"The innovative prince appears in Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded eating pizza at a Bahraini bistro with Friedman, while the daughter of a woman in a head-scarf at the table next to them is “dressed like an American teenager and had what looked like a tattoo on her left shoulder.” The bearer of the possible tattoo presumably belongs to the same category as the modern-sounding Egyptian hotel receptionist and other desirable types of Orientals, like “emphatically pro-Western Saudis, who have studied in America, visit regularly, and still root for their favorite American football teams.”
The relative familiarity of these ‘Orientals’ to the Western observer earns them Friedman brownie points vis-à-vis other contenders in the struggle for the soul of Arab/Muslim civilization, such as Palestinians “gripped by a collective madness” and Iraqis opposed to the US “occupation” of their country, who are written off as members of the “Iraqi Khmer Rouge.” Though Friedman eventually starts referring to the US occupation without quotation marks, he never explains why it is that the destruction of Iraq “to try to build one decent, progressive, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab East” is necessary when he has already advertised Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco as “progressive Arab states” and decreed that “whatever happens with the Iraq experiment — but especially if it fails — we need Dubai to succeed. Dubai is where we should want the Arab world to go.”" (thanks Hicham)
