Is This Tom Friedman's 'Walter Cronkite Moment' on Afghanistan?

Harvey Wasserman

The Iraq war's chief New York Times cheerleader has reversed field on Afghanistan. Does it mean there will be no escalation?

In early 1968, after the devastating Tet Offense, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite pronounced the Vietnam War unwinnable. Lyndon Johnson knew he had "lost middle America" and soon declined to run for a second term. The war dragged on for seven more hellish years. But the hearts and minds of the American public had been lost.

Tom Friedman is no Walter Cronkite. [...]

Thomas Friedman is nothing if not a megaphone for the corporate elite. He supports atomic power and consistently pumps global trade agreements, US military adventurism and top-down decision-making in ways that can draw howls of outrage with a single smarmy sentence.

It's impossible to assign tangible value to Friedman's loss of faith in escalation. But those of us hoping to avoid a catastrophic dive off the Afghani abyss have expected nothing but grief from this mainstay of the Iraqi catastrophe.

That a key cheerleader for that war is now waving his editorial pompoms for de-escalation can only be good. Let's make sure the White House gets the message.

Hear, hear.