LIARS -- OR FOOLS?

Never one to go along with the crowd, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has moved beyond the chatter about what to call the tangled mess in Iraq. Civil war? Get serious. Friedman says in his Nov. 29 column we've moved way beyond that. Friedman says the "central truth" about Iraq is that it is "so broken it can't even have a proper civil war."

According to Friedman, those guys can't seem to do anything right. There's nothing civil about this war. Everybody's killing everybody, he says -- "warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army..." And that's just the Iraqis. Friedman fails to mention the occupiers who are running around with their helmets on fire, or the honchos hunkered down in the Green Zone, frantically repeating over and over -- "Everything's gonna be fine...it's getting better day by day..."

Luckily for us, Friedman has it all figured out. Phase out in 10 months, he says, or reinvade with a shock-and-awe force of an additional 150,000 troops and smash everything and everybody -- Sunni, Shiite -- it doesn't matter because, like the incoming Senate minority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss) says, "They all look alike anyway." Then Friedman says we should plan to stay 10 years to rebuild the Iraqi "culture" from scratch.

Sound like a plan? Ten months or ten years, Friedman says. That's our only choice -- and he maintains that anyone who thinks we can train these bozos to be Iraqi troops or police officers and then slip out in two or three years "is either lying or a fool."

The message Friedman appears to be sending to James Baker and Lee Hamilton's Iraq Study Group is, "If your plan isn't ten months or ten years, you're all either liars or fools."

Well, Friedman may know ten times more than we do about what's going on in Iraq, but there's one thing for sure -- the ten members of the highly touted study group, most of whom are bloody Iran-Contra war criminals who got us into this mess in the first place -- are not fools.