  If urlLink Thomas Freidman is The Man, urlLink William Safire is a God. Freidman is The Man: " [the American Soldiers'] professionalism and their belief in this mission are still amazingly high. If you want the antidote to all the creeps in that Super Bowl show, spend a day at Centcom. I promise you, you will walk away with one overriding feeling: We do not deserve these people. They are so much better than the country and the administration they are fighting for. We owe them so much more respect, so much more sacrifice of our own and so much better leadership from a Bush team whose real sin is not hyping Saddam's threat, but sending Americans to remove him without a plan for the morning after.
All I have to do is see what happened to the Kurds the other day ? this proud mountain people who have built a nice little democracy and free market in northern Iraq, only to have it suicide-bombed by Islamists ? to be reminded that this is a just war. It is a war of the forces of tolerance, pluralism and decency against the forces of intolerance, bigotry and religious fascism. " I really think that Freidman has the right stance on the War in Iraq. Even if we were lied to by our president, the war, itself, was the right war, and probably an inevitable one after we failed to get Sadam out of power in Gulf War I. Friedman and I still agree that the administration has been totally reckless in its war administration. However i don't, as Friedman seems to, think this forgives the Administration for falsifying evidence, bringing power to bear over intelligence, and misleading the american populace over the reasons for the war. I find it ironic that the people who 1) defended Nixon from "liberal attacks" after watergate and 2) tried to impeach Clinton for getting a hummer are now 3) defending the president's lies despite overwhelming evidence that there was no real threat in Iraq.
(actually, that's not ironic, its all related: the principles they set out in 1) and 2) force them to either say that the president lied, and should be impeached or that he didn't lie at all. That puts them in somewhat of an untennable position. the problem is, of course, that 1) and 2) are both wrong--- Nixon should have been impeached for abusing presidential power, and Clinton should not have been; both lied, Nixon to cover a massive breach of public trust, and clinton to get a BJ that never once affected his ability to be president.
. .
just a side note) But more to the point, Friedman is right on-- we need to start making this into an ideological war, rather than a war of power; we need to get our allies back on board by saying "we're not just here to make Halliburton and Rathyeon rich, but to make life better for the Kurds in the north, and the Iraqi people in general.
" That'll make it politically tenable to "unleash the bread bomb," which i've spoken of previously-- make the United States such a leader in humanitarianism that the terrorists actually fear to damage our interests because their families are dependant on US international aid. ok, enough with that. Why William Safire is a destiny. Putin has become less than a sucessor to Yeltsin, and more of a sucessor to Gorbechev in his relentless pursuit of authoritarian power in Russia.
While our attention was elsewhere, Putin has put businessmen in jail for making too much money, reminiscent of Politboro style gestapo tactics of the 1960-70s. And his agents, as Safire points out, are pulling in the unstable government in the Ukraine closer and closer under Sov-ahem- Russian control. Moldavia is already run by KGB ex-aprachiks, and when Ivanov said, (quoted from Safire) "One of the major priorities of the Russian foreign policy is our relationship with our closest neighbors .
. .
relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States are in no way a hallmark of Russian-brand `neo-imperialism,' as some try to depict it, but an imperative for security.
. . .
" he sounds surprisingly like someone saying "we need breathing room. " All in all, the russian democracy seems to be based more on the smashing of chechnya than real democratic ideals. That's why the expansion of Nato into eastern Europe is so crucial-- it keeps the Russian Bear afraid of the west, and give us leverage to curtail these sorts of anti-west/anti-democratic tactics. And I thought the cold war had ended. 
