15 RULES FOR UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST
BYLINE: By THOMAS FRIEDMAN
SECTION: MAIN; Pg. A15
LENGTH: 763 words
For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq.
Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn’t count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.
Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany – not Iraq.
Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all – they won’t believe it.
Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasser Arafat, I could paper my walls.
Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning’s paper.
Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.
Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: “We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it’s too late. It’s all your fault for being so stupid.”
Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas – like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.
Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” And when it’s strong, it will tell you, “I’m strong, why should I compromise?”
Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.
Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel’s mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can’t understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera’s editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: “It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every
Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.”
Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.
Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs’ first priority is “justice.” The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq’s long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.
Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”
Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can’t want it more than they do.
I’m just speechless.
This is basically a point-by-point summary of the worst stereotypes of Bernard Lewis and Raphael Patai.
But in a way, glad he got it off his chest and put his BS out there for the world to see. Rather like Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-semitic rant.
What a bunch of racist filth!!!! His articles should be turned into toilet papers…
Well spotted! I like it when people like Friedman speak from their hearts and all their arrogance, ignorance and racism comes to the surface. But why does a ‘reputable’ newspaper print this crap?
Hmmmm
Rule no.1 for Thomas Freidman. If you wait long enough, he will w rite his true feelings in a reputable publication for all to see.
Rule no.2 for Thomas Freidman. He will then go on reputable and not so reputable talk shows and subtly backtrack on a few points.
As a friend of mine once said, better the racist with his philosophy in his hand outstretched to you, than the one with his hand offered to you and his racism contained in a knife behind his back.
That said, I think Freidman has a point of a sort in no.11. The sense of humiliation is understood differently in various cultures and the US (in particular) and the ME see it quite differently.
As for no.2, the real queston should be do you speak Araic, or Farsi or Pushtu or whatever, and have you studied the region’s colonial and current history using reputable methods? If not, enjoy your little vacation in Germany, Japan, etc. and hope that none of the soldiers under your command commit crimes against the local population.
For Freidman, the world truly is flat…
Well that interview with the al-Jazeera guy was truly ridiculous…
I can understand hating the Middle East. Some condescending, but funny, friend (can’t remember who) recently told me he couldn’t understand what I like about the Middle East. The entire region is the devil’s asshole, he said.
But why, why, why, why? Why does Thomas Friedman hate Arabs so? Was he jilted by an Arab woman? Was his little Lawrence of Arabia bubble popped? Was he cheated of his grandmother’s pearls? Mr. Friedman, are you reading? What happened?
I think all that time in Lebanon he couldn’t seduce any of those high maintenance Lebanese ladies. Even now that he’s a bigshot they probably wouldn’t go for him, not with the facial hair grooming style and with a car as stupid looking as a Toyota Prius.
The least understandable thing is not to be that hateful. A lot of people are. No, the worst thing is to be so ignorant while still arrogantly pretending to know and getting an audience with this crap. And it’s edited because a lot of people more or less silently agree (in the best case by intellectual lazyness), people who will feel reinforced by an “intellectual” authority and applaude his “courage” if what they will probably call political correctness dare to say that this crap is a crap.
Those Westerners, they have such a strange way of thinking and a “logic” of their own. The mysterious West, you know.
I think the “dissed by Lebanese women” explanation is probably a good one. Since Friedman just loves all those stupid Freudian theories of humiliation when it comes to the Arabs, they probably apply to him.
You could apply a lot of his silly points to the US too, you know.
1) Don’t trust what Americans say to you (Arab states) privately about the strength of your friendship and shared interests; focus on the ways in which they play up the Green Menace (e.g. “foreign oil,” the Dubai Ports World mess) when they address their own people.
3) If you can’t explain 9/11 to Americans with a grand pan-Muslim conspiracy theory of hate-filled educational systems producing terrorists bent on destroying freedom, don’t try.
4) Never take a statement by a US president saying that they want to negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine and support a Palestinian state seriously; they want a version of the status quo that looks nice in the history books but stops short of actually changing anything.
5) Never write that the US is past the age of pre-emptive wars and supporting convenient dictators and that they have learned their lesson from Vietnam, because they’ll just do it again.
6) In the US political establishment, foreign policy hawks and extremists go all the way and moderates are ridiculed as surrender-monkeys or tree-huggers.
7) The favourite phrase of American Democrats and peaceniks is that they were just about to negotiate an international dispute multilaterally and peacefully before some stupid action by hot-headed Middle Easterners “forced” them to support a war.
8) When the US gets involved in other people’s civil wars, it’s rarely about ideas. It’s always about supporting convenient allies while calling the others Reds or Extremists. (Oh, and if you read any newer critical American history, the US Civil War was about economic and political imbalances too, not ideas).
