most revealing (and most repellent) three minutes of commentary one can find, illustrating the real face of the Friedman-led American foreign policy class...
