Isn’t Thomas Friedman mixing his metaphors just a wee bit?
[t]his interim Iraqi authority should not focus on holding national elections - the hardware of democracy. Elections should come last. Instead, it must start with the software - building, brick by brick, the institutions of a free society - so that when people do get to vote…they have a range of choices and can be assured that there will be a rotation of power.
The hardware/software metaphor doesn’t work, even, in part because you can’t run software without the hardware and in part because national elections don’t seem very much like hardware to begin with. From the title, I was actually expected a piece contrasting the physical reconstruction of Iraq with some sort of “soft” cultural reconstruction. But what he wrote is just odd.
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