In today’s NYT opinion page, Thomas Friedman does his best to drown the fish, I mean to turn the agressive, cynical US adventure in Iraq he applauded in 2002-3 into yet one part of a larger attempt to transform the whole Middle East politically. This is an idea he has come to see as misguided. He is almost on the same page as David Brooks who a couple days ago defended the thesis that mistakes were made because intelligence was faulty or partial. No reason therefore not to re-elect the Democrats and Republicans who voted for the Iraq war: they were just misguided by faulty intelligence. No kidding. No recognition of the lies that hundreds of thousand of people demonstrated against in late 2002 and early 2003, no acknowledgment that this whole political class (except some experts who knew something about those countries) failed the country in this ill-thought adventure, no admission that the media, beginning with the NYT, played the enabler’s role in the tragic story. His final words:

We’ve spent more than a decade of lives and treasure trying to “fight terrorism” to fix a part of the world that can’t be fixed from the outside. It has been a waste. I wish it had worked. The world would be better for it. But it didn’t.

He is not yet prepared to admit it was a criminal act built on a lie he helped spread.