Friedman Lets Slip: "We Have to be Careful How Much We Aid Iran's Sunni Foes"

I am amazed at the subdued reaction of the pundit class to the caliphate rising in northern Iraq/eastern Syria. Nowhere have I seen evidence of alarm that Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS) now controls an expanded Sunni Triangle (see yesterday's "Iraq Rebels Stall North of Baghdad as Residents Brace for a Siege," by Rod Nordland and Alissa Rubin, for a comparison of the territory that was the hotbed of the Sunni insurgency during the U.S. military occupation with the area where ISIS is erecting its caliphate in northeast Syria and northern Iraq).

A good example is Thomas Friedman's column today, "5 Principles for Iraq." ISIS is not mentioned once! But Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is treated harshly, as is Iran. After reading Friedman's piece, you can't blame someone for thinking that it was actually an Iranian-sponsored Shiite terror group that had executed the 1,700 Iraqi soldiers (rather than the Saudi-financed Wahhabis of ISIS).

Friedman even gloats that the present state of chaos in Iraq is a win for the U.S. and a loss for Iran:

Maybe Iran, and its wily Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, aren’t so smart after all. It was Iran that armed its Iraqi Shiite allies with the specially shaped bombs that killed and wounded many American soldiers. Iran wanted us out. It was Iran that pressured Maliki into not signing an agreement with the U.S. to give our troops legal cover to stay in Iraq. Iran wanted to be the regional hegemon. Well, Suleimani: “This Bud’s for you.” Now your forces are overextended in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and ours are back home. Have a nice day.

We still want to forge a nuclear deal that prevents Iran from developing a bomb, so we have to be careful about how much we aid Iran’s Sunni foes. But with Iran still under sanctions and its forces and Hezbollah’s now fighting in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, well, let’s just say: advantage America.

So there you have it. Thomas Friedman, one the top pitchmen of bloody Pax Americana, flat out admits "[W]e have to careful about how much we aid Iran's Sunni foes."

This opinion, that the enemy is Iran along with its Shiite allies in the Middle East, has been uniformly repeated in the opinion pages since ISIS's capture of Mosul last Tuesday.

The problem is that the punditocracy, fused as it is with USG, is running far afield of public opinion. The public is unaware that the Sunni extremism of Osama bin Laden is now to be treated as an allied ideology. The spadework of public diplomacy has not be done. The populace is unprepared and unwilling to once again embrace Wahhabi suicide bombers as freedom fighters. That is why initially you had plenty of news stories about American veterans of the Sunni Triangle giving voice to anger and frustration that their enemy has triumphantly returned. (We will probably see less of those.)

But it is going to be tough to undo 15 years of programming. If Obama's failed attempt to bomb Syria at the end of last summer is any indication, people aren't going to go for it. The Far Right was front and center denouncing an attack as nothing more than the U.S. acting as "Al Qaeda's air force." Public outcry was enormous.

The pundits of the mainstream media should know that they can't have it both ways. The Friedmans and Kristofs have to expect that, when the newspaper that employs them frontpages stories about FBI concerns of homegrown jihadis traveling to Syria and Iraq only to return home as potential suicide bombers, their exhortations to blame Maliki and Iran and ignore ISIS will not make sense to most readers.

At least we can hope.