Friedman: …To have a proper civil war you need to have two sides —-you have about thirty sides—It's beyond a civil war there.So Friedman 1) offers a solution that is a totally incoherent non-starter, re-occupy Iraq? Who will do it? With what troops? Don't we have 120+K already there? and then 2) blames it on the Iraqis (no will). At the end of the day, it sounds like he has given up hope for establishing any control. There will be no more more Friedman units [one Freidman unit = 6 months].
Vieira: So what does that mean in terms of our role there then, Thom?
Friedman: Um, Obviously when you're dealing now with something broken up into so many little pieces–it's hard to believe that anything other than re-occupying the country–um, and establishing the very coherent order we failed to do from the beginning is really the only serious option left.
Vieira (stunned) But, is that really a serious option—to reoccupy the country?
Friedman: Well, I'm simply saying if you actually want to actually bring order there—the idea that you're going to train the Iraqi army and police to this kind of fragmented society is ludicrous. Who's training the insurgents? Nobody is training them and they seem to be doing just fine. This is not about the way–it's about the will. Do you have a will to be a country? If you don't have that then there's not much training is going to do..
| Name | Occupation | Description | Units | Begin date | End date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "The next six months in Iraq... are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time" | 1 | November 30, 2003 | May 30, 2004 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "What we're gonna find out... in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war." | 1 | October 3, 2004 | April 3, 2005 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "I think we're in the end game now.... I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear" | 1 | September 25, 2005 | March 25, 2006 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse" | 1 | December 18, 2005 | June 18, 2006 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding" | 1 | January 23, 2006 | July 23, 2006 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq." | 1 | March 2, 2006 | September 2, 2006 |
| Thomas Friedman | opinion columnist | "we're going to find out... in the next year to six months - probably sooner - whether a decent outcome is possible" | 1 | May 11, 2006 | November 11, 2006 |
To be fair, there were plenty of other people making the same types of predictions, and at some point he was probably right, in the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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