Friedman (Iraq War time unit)

One Friedman Unit, also known as "one Friedman" or "one F.U.", equals six months.

The term is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting of journalist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the time period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. FAIR cited his use of the phrase as early as 2003.

More broadly, many political observers measure any date-specific statement by a public figure regarding the future of Iraq or the Iraq War in Friedman Units, thus suggesting that the speaker's predictions of a near-term resolution of the Iraq War amount to that speaker's de facto defense of the status quo. Examples may involve troop withdrawals, the formation of government in parliament, the pacification of Baghdad, or merely an upcoming "critical time" in Iraq. The phrase has been widely picked up in online media, and increasingly in print media. Editor & Publisher, The American Prospect, Think Progress (the official online publication of the Center for American Progress), Daily Kos, and Washington Monthly, among others, have all made use of the term in their print or online editions, while the Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.

On August 4, 2006, Friedman unveiled a new time metric of "10 months or 10 years", arguing that the United States must either re-commit itself to fully stabilizing Iraq (10 years) or complete a phased withdrawal (10 months).

All examples
These examples include those by Thomas L. Friedman, members of Congress and others.

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Congressional actions on the Iraq War

External articles

 * "REPORT: The ‘The Next Few Months’ On Iraq That Never End," Think Progress, August 8, 2007.
 * John Emerson, "Why so many Friedman Units?" Seeing the Forest, August 17, 2007.
 * "Friedman: ‘I Don’t Apologize’ For Believing Iraqi Democracy Could Come From U.S. Occupation," Think Progress, August 17, 2007.
 * Swopa, "The problem with Friedman Units," Needlenose Blog, September 10, 2007.

Acknowledgment: This article was originally adapted from the Wikipedia article "Friedman (unit)" under the GNU Free Document License"