Thread by @halaljew

One of the most tragic things about the Lebanese Civil War is that this colossal moron made it out alive

Thelma and Louise-- that's your analogy? Are you fucking kidding me?

Friedman managed to packed a lot of poor analysis and flat-out lies into these paragraphs:

1) The Obama administration did not "bet on Iran"-- there was never, not even for a SECOND, any kind of pivot away from the Saudi-UAE-Israel axis. They just wanted to get a deal with Iran.

2) What does a "pro-Western middle class" mean here? Sure, a lot of middle class Iranians want to buy iPhones, but if you're implying that they want Iran to be an American proxy again as it was before 1979 (which is what Friedman wants), then you're very, very mistaken.

3) Again, Friedman uses this absurd trope that Iran "controls" four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sana'a. This is a flat-out lie, and it keeps getting repeated by the usual clan of soulless think tankers and servants of empire like Thomas Friedman.

If Iran "controls" Baghdad, then why are there still American troops in Iraq in 2018? Surely if Iran controlled Baghdad and wanted to limit American power, then their first priority would be getting the U.S. out of Iraq, right?

As for Damascus, weren't all these guys just saying Russia was the one controlling Damascus? Which is it-- is Syria controlled by Russia, or is it controlled by Iran? Make up your mind. In reality it's neither-- even during the Cold War, Syria never became a true proxy of anyone

As for Beirut-- Hezbollah does get money and weapons from Iran, but Hezbollah is not a proxy, it is very much a distinctly Lebanese party. More importantly, Hezbollah does not control Lebanon. They just don't. It wouldn't even be possible for them to do that.

4) The JCPOA (the "Iran Deal") was signed in November 2015. Hezbollah started fighting in Syria in 2013. JCPOA was strictly about Iran's nuclear program-- that's it. America doesn't get to dictate Iran's foreign policy, or Hezbollah's foreign policy for that matter.

5) Sunni Arabs were not ethnically cleansed in Syria. That's just not true. What, did Aleppo stop being a majority Sunni city? I must've missed that. And "genocidal"? Genocide has an actual definition, you can't just toss it around where it doesn't apply at all. It's insulting.

And the phrase "imperial over-reach" being applied to Iran, and from one of the biggest apologists for American Empire, is just beyond cynical

Let me get this straight: the problem Thomas Friedman has with Trump's Saudi Arabia policy is that he didn't appoint an ambassador or a special envoy to Riyadh?

The problem isn't Saudi Arabia's policy of starving Yemen to death-- no, it's that we don't have an ambassador.

7) Saudi Arabia's "intervention" in Yemen, if you want to use that euphemism, started under Obama. Not Trump.

And if these issues-- Yemen, Lebanon, and Qatar-- are so important to Thomas Friedman, they why didn't he push MbS on these during his gushing interview last year?

This is the ONLY mention of the kidnapping of Saad Hariri-- which he calls a "resignation, seemingly under Saudi pressure"-- and Saudi Arabia's brutal war on Yemen in Thomas Friedman's love letter to Mohammed bin Salman last year. The blockade of Qatar didn't even come up.

Thomas Friedman making sure to remind everyone that, according to the Washington consensus, the Iranian govt is somehow worse than Saudi Arabia's govt

If this is how you see the Middle East, you should not be able to write about the region. A) Sectarianism is not a level playing field, certain groups are at the risk of being wiped out entirely while others aren't B) Capitalism and imperialism are just as, if not more, important

Sectarianism doesn't exist in a vacuum okay, it doesn't just spring up out of nowhere-- it is in the interests of certain countries and certain people to push a sectarian agenda to bend the region to their will. It doesn't just magically come out of thin air.

Oh yeah, the Saudis /never/ funded any extremist groups before Trump and Mohammed bin Salman, it's a totally new phenomenon. Even Thomas Friedman isn't that stupid, he knows that Saudi Arabia has done a lot more than just writing checks.

"What happened under M.B.S. was that he wanted to play like the big boys in the neighborhood " I don't even need to explain how stupid this statement is, it's pretty self-evident. Thank god, that's it, the column is over. I'm sorry I had to subject you all to this drivel.