International and our own liberals see the United States getting richer and the rest of the world getting poorer. In their very marrow they believe the US has the moral obligation to correct this situation. We already are pouring aid by the ton all over the world. Folks see enough "truth through the fog" to know that even though in some good cases this works as an investment, in most it does nothing, it doesn't "teach them how to fish."
Teaching them how to fish is nation-building. Help these undeveloped nations build such things as an impartial judiciary et cetera.
Bush campaigned, correctly, that as stated, this cannot be our project.
The application of nation-building to Iraq, while just as difficult and problem-prone as it would be elsewhere, is justified. (Note that we are not going to toss around 87 billion dollars every time it might be a good idea to do this). It is justified in the light of seeing the war on Islamofascism and Islamic militant terrorism (World War IV) as similar to the Cold War (World War III).
It is going to take a free Iraq and a free Iran, the people in those countries using their backbone and love of freedom, to fight off the horrible politics of the Middle East, just as it took free countries within the sphere of influence, not just a remote US, to bring the battle to the Soviet Union
Tom Friedman doesn't see all this, he only sees the liberal project. At the least his columns are injecting a certain light into US liberalism, which otherwise is content to say the Iraq war is only about US oil interests.