Donald Rumsfeld demonizes war critics as “morally confused.” But it is the “moral confusion” at the heart of the Bush policy — a confusion between its important ends and insufficient means — that has hobbled us from the start. It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama. ~Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

Now Friedman left the “center” on Iraq some time ago, facing up to the grim realities (and conveniently ignoring his many, many predictions of various six-month waiting periods that that would tell us how things were going), but the intensity of his criticism of the administration is striking all the same.  The conclusion that one must eventually draw is that Mr. Bush does not really believe we are in a titanic battle or the “ideological struggle of the 21st century,” because no one who really believed this could be so indifferent to the numerous failures and poor decisions made in waging that struggle.  I will say more–he does not believe we are in such a struggle because we are not, and he does not have the imagination of a Newt Gingrich to really conjure up the image of an almost completely fictitious world war.  He needs to wrap up his policy failures in grandiose visions.  People who are liable to believe in grandiose visions–people such as Friedman–are baffled by the insufficient resources given to the Great Cause, who conclude that Bush must simply be incompetent.  Incompetent he certainly is, but someone who really believes he is fighting the Great Cause of his time  does not tolerate failure at any level.  That Mr. Bush privileges those who are loyal to him over the good of the Cause, whatever it is Friedman thinks such a Cause might be, tells us volumes about how seriously Bush takes the entire fight against jihadis and even the distinct, separate Iraq war.  He does not take it seriously, I think, because he does not really believe that the stakes are high at all.  But he needs us to believe that the stakes are high and the Cause is profound and of global significance, or else the public would rip him to shreds for what he has done to this country.