I want you to step back for a moment and imagine the president of the United States begging forgiveness from the leader of a country which picks up the check for Sunni terrorist operations all over the world; which has been working for decades to spread Wahhabism to mosques and madrassas on every continent; which itself engages in interrogation tactics far more draconian than the ones American troops are being accused of (a point Friedman acknowledges); which produced fifteen of the nineteen degenerates who knocked down the World Trade Center; and which, as recently as last week, blamed "Zionists" for its various chickens having recently come home to roost. Go on, imagine it...

It’s the ideology, stupid, and groveling to the very same thugs our campaign in Iraq is designed to eventually eliminate isn’t going to change that ideology in any way except possibly to strengthen it. Friedman would do well to read his own op-ed page on this point, as there’s a piece in there today by a Muslim who lives in West Virginia that puts the lie to his whole argument. The leadership of her mosque was taken over by a bunch of Wahhabist shitheels. The author wonders why moderates like herself don’t stand up to them and notes ominously that "Americans need not look elsewhere to hear hate-filled rhetoric preached by fundamentalists. It resounds in our own back yards." Yet Tom Friedman would have the president of the United States walk up to this same bunch of miscreants and tell them, "I’m so sorry about Abu Ghraib."