TOM FRIEDMAN NEEDS TO DO THE RIGHT THING

Never write or speak another word about foreign policy, ever, because he has absolutely no principles, as David Corn brought to my attention. You may recall that Friedman was on The Charlie Rose Show in May 2003 and justified the Iraq War this way:

What we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world . . . and take out a very big stick. . . . And there was only one way to do it. . . . What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society? . . . Well, suck on this, okay?' That, Charlie is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia [because it supported terrorists] . . . could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

This is the logic of a gang leader, not a supposedly knowledgeable foreign affairs pundit and certainly not a moral reason. A little over 7 months later in Slate, Friedman tried to re-cast his support of the war in part in moral terms:

The moral reason for the war was that this was a genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of some 1 million Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians, and Kuwaitis as a result of Saddam's internal suppression and external wars with Iran and Kuwait. Saddam was 10 times worse than Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, whom NATO took on without U.N. cover.