Friedman Is Back as Midwife to Help Trump Rebirth Middle East
Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman has what Edward Said (Village Voice, 10/17/89) called "the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism."
It is not often that I check the New York Times Opinion page to see what the paper’s three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and mansion-dwelling foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is up to. After all, I feel I’ve already exceeded my quota for masochism by wasting a full year of my life writing a book about the man, source of such ideas as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace, and that Iraqis needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for the 9/11 attacks—an event Friedman himself admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.
Employed in various posts at the United States’ newspaper of record since 1981—including as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem—Friedman has just entered his 30th year as foreign affairs columnist. His imperial imperiousness and pompous dedication to Orientalism came under fire from the get-go from none other than Edward Said, who remarked in a 1989 Village Voice intervention (10/17/89), titled “The Orientalist Express”:
It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner…. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility.
Noting that Friedman had “internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity,” Said called our journalist out on his habit of offering “advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.” Had everyone been paying attention, they would have learned Friedman’s “moronic and hopelessly false dictum”—Said’s words—according to which “the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.”
Just for the hell of it, I checked up on Friedman on January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s reinauguration. Sure enough, there was his very first column of 2025, headlined: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” In other words, it was the latest version of how much better everyone could be doing if they paid attention to the self-appointed secretary of humanity.
'Reborn as a strong region'
Friedman (New York Times, 1/21/25) counsels Trump: "The more credibly we threaten" Iran, the more likely you will get a Nobel Peace Prize.
You couldn’t ask for a more Orientalist ambition than “remaking” the Middle East, and Friedman has various suggestions for Trump on that front. First, he instructs the president that “your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a US-led alliance with our other Arab partners”—which basically boils down to rewarding the party that has since October 2023 been conducting straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip with a normalization of relations with Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia, whose bloodthirsty ruler Mohammed bin Salman has long occupied a special place in Friedman’s heart.
Friedman continues with his roadmap:
Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20% (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.
Never mind how the old Oslo Accords panned out—the 1993 US-brokered agreement that was supposedly designed to pave the way for Israeli/Palestinian peace and Palestinian self-governance, i.e. a two-state solution. Friedman might do well to revisit his own assessment in 2000 that “the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense,” and that “Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day—seven years into Oslo.”
Friedman warns Trump that
the Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives, or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.
Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that Friedman has at last gotten something right, rest assured that the drone-happy terrorists to which he is referring are not in fact the Israelis—despite the Israeli military’s established chilling expertise in said field.
'Birth pangs of a new Middle East'
Friedman claimed that in Iraq, the US was "a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts" (Jacobin, 7/26/12).
As for the alleged necessity that the Middle East “be reborn,” murderous obstetrics have long factored into the United States’ Orientalist approach to Arab and Muslim regions of the world; just recall then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s favorable assessment of Israel’s summer 2006 slaughter-fest in Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
That particular assault, which killed approximately 1,200 people in 34 days, was subsequently invoked by Friedman in 2009 as a positive precedent when Israel was once again ravaging the Gaza Strip. Declaring that Israel’s decision in 2006 to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” Friedman prescribed the same “logical” approach to Gaza—to hell with the pesky Geneva Conventions, as well as Friedman’s own ostensible opposition to, um, terrorism.
Of a piece with the whole rebirth-by-mass-killing theme is the Orientalist exploitation of infantilizing terminology. And in that realm, too, Friedman has long excelled, including in his repeated references to Afghanistan—a nation decimated by the US with Friedman’s enthusiastic encouragement—as a “special needs baby.” Then there was the time he complained that the US was “babysitting a civil war” in Iraq—a baby-sitting job that, mind you, happened to have been unleashed by the very 2003 US invasion extensively cheer-led by Friedman, who in 2002 argued that such a war was the “most important task worth doing.”
As I note in my book, Friedman’s reliance on childish condescension is
merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator and parent/babysitter.
As is the case with the 2006 “birth pangs” and the current Middle East that Trump has now been tasked with rebirthing, the Arab/Muslim world is often portrayed as having not even yet made it into infant form, instead awaiting violent expulsion from the imperial womb—as in Friedman’s eloquently cogent 2012 proclamation that Syria was in need of a “well-armed external midwife.”
'Animal Planet'
As FAIR (2/6/24) noted, "The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide."
Of course, Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire goes beyond infantilizing rhetoric and fetal fantasies. There was that time in 1988 that he decided that Palestinians could be collectively referred to as Ahmed—“I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands”—after which Noam Chomsky questioned whether journalists could also be promoted to chief diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times by suggesting that Hymie or Sambo be given a seat in the bus.
And just last year in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Friedman undertook to outdo himself with a column headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” which as I observed at the time would have already been sufficiently grotesquely bonkers had the Israeli military establishment not taken the liberty of classifying its Palestinian victims as “human animals.”
The column hosted some nonsensical babble about parasitoid wasps and sifaka lemurs, along with the following information about our columnist’s investigative modus operandi: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.”
Anyway, Friedman is now clearly the best candidate to help Trump “Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” No matter that Friedman purports to be at odds with Trump’s nasty worldview; the two conveniently share a haughty and snotty antagonism vis-à-vis those “animal planet” parts of the world that need a "well-armed external midwife" as a mission civilisatrice.
If only Friedman himself could be rebirthed into something more human.
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