Friedman parody:
For better and for worse, the United States in Iraq
performed the geopolitical equivalent of fathering a child – that we are also the mother of. That is, we inserted ourselves into Iraq
thinking we were screwing Saddam, shooting our troops into him
like so many camo-clad spermatozoa. Rather than using our own iron fist on
ourselves, we initiated coitus with a multisectarian regime, and we didn’t pull
out. So, when the inevitable explosion followed, we assumed this would give
birth to a new order that would shoot a flamethrower of freedom that would enflame
our new child into a beacon of hope for the region. But Saddam was not who we were having
relations with. He was more like our
deadbeat cousin who gives us a brittle, expired condom from his wallet and
tells us “good luck” when we head out on a date. So we hoped against hope that
it would contain the explosion. Except the condom was made of barbed
wire. So it didn’t contain
anything. Plus, it hurt when we put it
on. And the straining relations among
Shiite-Sunni communities made it hurt more.
And when we fully penetrated what we thought was Saddam’s Iraq, it hurt
still more. And that’s when we realized
that, with the Arab world filming the proceedings to show to the rest of the
globe on the internet, we had sr screwed ourselves.
