You Gotta Have Faith

Tom Friedman over at the NY Times has decided that the French are really our enemies. Their primary crime seems to have been a continuing lack of faith in America’s ability to create a fabled democratic Middle East and an end to the radicalization of Islam by beating the crap out of Saddam Hussein. “Charles Dodgson” does a marvelous job of taking Friedman apart to his component junk thesis atoms.

My take is that Friedman is paddling as hard as possible to keep reality from breaking his frame. Friedman purchased wholesale this rather silly neocon-spun theory that the successful invasion of Iraq would cheaply, just-add-freedom-instantly create a model prosperous Islamic democracy that would shine as a beacon of Western values and teach young Islamist radicals that American-Christian-style prosperity and democracy were really Good Stuff and not to be blown up, willy-nilly. Now the on-the-ground realities of post-major-combat-operations Iraq seem to be settling in with Mr. Friedman. But he can’t believe that he’s been retailing a Bad Theory. That would involve changing his mind. So the failure of a perfectly good theory must be blamed on some perfidious outside influence. Like Mr. Rumsfeld before him, he seems to have decided that it would have worked, it could still work, If People Would Just Believe In Us. I’m calling this the Tinkerbell Hypothesis. It seems only fitting in an administration so deeply grounded in Faith. First we got faith-based charity, then faith-based economics, and now we’re seeing that it extends to faith-based foreign policy prosecuted by a faith-based military.

So all you good kiddies out there, keep clapping your little hands together with patriotic faith, and our dream of a democratic beacon in Iraq will rise from the dead.