Distorted vision

I’m often sympathetic with Tom Friedman’s column in The New York Times (although I thought his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, was a simplistic paean to the Washington consensus). But today Tom seems to have been swept up into a reality distortion field.

He sees Bush’s rhetoric about the “axis of evil” as serving as a useful deterrent to America’s enemies. “There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” I thought part of the point of being a shining city on the hill is to be an exemplar. Tom is advocating a modern version of MAD — mutually assured destruction — only this time there’s nothing mutual about it.

It may, emphasis on the may, engender fear of what the US might do (which Tom thinks is a good idea), but it is also likely to diminish respect.