>>Because the folks in the Middle East do crazy so much better than we do.

That's what bin Laden thought, too, and look at what it got him. I'll take the crazy guys with the hot babes with chainguns, with the Specter gun ships, with the hyperbaric bombs, any day.

The worst nightmare of these Mideast bigmouths is that we actually notice them and take them seriously. We still haven't even lost our temper with them, not really. If we actually went crazy on them, they would all be dead within a half hour.

Agreed, T. Those who take inspiration from the the October 1993 mess in Somalia are going to be very surprised. Don't go poking a sleeping bear with a sharp stick unless you want to wake him up! Careful what you wish for because it might come true. Etc.

And from where do people get this crazy idea that doing the right thing to protect ourselves, and by extension others in the free world, necessarily requires convincing other nations of ANYTHING? I just do not get that at all. How does arguing with those who refuse to wake up to post-Cold-War reality make you any more right? I suppose part of it is just the usual positioning for the post-war spoils, but that is NOT how the anti-war camp is portraying it, so either they are naive or disingenuous or both.

Besides, Russia, China, and France are just TALKING like they don't want war. It sounds good and their economic interests are protected by the TALKING. Doesn't mean they privately want what they say publicly.

Friedman seems to have made the same mistake that many in the Arab world have; he has completely underestimated the American capacity for crazy. If those in the Arab world continue is this misapprehension, and succeed in indulging in their craziness, they will in turn experience craziness on an order of magnitude that the world has never seen before. If engaging in a lesser level of craziness in Iraq can educate many in the Arab world as to what might await, absent fundamental change, then it would be a positive development.

Frankly, I don't see any part of Friedman's essay as all that brilliant. Friedman's ability to pick out new insights on the Middle East ended many years ago. Now he merely mixes up a blend of the obvious with silly platitudes.

I also grew rather tired of his too-glib, facile, metaphors and analogies a long time ago. He may be the most overrated pundit in all of the major media outlets, since he doen't come in for the whithering criticism often rightly directed at the Dowds, Krugmans, Kellys, and others in the punditocracy.

Will, I agree. Another 9-11 and they don't know what crazy is.

The funny thing is, if we were as bad as they make us out to be in their anti-American propaganda, they would already be dead.

I don't get his (or others) emphasis on allies. Whether the US goes it alone, or has France and Germany onboard, the US still does all the heavy lifting. Other than the UK and a few strategic Gulf states, what do allies have to contribute?

The 'game of chicken' metaphor is inapplicable here as it begs the question that Saddam can be deterred. He has a history of making huge strategic blunders which get him spanked. The only way to stop Saddam from making (and using) WMDs is to go in and take them away from him. Just standing around saying "I will have such revenges on you both,/That all the world shall--I will do such things,--/What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be/The terrors of the earth." ain't gonna cut it any more.

And yeah, the West does crazy so much better than anyone else. We like crazy. I've seen closeups of Mutlaah Ridge - we incinerated thousands of fleeing troops, flensed them into fragments, chopped them into barely recogniseable carbonised chunks. It was like the finger of God had come down and rubbed out a dvision's worth of troops with as much thought as we would pick a piece of lint off a jacket. T. Hartin is right - we didn't take the Taliban seriously until 9/11, and scant weeks later they were gone, with thousands of them dead. The gulf between their rhetoric and our capability is unlike anything the world has ever seen. The only corollary comes out of the movies (think Independence Day, except there's no Arab Jeff Goldblum to save their bacon in the final reel).

Crazy? You want crazy?

Let me ask you this.

Who nuked whom?

Not only that. We liked it so much, we did it again!

So tell me who's crazy.