Whither Iraq

THEN: "Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960's. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U.S. and its allies remove the lid.

Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and it will say one of two things. It could say, 'Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany - a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed.'

Or the envelope could say, 'You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia - an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam.'

In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which we've won only when we take off the lid.

The conservatives and neocons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don't know either."

--Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, January 26, 2003


IN HINDSIGHT: "To me, the real intelligence failure was how broken Iraqi society was. It was so much more decimated than the CIA were telling the U.S. government. Those guys had memories of an Iraq of the fifties and sixties, not the Iraq that had been battered by eight years of Iran-Iraq war, Gulf War I, ten years of sanctions, and then an invasion.

I knew this was going to be hard. Believe me, it didn't take any genius to know that. You just needed to have a basic acquaintance with the Middle East and the history of Iraq to know that.

And that's always been my issue with the Bush administration. My issue is not that this isn't important. No, I think it is important. It's important and hard, and they thought that it was important and easy."

--Thomas Friedman in Esquire, December 13, 2005