A Few More Friedmans, Yet Again.

A "Friedman", for those few that don't know, is a period of six months in Iraq which may turn out to be years - it immortalizes 'pundit' Tom Friedman's infamous flexible deadlines.

Today the senior American soldier in Iraq,General Casey, said in the presence of the real ruler of Iraq, U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, that another two or three Friedmans would be enough to see Iraqis looking after their own security. Casey's opinion is yet another admission that the timetable for "them to stand up as we stand down" has changed course again whether the Bush administration likes it or not.

I thought it would be interesting to look at a few other notable Friedmans from the years of occupation.

There was the time Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Defense Secretary and "a leading architect of the Bush administration's reconstruction plan" (sic) told the world:

"A month after the Gulf War, we went in with a coalition force . . . cleared the Iraqi army out of the northern third of the country and left six months later and left it in the hands of the northern Iraqis, who've done a reasonably credible job of managing their own affairs," Wolfowitz said.

But Wolfowitz acknowledged it would be more difficult to stabilize the entire country and turn over power to the Iraqis.

"The country as a whole is bigger and more complicated," he said, "It will undoubtedly take longer."

Somehow I don't think he meant this much longer and still another year and more to go.

There was the one where the Coalition Provisional Authority's head honcho, Paul Bremer, told reporters after the first six months of occupation:

We will see it through. We -- I am optimistic. We have made an enormous amount of progress here in six months, more than I think anybody could have safely predicted, beyond -- in many places, beyond what our plan was. And I think we will continue to implement, as we go forward, on our plan over the next six to nine to 12 months.

Mind you, that was the same press briefing where the following exchange occurred:

Q (Name inaudible) from CNN. Mr. Bremer, with all of your positives and accomplishments notwithstanding, how much longer can we have this daily violence and chaos, with daily loss of life, before the coalition acknowledge that it was very ill-prepared for the aftermath of the war, that it fundamentally misread the reality and the complexity of Iraq?

MR. BREMER: Well, it's going to be a very long time before I admit either of those things, to answer your question.

Then there was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel telling the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce that "The next six months will really tell the story," back in August of 2005.

And let's not forget FoxNews and neocon favorite, retired general Barry McCaffrey, who told a Senate foreign relations committee hearing in July of 2005 that:

"January through September 2006 will be the peak period of the insurgency and the bottom rung of the new Iraq,"..."The positive trend lines following the January 2006 elections -- if they continue -- will likely permit the withdrawal of US combat forces by late summer of 2006,"..."With 250,000 Iraqi security forces successfully operating in support of a government which includes substantial Sunni participation the energy will start rapidly draining out of the insurgency by next summer, in my judgment,"

Which just goes to prove how much drivel these so-called experts expect us to swallow when they make these Friedmans - punting the blame upfield by multiples of six months by which time they hope we will all have forgotten what they said at the time.

Oh, and let us not forget General Casey at the beginning of this month:

"This is a decisive period for everyone and everyone knows it. The next six months will determine the future of Iraq," Casey said in a statement after attending two days of closed-door meetings in Warsaw to address "the challenges facing Iraq and the US-led coalition."

Every six months has been that "decisive time" - and so far the decisions have not been favorable to the occupation.

How many times does anyone have to bang their head off a brick wall before working out that stopping would be a good idea?

Postscript Interestingly, way back at the time of Wolfowitz's Friedman, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was telling ABC:

"We learned a lot in the Balkan situation, where the U.N. suddenly moved in. Here we are 12 years later, still struggling to try and put those pieces back together. We've learned from those experiences, and we're not going to repeat them in the aftermath of this conflict." (Same link as the Wolfowitz quote above - C)

That was the Republican justification for cold-shouldering the UN. It looks pretty damn incompetent now. They found a whole slew of new ways to f**k up.