February 7, 2007 -- 10:14 AM EST // //
TOM FRIEDMAN CALLS FOR WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ! BUT...
As loyal readers of this blog know, I've been doing my best to keep track of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's dance of what I'm calling the "Conditional Shuffle" on Iraq. The Conditional Shuffle is when a leading opinion maker says he'll support President Bush's escalation if Bush does this or that or when a pundit says we'll need to pull out if Bush doesn't ever do the things he's demanding. It's become a convenient game designed to postpone the need to take a real position, and Friedman's been doing a whole bunch of that lately.
Well, today Friedman edges a bit closer to calling for withdrawal. But he shows he's still got a bit of that Conditional Shuffle left in those dancing feet of his. In today's column he calls for a pullout by Dec. 1:
So how do we get leverage? The first way to do that is by setting a firm date to leave — Dec. 1. All U.S. military forces are either going to be home for Christmas 2007 or redeployed along the borders of Iraq, away from the civil war...O.K., boys, party’s over: we’re leaving by Dec. 1.
But...
But at the same time, we have to impose a tax that creates a floor price of $3.50 a gallon for gasoline — forever. This is also about leverage. It says to all the parties: we are going to conserve enough gasoline and spur enough clean alternatives to fossil fuels that no matter what you all do in the Middle East, we will not depend on you for energy...Once we’ve set a date to leave by and a gas price to live by, we, for the first time, will have choices in Iraq.
As best as I can parse this, Friedman is saying he supports withdrawal by Dec. 1 if it's packaged with this gas tax. But what if this gas tax never materializes? Then what?
Back in November, Friedman wrote: "We need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops..."
Bush, of course, has since declared that he's sending over approximately one-seventh of the amount of troops Friedman says we need in order to avoid failure. Yet since then Friedman has again and again stopped short of calling for us to do what he himself was our only other option -- that is, "leave."
One more time: How long do we have to wait before we can conclude that the gas tax is never going to happen? And does -- or will -- Friedman support pulling out by Dec. 1 without this gas tax that's almost certainly never going to happen?