Gnomes of Where?

A couple of blogs (link, link) are beating up on Tom Friedman for this:

If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland.

I don’t want to get into this fight directly (for one thing, I haven’t actually read the column—wouldn’t want to compromise judgment, now would I?). I’d rather suggest this: right point, wrong country.

Look at it this way: not too long, Switzerland was an island of poverty and isolation whose only known export was warriors famous for being nasty, brutish and tall.

Somewhere along the line, they morphed into the pointy-headed gnomes that we know and love today (I think it had something to do with Protestant bankers from Lucca, driven out of Italy by the Counter-reformation, but I can’t put my finger on a good link): stable, secretive, prudent, cautiously avaricious (and rich).

Who is equipped to follow that trajectory in the next century? Where can we find a country remote, mountainous, misunderstood and feared, with a population strong and savage yet ripe for better things? Why, here, of course: only a matter of time before we are all fussing about the gnomes of Kabul. Maybe they’ll put up a set of twin towers.