Still trying to make lemonade from lemons, Iraq War Cheerleader Thomas Friedman writes in this morning's NY Times:

Here's a story you don't see very often. Iraq's highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That's not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can't imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel -- and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

***

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops -- because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty -- but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I'm sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did -- that he'll wait forever for them to sort out their politics -- while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to  restore my own reputation enhance the Democratic Party's national security credentials than that.

That Friedman would have advocated an American invasion of Iraq with the goal of democratizing the Arab world was hardly surprising. Some fourteen years before we invaded Iraq, former Columbia University Professor, Edward Said, noted about Friedman's book From Beirut to Jerusalem: "how determined [Friedman] is to be an all knowing White Father composing the ultimate how-to-do-it book for the Middle East."

(I remember Said's observation originally published in The Village Voice, October 17, 1989, and reprinted in Said's Politics of Dispossession largely because Said in the same piece wrote of Friedman "traveling rather ostentatiously across the Lebanese-Israeli border with his golf clubs." Reading From Beirut to Jerusalem I was similarly struck by the dissonant Ugly American tone of Friedman's anecdote about dragging his clubs though Lebanese and Israeli checkpoints.) 

So I guess it is no less surprising that Friedman is still trying to convince people (and I suppose himself) that he was right all along. He'd however have better luck as a groundskeeper in the minefields of Southern Lebanon.