MB Civic

as expected, Atrios ..

[Friedman on Charlie Rose] – “I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie … We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, 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, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.
Okay. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”
… [snip] …
For years Friedman spent dithering about the war. Oh gee it wasn’t going well, but the light at the end of the tunnel might be around the corner in another critical 6 months, leading me to coin the term Friedman Unit, or the F.U. It wasn’t just Friedman of course. Basically every pro-stay in Iraq person would utter some version of “the next six months is critical” on a regular basis. For years I put these statements in my calendar, and six months later would remind the world that nothing had changed and we are still in Iraq and the stupid fucking fuckstick is still writing in your newspaper or on the teevee blathering about the next crucial six months. The state of the world is what it is in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person

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