11) The most underestimated emotion in US politics is a hidden insecurity towards France and “Old Europe” – who do they think they are using the lessons of their long history to urge peace and multilateralism? Who said history was important anyway? Back off, old man!
13) Most people’s first priority is peace and stability, but the Americans’ first priority is to remake the world in their own image, even if it means firing Baathists with their weapons, and letting twentysomething Republicans establish wild capitalism in a war zone.
Be nice, guys. You gotta to put yourself in TF’s shoes: you’re a warmonger, not too bright, you have pushed for a “war of choice” (i.e. a war that shouldn’t have occurred), your champions (the mightiest army the galaxy has ever known, the greatest country in the universe) has been beaten (denied victory) by a ragtag bunch of insurgents, and is now looking to a possible terrifying strategic tragedy. What do you do? Do you acknowledge defeat? Do you rethink the whole thing? No, it’s un-american. So you insult the bastards who are denying a deserved victory to the almighty US, and incidentally to those other mofos who “spoil” (i.e. deny) Israel’s victories, and do not bow before their greatness. Throw in the midst (possibly) one or 2 or more Arab bitches who would not fall for that fine product of the fantasmagorically great Western civilization, and you have insane rantings as a result. With help, understanding, extensive psychotherapy, and a few history classes, Tommy will be weeping on the couch.
Some corrollaries:
When American administrations can’t solve a generations-old conflict in the first half of a presidential term, they will go away whining about the fundamental intractibility of the conflict in question
When American administration officials can’t convince people who have been screwed out of their land/oppressed for decades by a brutal elite to knuckle down and accept being screwed out of their land/sharing power with that brutal elite, they will complain about how said people have no interest in a negotiated solution
When American commentators can’t sum up the causes and roots of a conflict in a 15-minute slot on Meet the Press, they will blame it on the fundamentally violent nature of Islam.
When American journalist have tea with professional Middle Eastern politicians, write up stories citing an “impeccable and trusted native source”, and then find out that that they have been used by said professional politicians, then they will write columns about the fundamental duplicity of everyone in the region
Thanks for that post Issandr, as everyone has noted, it has brought Tom’s true feelings out into the open and left me ashamed for ever thinking he had a clue.
And produced some truly inspired comments…
apart from a couple, he’s got us sussed. Finally a foreign journalist who sees past the smoke screen….
rule 14: IF they don’t have the victim mentality, then they can’t be arab
rule 15: always taking any form of criticism as racism instead of following it up with introspection and self improvement.
rule 16: to hell with america but half the arab world stands outside it’s embassies dying to get visas and leave the great Umma behind.
Oh I’m Lovin’ it, I love you too. Yeah I am queuing right now in hope of getting a visa. Yes, I hope to actually get tons of money for my work, in a place where there are tons of money. I know I should learn by heart all of TF’s columns on the Arabs, especially those where he wants to bomb the lights out of everybody in sight, because that would help me turn a critical eye on my world. But you know, he is just so … how shall I put it? DUMB. But maybe people who are are waiting for a visa are dumber and should be bombed, and you may be right on that one. Hope you will never ask for a visa (I am sure you very bright and self-critical).
You know, I liked most of the comments. Glad that you republished
that TF’s crap so i could enjoy the comments. Thax all of you
I just love the way Friedman starts the piece, by writing two sentences about how he is “disappointed” that stuff in Iraq isn’t working out. He’s basically admitting that every piece he wrote before the war started and soon after the US “won” the military battle was a whole bunch of BS (all of them supported the war and the democracy promotion agenda). But he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to his confession of idiocy, so he goes on a rant about Arabs. When in doubt, just bash the Arabs, Mr. Friedman.
I suggest writing the Public Editor at the New York Times. I belive the position was created in the aftermath of the NYT’s belated, too little, too late apology for their pro-war Iraq reporting. Obviously the problem remains!!!
Contact
E-mail: public@nytimes.com Phone: (212) 556-7652 Address: Public Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036-3959
Jeannie, the NYT may be willing to listen to feedback about reporting, but would the public editor dare rebuke a Tom Friedman? I doubt it. And besides, as Benjamin mentioned above, these ideas are fairly well received in American public opinion. And most of all, I suppose, one gets tired of patiently pointing out how stereotypes about the Middle East in the American press are not borne out by facts and getting nowhere because people want to hold on to their comfortable prejudices.
But in a way, glad he got it off his chest and put his BS out there for the world to see. Rather like Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-semitic rant.
Wrong. It’d be muuuuuuch better if he was pubicly outed somehow. Many of his readers don’t consider his language racist.
I would like to believe that this column have some sarcastic feeling attach to it. I mean its in the New York Times, they would not allowed to publish a racist column not because maybe a lot of people think that way but because the repercusions that it would create. I was just wondering.
BlaiseP’s rebuttal…to TLF’s article in the NYT. interesting read.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/21/9151/3104
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