Moustache of Understanding Alert

Friedman, today in the Times: It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war. If you read the whole thing, you'll see that the Moustache says disengage, kinda sorta.

Only six or seven Friedmans too late. But it looks like he wants another donors conference. How did that first one turn out, again?

And there's this: Yes, the best way to contain Iran would have been to produce a real Shiite-led democracy in Iraq, exposing the phony one in Tehran. But second best is leaving Iraq. Because the worst option — the one Iran loves — is for us to stay in Iraq, bleeding, and in easy range to be hit by Iran if we strike its nukes.

If, of course, you really wanted to contain Iran, "the best way" would have been to leave Saddam in power. I'm not saying that that would have been good for Iraqis, but that was "the best way" to contain Iran. My problem with the rest of the quoted passage is that it doesn't make any sense. Sure, Iran is not really democratic, by Western standards. But I'm not sure that a "Shiite" democracy is going to look like a Western democracy, so, um, I'm not sure why Iran has a "phony" democracy. My understanding--and, of course, I don't have a moustache, so what do I know--is that Muslim thought doesn't truck with the idea of separation of mosque and state. I've been told that, in Muslim thinking, that division doesn't make sense. So maybe "a real Shiite-led democracy in Iraq" would look just like the "phony one in Iran."

I guess if you write for the Times, you get to apply Western concepts to other cultures, willynilly. Or, say, if you work in the White House or the geometrically named structure on the Potomac. But here, in the real world, we had Iran contained, and we blew it, folks.