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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Friedman’s Rules

Friedman’s Rules

by John Cole|  January 13, 200510:07 am| 4 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs

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These make sense:

Rule 1-Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning’s paper is out.

Rule 2- Never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person who is supposed to be doing the conceding. If I had a dime for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I would be a wealthy man today.

Rule 3- The Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure that they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 4- In the Middle East, if you can’t explain something with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all – people there won’t believe it.

Rule 5- In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away – unless the coast is completely clear.

Rule 6- The most oft-used phrase of Mideast moderates 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 7- In Middle East politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “How can I compromise?” And the minute it becomes strong, it will tell you, “Why should I compromise?”

Rule 8- What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in Arabic, in Hebrew or in any other local language. Anything said in English doesn’t count.

This does not:

For all these reasons, the least bad option right now for the U.S. is to forge ahead with the elections…

Otherwise known as the best option…

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4Comments

  1. 1.

    Far North

    January 13, 2005 at 10:45 pm

    Well, well, the report comes out that says, drum roll…………………….. there were no weapons of mass destruction. Damn. And we’re still fighting the war in Iraq that we had to start because Saddam had WMDs. Damn.

    Bush said it, Cheney said it, Rumsfeld, Rice and everybody who knew anything, they all KNEW without a doubt that Iraq had WMDs. Now the report comes out and says NO there weren’t any WMDs.

    Too bad the So Called Liberal Media was too busy embedding themselves with the military and preparing for the greatest celebration of blind patriotism in our country’s history to tell us what was really happening.

    Apologies from the conservatives are forthcoming, right? You know, apoligies to all the people that you conservatives called bin Laden loving, America hating traitors for daring to question Bush, Cheney and company. Turns out the critics of Bush speak were right. To partially quote Judith Miller of the NY Times, all you conservatives were “proved fucking wrong”.

    As a matter of fact, you could not have been any more wrong about anything.

    I know, all WMDs are in Syria.

  2. 2.

    Aaron

    January 14, 2005 at 4:45 am

    How many mass graves found in Kosovo?

    No, seriously.

    Being wrong is not the same as “fucking up.”

  3. 3.

    CadillaqJaq

    January 14, 2005 at 11:01 am

    It’s interesting to note that Far North possibly covered his ass by inserting the Syria remark. Also, why not include the dozens of other countries and their esteemed leaders who agreed at the outset from their own information sources that WMD did indeed exist in Iraq?

    Yesterday’s statement is not the end of this story.

  4. 4.

    Kimmitt

    January 15, 2005 at 1:58 pm

    How many mass graves found in Kosovo?

    No, seriously.

    How many in the Sudan? The Democratic Republic of the Congo? Myanmar? Why is Iraq the only killing field that matters? One starts to get a very cynical view of the Right’s sudden discovery of human rights.

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