I Know - We'll Poll The Soldiers, And....

Apparently not wishing to be outdone in the idiotorial business by Anne Applebaum's amazing entry on electronic voting, Tom Friedman shares his, um, insight into when it will be time to give up on Iraq:

Readers regularly ask me when I will throw in the towel on Iraq. I will be guided by the U.S. Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical - so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they too are unsure it will work. When a majority of those grunts tell us that they are no longer willing to risk their lives to go out and fix the sewers in Sadr City or teach democracy at a local school, then you can stick a fork in this one. But so far, we ain't there yet. The troops are still pretty positive.

Well, let's hope that the troops are positive. The suicide rate among troops in Iraq is already pretty alarming, and we don't need any more incidents of "fragging". Troop morale is unquestionably important.

But in his zeal to support the war, he comes up with a notion that even his optimistic troops might find absurd - the notion of quitting a war in the event of poor morale among the soliders, or a large scale mutiny. Perhaps one of them can jot Mr. Friedman a note explaining that the military is not a democracy, and (within that context) why officers carry sidearms instead of something that would be, say, more useful for shooting enemy soldiers. Someone might also wish to remind Mr. Friedman that the zeal with which troops take to a cause is not always a good measure of the rightness of the cause and, even though the test may seem to work in the context of this military action he supports, he may find himself unwilling to apply the same standard to myriad other conflicts, past, present and future.