ANOTHER FRIEDMAN UNIT?

I can’t believe Tom Friedman, from the NY Times, is still trying to give advice on Iraq.

As I noted in yesterday’s post op-ed columnist Tom Friedman once beat the war drums about George Bush’s “audacious shake of the dice” in Iraq. In today’s column he's trying to exhort the next president to “think” about Iraq so that we might “salvage” something out of President Bush’s Blundering Wars Project. In a few words he’s suggesting that the next president, or the next couple of years, will determine whether we can leave Iraq successfully.

Has he just created another “Friedman Unit”?

For those who don’t remember, Tom Friedman demonstrated his inability to think things through by arguing on 14 different occassions immediately after the invasion of Iraq that “the next six months” would determine “whether a decent outcome is possible." Not only was Friedman wrong, but his consistently failed apocalyptic opinions led other more astute watchers to ridicule his dire warnings as a “Friedman Unit”, which is generally viewed as any six month period that gets labeled as “crucial” to the outcome of Iraq.

Friedman’s attempt to pin Iraq’s success or failure on the next president – and not George W. Bush – shouldn’t come as a surprise. Failed analysis on the real big things seems to be his calling.

I'll try and post a little more on this later. It helps to explain what's wrong with our national press.

- Mark