Can anyone who makes a living writing on the Middle East get it wrong so often?
Today he tells us that a big issue that began to roil Bahrain in 2006, particularly among Shiite men who want to get married and build homes, was the unequal distribution of land.
Oh really? But didn't Friedman tell us in 2002 that Bahrain "had successfully conducted the first democratic parliamentary election in the Arab gulf, to begin empowering Bahrainis to control their own land"?
Yoo hoo? Mr. Friedman?
And what does he say today about Egypt?
China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid.
Would someone tell this man that China has the world's second biggest economy mainly because it has more than 1.5 billion people. Egypt's 80 million people have no illusions that they are going to compete on size.
They are competing economically, however. Per capita purchasing power in China was $7,518 in 2010. In Egypt it was $6,367. Not such a huge difference. And while Egypt's economic growth, at annual 5 to 7 percent for each of the last six years, is not as high as China's, it has still been among the fastest in all the countries of the world. Faster even than that of economic miracle Israel!
And finally the Fayyad factor!
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad introduced a new form of government in the Arab world in the last three years, something I’ve dubbed “Fayyadism.” It said: judge me on my performance, on how I deliver government services and collect the garbage and create jobs — not simply on how I “resist” the West or Israel. Every Arab could relate to this.
That may be the view from Washington and Tel Aviv. But the view from the Arab street is that Fayyad and his boss Mahmoud Abbas are hapless puppets of the Israelis. The idea that "Fayyadism" helped ignite the Arab Revolt is ludicrous.