Thomas Friedman should stick to foreign affairs commentary — here’s his fairy tale history of the US Civil War from last week’s “Meet the Press”:

We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human dignity and equality, about, you know, the right of one people to enslave another. They’re having a civil war in Iraq, only it’s not about ideas, it’s about tribal issues. There is no Abe Lincoln there. It’s the South vs. the South, that’s the problem with the fight right now.

I’m not a historian, but the causes of the Civil War are far more controversial and complex than Friedman appears to realize. It’s highly reductionist (at best) to claim it was fought “because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things… about human dignity and equality, about, you know, the right of one people to enslave another.” And that oversimplification of our history is only going to make it harder to understand the complex civil war unfolding in Iraq.