Axis of Appeasement

Thursday, March 18, 2004
By Thomas L. Friedman

NYT Op-Ed Columnist

Spain is planning to do something crazy: to try to appease radical evil by pulling Spain's troops out of Iraq — even though those troops are now supporting the first democracy-building project ever in the Arab world. I understand that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office. But they should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq — to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis' attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement.

NYT
The new Spanish government's decision to respond to the attack by Al Qaeda by going ahead with plans to pull its troops from Iraq constitutes the most dangerous moment we've faced since 9/11. It's what happens when the Axis of Evil intersects with the Axis of Appeasement and the Axis of Incompetence.

Let's start with the Axis of Evil. We are up against a terrible nihilistic enemy. Think about what the Islamist terrorists are doing: they are trying to kill as many people in Iraq and elsewhere as possible so the U.S. fails in Iraq, so Iraq collapses into civil war, so even a glimmer of democracy never takes root in the Arab world and so America is weakened.

But if they are so bad, why aren't we doing better? It has to do with the pigheadedness of the Bush team and the softheadedness of many allies. Regarding the Bush team, let me say yet again: We do not have enough troops in Iraq, and we never did. From the outset, the Bush Pentagon has treated Iraq as a lab test to prove that it can win a war with a small, mobile high-tech Army. Well, maybe you can defeat Saddam that way, but you can't build a new Iraq — and control its borders to prevent foreign terrorists from coming in — with so few troops, especially when you disband the Iraqi Army on top of it.

Don't tell me we have enough troops in Iraq when our soldiers are getting picked off daily by roadside bombs, when our aid workers are getting murdered and when Iraqis are getting massacred by suicide missions. Don't tell me we are not fighting this war on the cheap when our diplomats in Baghdad don't have enough armored cars, cellphones, bulletproof vests or escort troops to protect them as they try to travel around the country. We are now paying for the contradiction between Mr. Bush's two great projects: his war on taxes and his war on terrorism.

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Dan