Hot, flat and a bit crap

Tom Friedman has some strengths, but his blind spots continue to make my jaw hit the floor. In channeling the thoughts he would like John McCain to have, he writes:

"we’re not going to baby-sit Iraqi politicians who don’t have the will or the courage to reconcile their differences — unless they want to pay us for that. In America, baby sitters get paid.”

Has he really not noticed the ethnic cleansing that, as Andrew Sullivan rightly says, the U.S. has presided over in Iraq. What kind of mind uses the baby sitter analogy in such circumstances? I could get as angry as Jed Bartlet.