August 4, 2006: New York Times Pundit Friedman Finally Gives Up on ‘Six Months’ to Resolve Iraq, Declares Time to Withdraw

The New York Times’s foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, recently lambasted for predicting a resolution in Iraq “within six months” at least 14 times for nearly three years (see May 6-11, 2006), finally gives up his insistence on giving Iraq “six months” to “play out.” He writes: “It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.… [T]hree years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B—how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” Iraq has finally put together its own elected government, one of the central goals of the reconstruction, and, Friedman writes, “the situation has only worsened.” Iraq is now “a lawless mess,” he writes, and to remain in Iraq is to only “throw more good lives after good lives.” A multinational “Bosnia-like peace conference” is one option, he says, but “[f]or such a conference to come about… the US would probably need to declare its intention to leave. Iraqis, other Arabs, Europeans, and Chinese will get serious about helping to salvage Iraq only if they believe we are leaving and it will damage their interests.” Otherwise, he writes, Iraq will almost certainly “erupt into a much wider civil war, drawing in its neighbors.” Whatever the outcome of withdrawal, he writes, “[t]he longer we maintain a unilateral failing strategy in Iraq, the harder it will be to build such a coalition, and the stronger the enemies of freedom will become.” [New York Times, 8/4/2006]