FOG OF FRIEDMAN :

Fog of War (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, August 18, 2002, NY Times)

It's the first rule of warfare: never launch a war that you can't explain to your people and the world on a
bumper sticker. If it requires an explanation from a Middle East expert on CNN, you're on the wrong track. The Palestinians could never explain why they were killing Jews to end an occupation that the U.S. and Israel were offering to end through diplomacy. There is only one bumper-sticker phrase that can explain such behavior: "Death to Israel." And if that is their real strategy, then a war to the death it will be. If it's not, then what have they been up to?

Attention President Bush: What is your bumper sticker for justifying war with Iraq? I've heard a lot of different ones lately: We need to pre-emptively attack before Saddam deploys weapons of mass destruction. We need to change the Iraqi regime to give birth to democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world. We need to eliminate Saddam because he is evil and may have been behind 9/11. We need to punish Saddam for not living up to the U.N. inspection resolutions.

All of these are legitimate rationales, but each would require a different U.S. military and diplomatic strategy. If the Bush team is serious about Iraq, it needs to zero in on one clear objective, produce a tightly focused war plan around it and then sell it - with a simple bumper sticker - to America and the world. If the Bush administration's different factions - which are as divided as the Palestinians' - can't do that in advance, they shouldn't move.

When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there - just ask the Palestinians. But when you're talking about an unprovoked war to dismantle a government half a world away, any road just won't do. You need a clearly focused end, means and rationale.

Because we certainly don't want to pick up a newspaper two years from now and read that there was just a heated meeting of Bush advisers about what the war in Iraq was supposed to be about.

Okay...it's a tad disturbing that it's taken multiple Pulitzer winning, Middle East expert, columnist to the cognoscenti, Tom Friedman this long to figure out that the point of the Second Intifada is that the Palestinians don't just want their own state they want Israel. But surely he can fgure out the bumper sticker for the Second Gulf War just by reading his own column. If not, let's help him : Death to Saddam. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2002 8:11 AM