Thomas Friedman is always wrong, while your humble servant is only wrong some or most of the time, thus, alas, I am not the bellwether he is.

To think that some here once referred to you as "Mr. Gloom" David. Now you've given us a reason to celebrate not only Friedman but a boondoggle in Afghanistan. In the words of Beckett cum Pozzo "Happy days!".

I cannot stand that guy. Minnesota's own. Same neighborhood that produced him produced Al Franken.

NO WE NEED TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

THE END

Point taken. And here I am being persuaded the much smarter Steve Clemons to agree we have to back out of Afghanistan and of course Iraq. This week's The Nation needs more reading by moi, but my feelings have been edging that direction. Like Vietnam, it will be hard to uncouple.

Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, especially if that acorn is rammed up its nose. Friedman has also come around on other obvious questions, like energy/climate stuff.

My interest in pundits, like Friedman, is like a leave being blown along by the wind - eventually it becomes compost.

The simple bottom line is that everything wrapped in the word "neocon" is panting for a war with Iran. If this war finally happens it will be a disaster for the entire world (except for everything wrapped in the word "neocon") and as ghastly as it may sound, probably the only way of protecting ourselves from ourselves is to make it our patriotic duty to "stay the course" in Afghanistan, which although it is pure "The Marx Brothers meet Rudyard Kipling" is never going to be as harmful as a war with Iran.

It reminds me of when I was a little boy and my father was getting remarried, which he did now and then, and my scandalized Victorian and Catholic grandmother giving me loads of chocolate flavored Ex-lax the night before the wedding, so that instead of attending the pagan bacchanal (granny's term), I spend the day on the john.

Afghanistan is the Ex-Lax.

I am waiting with baited breath to read Charles Krauthammer tomorrow.

Friedman been wrong so long, look like Right to me.

David Brooks was an early, often Iraq War fan and pushed the WMD mirage as recently as 2006.

Neocon princeling William Kristol had a short-lived NYT column long after Iraq was a proven disaster, and now bloviates on Fox.

Jeffrey Goldberg, David Frum, even Joe Klein, Christopher Hitchens, the monstrous Max Boot... they all rallied 'round the flag. All of them are "serious" pundits earning mucho dough.

Want a successful, big-ticket journalism career in America? Be disastrously wrong about everything, cheerlead your country into nightmarishly pointless wars - and never say you're sorry.

Uh... why?

What troubles me about this post and discussion is that it seems replete with dogmatizing, some of it supercilious in tone, but with very little factual documentation to support the assertions.

Elsewhere, and repeatedly, I've tried to offer my reasons for concluding that premature disengagement from Afghanistan before we can be adequately replaced by indigenous forces would be profoundly dangerous. Some of this evidence was provided, in fact, in commentary on previous David Seaton blogs as well as other blogs, so I won't repeat it here. My view, however, is that President Obama is approaching this from an unsparingly objective perspective rather than one distorted by an ideological filter. I can't predict what options he will choose, but based on the evidence I've seen, I think it likely to include a troop increase, although less than what General McChrystal has requested - at least for the present. In particular, I expect that he will want to see some reforms in the government of Hamid Karzai (or his replacements) before making too many commitments,and so his stance will be, "you reform, and we'll send more troops". This requirement will also help with the civilian side of an operation that all agree cannot be exclusively military to succeed.

There are no cost-free solutions for Afghanistan, but the extremes - withdrawing prematurely or staying for decades - are likely to be far more costly in lives and money than something more balanced.

For a recent article of relevance, the piece by Ahmed Rashid is worth visiting -

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=22320

Tom Frielieberman.

Just before this post rolls off into TPM purgatory, thanks for the recs and the comments.

David,

Do you not realize how your advocacy of continued US involvement in Afghanistan ironically resembles the Bush administrations's main justification for invading Iraq? In both cases a highly speculative future possible evil is advanced as a justification for war now: in Iraq, it was the possibility that some day Saddam could have and use weapons of mass destruction; in Afghanistan, the possibility that US troops would be diverted to an invasion of Iran. But how likely is the latter? Extremely unlikely: this was a neo-conservative fantasy that had some traction in the Bush administration but has none whatsoever after the failure in Iraq. Iran is several times larger than Iraq and infinitely more sophisticated than Afghanistan. Do you really think that Obama is that crazy? You offer no evidence whatsoever for that proposition (and of course there is none), only your generalized conviction that the US must be involved in a war somewhere. Not very compelling.

Americans and Afghans are dying now, every day in Afghanistan. To say that this is a good thing because it averts an alternative evil that is in fact only remotely possible is unconscionable and just plain silly.

According to the reporting by Seymour Hersh and others, an aerial bombing attack on Iran was contemplated in the last years of the Bush administration. As far as we know, no one--not the craziest of the crazies among the neo-conservatives, nor the Israelis, --was advocating a land invasion, which would make the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan look like picnics.

The presence of US troops in Afghanistan is no impediment to an aerial bombing campaign against Iran. I'm no military strategist, but for all I know it might even facilitate such a campaign, by providing staging areas.