I’ve said a lot of stupid shit in my time and made a lot of stunningly wrong predictions. My favorite these days is this piece for the American Prospect I wrote in late November 2006 about how the Iraq Study Group was going to transform the politics of the Iraq debate. Luckily, I’ve not quite said anything as dumb as this:

Then, a month into the Afghanistan conflict, Friedman complained that “the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last” and advised readers to “take a deep breath,” noting that Afghanistan is “far away.” Besides, Friedman had “no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war.” A month later, he noted in passing that “America has won the war in Afghanistan” and that “the Taliban are gone,” though he did express some concern about “all the nonsense written in the press about the concern for ‘civilian casualties’,”  a term he took to using with scare quotes. Seven years later, civilian casualties remain a major item of concern for Afghan’s in the non-won war against the non-gone Taliban.

Still, I’m going to go through the rest of my life with a tendency to see all foreign-policy problems through the prism of Iraq, so that’s sure to make me a foolish and unreliable interpreter of the day’s events. It’s easy to laugh at Friedman, but much harder to fight the Friedmanism within. And to think I began this post intending to simply laugh at Friedman.