Welcome Back, Friedman

In the summer of 2006, the darkest days of American involvement in Iraq when Sunni and Shiite were at each other’s throats, Rumsfeld was still in the Pentagon, and Petraeus’ surge was hardly a glimmer in his own eye, Tom Friedman jumped ship, famously writing about our Iraq venture, “Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.”

Well, that was then. Now with George Bush gone and friendly Democrats everywhere, Friedman finds it safe to say,

I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women. Any decent outcome in Iraq would bolster all the progressive forces by creating an example of something that does not exist in the Middle East today — an independent, democratizing Arab-Muslim state.

“The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today,” said Stanford’s Larry Diamond, the author of The Spirit of Democracy. “When there is no model, it is hard for an idea to diffuse in a region.”

Hooray, Tom Friedman. Your heart was always with the liberation and democratization of Iraq, even if your head lost it for a bit.