There’s some sensible stuff in this Tom Friedman column, but I don’t think one can condemn those who were chanting “vote McCain not Hussein!” and then let this go by without comment:
So, I was speaking to an Iranian friend about what a mind-bending thing it must be for people in the Middle East to see Americans, seven years after 9/11, electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama as president. America is surely the only nation that could — in the same decade — go to war against a president named Hussein (Saddam of Iraq), threaten to use force against a country whose most revered religious martyr is named Hussein (Iran) and then elect its own president who’s middle-named Hussein.
I mean, look. Obama’s not a Muslim. He’s not a Muslim when people are trying to smear him by suggesting he is, and he’s also not a Muslim when people are trying to suggest that he shares a secret connection with the Islamic world in a good way. Obama’s just not a Muslim. His dad was from a Muslim family, but he didn’t practice the religion and wasn’t involved with raising his son. Meanwhile, the idea that there could be no Hussein-on-Hussein violence is belied by the fact that Iran and Iraq fought a vicious war with each other in the 1980s. Nor was there any love lost in the 1990s between the America-aligned King Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
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