Thomas Friedman

I'm in the middle of "From Beirut to Jerusalem", Tom's landmark work on the Lebanese and Israeli-Palestinian struggles, published originally in 1989. It's great so far - I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long time. Friedman's positively prophetic about Ariel Sharon, though he was writing when Sharon was in a political coma.

He writes, "I am convinced that there is only one man in Israel that [Syrian President] Hafez Assad ever feared and that is Ariel Sharon... Assad knew Sharon well; he saw him every morning when he looked in the mirror," and "These two men [Yasir Arafat and Lebanese Christian leader Camille Chamoun] had sent so many young men to die in defense of their own personal power and status, and now they were sending bouquets. That was Beirut. Beirut was a theater and Arafat though he could star in it forever. Then one day an outsider stormed in, without even buying a ticket. He was a big man, a fat man, and he did not understand the logic of the play.

Ariel Sharon never sent Yasir Arafat flowers.

Friedman still works for the New York Times, but now in the Big Apple as the foreign affairs columnist. NYTimes provides his biography and some of his latest work.

"From Beirut to Jerusalem" even had a quote that was germane to my work here in the Press Office: It actually ended up hurting the PLO more than helping it, because the PLO leadership fell in love with their own press clippings. Headlines became a narcotic substitute for truly meaningful grassroots political or military actions and gave the PLO leaders a much exaggerated sense of their own strength. They mistook news reports for real power and theatrical gestures themselves into thinking that history was on their side, that they were getting stronger, and that this was no time for making concessions.