Paul Krugman Is A Genius

Compared to Tom Friedman, at least. Actually, compared to Tom Friedman my little Calico cat, who still thinks that thing in the mirror is a different cat which needs to be attacked, is something of a genius. She at least knows how to find her food dish.

According to Tom Friedman, America in Iraq was “a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both feared and trusted to manage the transition” as he put it “from Saddam to Switzerland.” No, I’m not kidding, he actually wrote that, and the New York Times actually printed it.

Note the “feared and trusted” part. Only Tom Friedman would think that an entity can be feared and at the same time be trusted. Most people would think that those two sentiments are mutually exclusive, but Friedman is not most people. Which may be one of the world’s great understatements.

He’s talking about Syria and, as you might imagine, he wants us to give Syria the same wonderful gift of freedom and democracy that we gave Iraq. (Wait a minute, my keyboard just exploded and I had to get a new one.) Doing that will be, he admits, harder than the “low-cost, remote-control, U.S./NATO midwifery that ousted Qaddafi and gave birth to a new Libya.” Delivering babies with 1000# laser-guided bombs is not without a certain amount of hazard to mother and baby, of course, and he does not go on to describe what the “new Libya” looks like.

He then goes on to deliver such pearls of genius as to suggest that “U.S., Turkish and Saudi intelligence officers on the ground” go in and foment an alliance between Sunni militias and the Alawites and Christian minorities who “supported the Assads out of fear.” I'm trying to picture those three intelligence agencies acting in concert, but the mind simply boggles. And the fear to which he refers, of course, was and still is that they will be slaughtered by Sunni militias, so such an alliance will strike any person who has an IQ of higher than two digits as highly unlikely, but we must recall that we are dealing with a guy here who my cat could probably defeat in a battle of wits.

If, that is, she was motivated by the prospect of some crunchy cat treats.