US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 25, The Iraq War (Con't)

[There was a] terrorism bubble that built up over the 1990s... And what we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble... And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re going to just let it grow? Well, suck on this." That... was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan, We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.

—Thomas Friedman (Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times columnist), in an interview, May 30, 2003

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