A Neverending Six Months

Tom Friedman still thinks he's 6 months away from being able to say 'I told you so' for supporting Bush in his unfolding disaster. Sad.

A smart man once wrote this about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:

Yet for all his need for a war, Begin did not quite have the guts or the know-how to manipulate a whole country and a whole army to satisfy his quest. Ariel Sharon did. Sharon didn't share Begin's victim complex, but he had his own fantasies about power. Sharon knew how strong Israel was, and he believed, wrongly, that this military strength could, in an almost mechanical fashion, solve a whole knot of complex, deeply rooted political problems - that tiny Israel could drive the PLO out of Lebanon, install Bashir Gemayel as President, neutralize Syria and the Lebanese Muslims, get Lebanon to sign a peace treaty, and then force the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to accept Israeli rule. Unlike Hafez Assad, Sharon did not know when to stop; he did not understand the limits of power in a fragmented, unpredictable place such as Lebanon. Assad was a brutal realist with a very limited agenda - survival. Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design, or, as Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi liked to say, "Sharon was a realist at the tactical level and both a mythmaker and a man possessed by myths at the strategic level." That is precisely what made him so dangerous in Lebanon. He behaved with a decisiveness and unwavering sense of direction, as though he knew exactly where he was going strategically, when in reality he didn't have a clue about the world he was charging into. His strategic design in Lebanon was based entirely on self-delusions, which is why it eventually led Israel into a disaster. His was a classic example of false leadership.

That smart man was Tom Friedman writing in the book 'From Beirut to Jerusalem'. No word on whether he's related to the guy who writes for the New York Times today.