It’s been over four and a half years since New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman compared the need to go to war in Iraq with oral rape in an interview on “Charlie Rose”, with Chuck sitting and and lapping up the pearls of wisdom dripping from Tom’s mouth, but there’s ever so much more in the hour-long interview that strips the curtain from the naked psyche of Friedman.
Take, for instance, this glorious thirty seconds or so, near the end of the interview (beginning at 51:10, if you think you can stomach it). Transcript is mine.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: I was in Cairo while the war was going on. The American Embassy asked me if I would have a tea one afternoon in Fishawi’s Coffee Shop where uh, um, Naguib Mahfouz used to hang out in the Khan el Khalili market, with a group of opposition —
CHARLIE ROSE: The famous Egyptian novelist.
FRIEDMAN: — journalists. So I met with these opposition journalists and they were all going on and on about um, uh, how bad this war was. And I finally, y’know, said to them: “Look. Maybe we’re going to totally blow it. Maybe we in the United States will make the biggest mess in the Middle East. But what if we don’t? What if,” I said to them [brings index finger to lips], “by the year — let’s pick a number: 2005 — Iraq holds a free and fair election. Jimmy Carter comes over and says this was a free and fair election. Wait a minute! Who else is holding an election in 2005? Egypt’s holding an election in 2005! [ROSE smiles with delight at the story so far.] Now do you think Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt could hold an election any less free and fair in Cairo in 2005 if in Baghdad there is a free and fair election? I don’t think so.”
So that’s why what goes on in Baghdad is so important.
2005, eh? Well, we’ll just see about that, Mr. Friedman!
The famous “Suck. On. This.” sequence starts at 5:00. Lots of stuff in-between.
[The alternate title for this post was: “Pissed-Off Egyptian Journalists: 1, Tom Friedman: 0” because they got it right, but then they have to live with the results of Friedman’s disaster and Friedman gets another book contract.]