On Saturday morning, Thomas Friedman went on CNN and said he didn't want America to win the Iran war. His words were softer than that. The meaning wasn't.

Friedman told Michael Smerconish that Iran's regime deserved to fall. Then he added a clause. He didn't want Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu to get credit for it, because they are "terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America's standing in the world."

So he's torn. He wants Iran to lose. He doesn't want America to win. He said that, on camera, in the month America put men around the moon, pulled a wounded colonel out of an Iranian mountain, and cornered the regime that spent twenty years killing American troops in Iraq.

This was not a slip. Friedman has been a New York Times columnist since 1995. He has been writing about the Middle East since the Reagan administration. What he said Saturday was the confession at the end of a very long pattern.

The war he cheered, and the war he won't

In May 2003, Friedman went on Charlie Rose and explained what the Iraq invasion was really about. What the Middle East needed to see, he said, was "American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad" and telling the region to "suck on this." He said the war was "unquestionably worth doing."

Fourteen times between 2003 and 2006, he wrote that the next six months would decide Iraq. Bloggers started calling it the Friedman Unit. Six months came and six months went. The war never turned.

The reason it never turned was the regime Friedman is now rooting for. Iran funded Shia militias inside Iraq and shipped them roadside bombs engineered to punch through American armor. The Pentagon eventually put the number on it: 603 American troops killed by Iran-backed militants between 2003 and 2011. Seventeen percent of every American death in Iraq, traceable to Tehran.

The Islamic Republic did everything it could to make sure Friedman's war failed. It mostly succeeded. And nobody in Washington wanted to touch the cancer that made it possible. Not Bush. Not Obama. Not Biden. The regime that sabotaged the Iraq war was the regime we left alone.

Twenty-three years later, the United States finally went after it. Khamenei is dead. Iran's air defenses were destroyed on day one. The Strait of Hormuz is under Navy blockade. The war Friedman cheered in 2003 is only now being finished, because Washington finally went after the people who sabotaged it.

Friedman's response: a television confession that he'd rather we not finish it.

The columnist who wanted to be China

In September 2009, Friedman wrote a column titled "Our One-Party Democracy." He argued that China, led by "a reasonably enlightened group of people," was getting 80 percent out of its bad political system while America got 20 percent out of its good one. He's been on the China-knows-best beat ever since. In another book, he wished America could be "China for a day" so someone could finally impose the policies he favored.

The 2026 scoreboard for his favored model is not kind. Panama's Supreme Court threw Chinese control of the canal ports out in January. A 150-aircraft American operation captured Maduro, and Beijing issued a statement. When Iran went under, China's top diplomat burned through twenty-six phone calls trying to find someone who would listen. Nobody did.

Chinese money is failing where Chinese weapons are failing too. Argentina chose American F-16s over Chinese jets after watching Pakistan's Chinese hardware underperform against India in May 2025. Pakistan's HQ-9 and HQ-16 air defenses could not stop Indian strikes. The first combat use of the PL-15 missile produced no independently confirmed hits. Russian air defenses in Iran were the centerpiece of the China-Russia-Iran axis Friedman's admirers have spent years calling inevitable. Day one of the war took them out on live television, which every country still shopping for Russian or Chinese hardware watched in real time.

The columnist who told Americans to model themselves on Beijing is watching Beijing lose on three continents without firing a shot. He has not written about that.

What Friedman actually argues, and why he's wrong

The cable confession was loud. The printed case is quieter. Friedman's March 2 New York Times column argued that Iran's unpredictability works as a deterrent and that Trump has no real path to an endgame.

The endgame Friedman says isn't there is the thing that is happening. The Strait of Hormuz is under American naval control. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline is at full capacity, moving seven million barrels a day around Iran to the Red Sea. The UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline is pushing another 1.5 million barrels a day outside the strait. China, which spent 2025 refusing American LNG over tariffs, is now buying 600,000 barrels a day of American crude to keep its Asian fuel markets supplied. Khamenei is dead. Iran's military leadership has been decimated. The proxy network is cracking apart into local wars Tehran does not control.

That is not a missing endgame. That is the endgame, running in real time.

This is the same misreading Friedman made on Iraq, repeated. Fourteen times he wrote that the next six months would decide that war. He kept writing it because the war kept producing outcomes his framework could not fit. So he moved the decision point six months out and waited for reality to catch up. It never did.

He is doing it again. The endgame does not exist to him because conceding the endgame is happening means conceding the men running it earned the result. He told the country on Saturday morning he will not do that.

Friedman is not alone in this miss. Greg Ip filed in the Wall Street Journal before Trump's blockade order; he is still analyzing yesterday's board. Bloomberg called the war a strategic setback while Chinese refiners were on the phone with Houston. Mark Warner said he does not see how we are safer after forty days; the Navy took Hormuz on day forty-one. The commentariat is grading photographs. Friedman, at least, has the clarity to explain what the photograph is for. He does not want the movie to end well.

The best case for him, broken by his own record

The strongest defense of Friedman's position is that skepticism of a sitting wartime president is the most serious thing a columnist can offer, and that cheerleading is what produced the last Iraq-sized disaster. That argument would carry weight from a writer who was not himself the most prominent cheerleader for the last Iraq-sized disaster.

He cheered Iraq and spent three years insisting victory was six months away, without ever grappling with the Iranian sabotage that made his deadlines a joke. He greeted the Arab Spring as a democratic flowering; Egypt produced a Muslim Brotherhood government, and Syria and Libya collapsed into failed states. He praised China's one-party autocracy as better-run than American democracy. He defended an Iran deal that did not prevent the nuclear program it promised to prevent, or the war that followed. Now he is wrong on what the current war is accomplishing.

He has been wrong for decades. He is wrong here.

Forty-seven years of receipts

Iran took our embassy in 1979. It bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Over eight years in Iraq, it killed six hundred and three Americans with roadside bombs engineered for the job. In 2024 it hired operatives to assassinate the sitting American president on American soil.

Destroying that regime is good. It is good for every Marine at Beirut, every soldier in Iraq, and every American the regime would have gotten to next.

Friedman looked at this on Saturday morning and said on television he did not want it, because the man running the operation has a name he cannot stand. That is not criticism of a president or a country. It is a grudge with a byline.

A columnist who cannot see why destroying the Iranian regime is good for America has lost the capacity to criticize the American president or the American country.

The United States is delivering a generationally devastating blow to a homicidal regime. We are not out of the woods yet. History will judge what we do with the leverage we have won over Iran and the critical blow we have delivered. There is a lot of work to go. But this is a fundamentally good moment, and Trump and Netanyahu deserve credit for doing what no one else was willing to do.