DRIVING LESSONS

Thomas L. Friedman, the Middle East-focused columnist for The New York Times, continued his descent into deranged apologia yesterday in a piece titled, “It’s no Vietnam.” (Iraq, he means.)

I admired his work only before Bush started his drive toward Iraq, which is when Friedman yelled, “Shotgun!” and jumped in for a fast and reckless ride that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been undertaken with the nation’s most notorious DUI. Now that our soldiers are being attacked “an average of 33 times a day,” and continuing to die accordingly, notes an article found only 17 pages earlier in the Times’ front section, Friedman has been unable to leave the president’s vehicle -- which has, admittedly, yet to come to a complete stop.

Jump out, Tom! You look like an idiot in there.

Friedman is deranged because he is so in love with the Democratic experiment he sees going on in Iraq, despite the contradiction that the great Democratic experiment was the result of an immense con job on the American people, that before we export Democracy to Iraq and ask its people to pay for it, perhaps we should make sure it’s in good working order here.

“Many liberals oppose this war because they can’t believe that someone as radically conservative as George W. Bush could be mounting such a liberal war,” Friedman writes. “Some, though, just don’t believe the Bush team will do it right.”

Ugh. Has Friedman been reading his own newspaper? Or any? Has he not noticed that our efforts in Iraq are dramatically lacking in credibility? That killing innocents and forcing a way of life on people is not the most liberal of acts? That the Bush version of democracy is an improvement only by default? At least Friedman doesn’t try to pretend, despite his panting romanticism over what we could do in Iraq, that “this war” is over.

But his refusal to see the war as tainted translates into another blindness. He asserts that Iraq is “no Vietnam,” and that “The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge -- a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.”

The blindness: So what? It’s a distinction without a difference. I don’t think Iraq is Vietnam either, for what it’s worth, but U.S. soldiers are still dying, as they did in Vietnam, Iraqis are still dying, as the Vietnamese did, and we still have no valid reason for being there, just as we lacked valid reasons to be in Vietnam.

Friedman wants us to think it matters which brand of killer is wrecking our glorious occupation, but the more important point is that the killers exist at all, and are attacking an average, just an average, of 33 times a day long after we drove in, guns blazing, and screamed, “Attack us!”

Friedman, riding shotgun, was screaming something somewhat different. He seems not to notice that his garbled message was indistinguishable from that insane provocation and is still -- still -- being drowned out by the sounds of gunfire.