They have been there a long time. What we want from them has been there even longer. Who do you think holds the upper hand?
If you think I’m talking about oil and the war in Iran and Donald Trump’s recent pathetic attempts to negotiate his way out of it, I am. But I’m also talking about buying rugs in the Middle East.
It’s one of the most daunting things you can do in your life, walking into the shop of a rug merchant in a market in Beirut, Lebanon; Kabul, Afghanistan; Peshawar, Pakistan; or the Arab quarter of Jerusalem or Jaffa in Israel. There, laid out in stacks and hanging from rods along the walls, are the rugs you want. The colors are muted, or they’re bright; the designs are subtle, or they’re loud; the textures are thick and nappy, or they’re pliant and soft. It doesn’t matter, because for all intents and purposes, they are the most beautiful things in the world, and the merchant knows you think this simply because you’ve walked into his shop.
You have never felt so naked as when you feel the eyes of a man who has been selling Persian rugs for 40 or 50 years fall upon you. He knows everything, and he knows that you know nothing. He can even tell if you have studied Persian rugs and the way they’re made and whether the dyes in the wool are natural or not. He knows that with all the knowledge you may have accumulated, all the rugs you may have already seen and felt and walked on, you still know far, far less than he does, because he knows what he paid for the rugs in his shop, and you don’t.
Because there are no price tags on the rugs, you start from a position of utter weakness. The oldest rule in the book about negotiation is, don’t be the one who makes the first offer. The dangers of doing that are manifest. The minute you give up a number for what you’re willing to pay for the rug, the merchant knows how badly you want it. If it’s low, he not only knows how low is your offer, he has a good idea of how much more you’re willing to pay. If your offer is high, his position is even better. He knows that you really want it and you’ve got the money, and you’re trying to get it by offering so much, he’ll probably take your offer, and so it’s likely that if there is further bargaining, it will be more than the generous price you offered.
All of this, and I mean all of it is bad for you. The fact is, when you’re negotiating the price of a rug, there is almost no right move for you. If you pick up the corner of the rug to check the knot density, the rug merchant will probably turn his back to hide the grin on his face. Knots are not just knots. There is the density of the warp and weft of the foundation material; there is the nature of the foundation itself, whether it is cotton or wool or even silk. And then there are the kinds of knots made to create the rug – asymmetrical Persian knots or symmetrical Turkish knots. And more knots doesn’t necessarily mean more value. Rugs from rural areas with fewer knots per square inch can be worth more because of their design and the dyes used and the nature of the wool.
It’s a bottomless pit, and you, as an outsider, are at the bottom of it.
What is the other rule that applies to negotiating your way out of a problem? If you’re in a hole, it’s useful to not keep digging.
In the Middle East – doesn’t matter where, really, which country or region or nationality or tribe – you are the bit at the bottom of a hole that was there before you came along and jumped in.
Donald Trump and his genius negotiators are in an even deeper hole than you would ordinarily occupy, because they were negotiating with Iran’s government while Trump was planning to attack Iran with Israel. This is a little bit like walking up to the back of a rug dealer’s shop and setting it on fire and then walking around to the entrance and telling the merchant that you want a good price for one of his rugs.
There is another problem Trump and Witkoff and Kushner have. The negotiations they started before the war were with a representative of the Iranian leader who was killed, along with much of his government and military leadership, on the first day of the war. This is like setting fire to the rug shop, shooting the rug merchant, and then trying to find another guy to buy a rug from as the shop burns and the merchant bleeds out.
From everything that is being reported about this war, the war part has gone swimmingly. Oops. With the Strait of Hormuz being closed and shipment of Gulf oil completely cut off to the rest of the world, perhaps we could choose a better word. Let’s call it the shooting part of the war, and let’s say that it has gone about as well as expected.
But even that isn’t right. We don’t know how well the bombing has gone, because we don’t really know what has been knocked out, do we? The Pentagon tells us how many sorties have been flown and how many missiles have been fired and how many bombs have been dropped and how many pounds they weighed. They tell us the targets have been Iran’s nuclear sites, its missiles and drones, and its defense manufacturing facilities. But we know, because it has been reported in the Times and Post, that Ukraine is manufacturing missiles and drones underground. Why wouldn’t Iran be doing the same thing?
Of course they are. Do you think we know every underground cave and bunker that holds a factory making Iran’s missiles and Shahed drones? I very seriously doubt it. Iran is still shooting missiles at Israel and sending drones across the water to attack Gulf states, not as many as when the war first started, but maybe that’s part of their tactics. In fact, maybe that is Iran’s overall strategy. Parcel out its ammo carefully, so they can keep the war going longer.
To whose advantage is stringing out the war? Ah-ha! I remember that other Middle East saying about conflicts and negotiations. We’ve got the watch, but they’ve got the time. How did our 20 years in Afghanistan work out for us? The Taliban was running things in 2001 when we first attacked. They’re still running things in 2026, 25 years later. They’ve even got all the weapons and vehicles we gave to the so-called “Afghan army” to help us fight the Taliban when we were still there.
You walk into the shop of the rug merchant in the market, and you spend some time looking at rugs, and maybe you decide to buy one and you haggle over a price that’s acceptable to you – and which I can assure you delights him, because he’s not going to sell you a rug for less money than he bought it for – and you walk out.
The rug shop is still there. The rug merchant is still there, waiting for the next customer like you to walk in and be dazzled enough by his wares that you will fork over enough money to make the next couple of payments on his new Toyota Camry. But you don’t know that. You don’t know that he’s even got a Toyota Camry, because all you know is that there is a rug shop in the market and a guy running it whom you bought a rug from.
I once sat on a plane from Stockholm to New York with two guys from Connecticut who were returning home from making deals to buy super-high-quality steel that was made in Sweden. They told me that their buying trip had been a big success, because they had spent the previous six months looking into the life and background of every man who ran the companies they were buying from. About one man, for example, they had discovered he was into S&M and liked being on the receiving end. With another guy, they discovered he had a gambling problem and was in debt. Badly. Neither guy knew what these two men from the U.S. knew about them. I hardly need tell you how well their negotiations for super-hard steel went.
What do you think Witkoff and Kushner know about the new leader of Iran? Oh, I’m sure the CIA and Israel’s Mossad have been gathering stuff on the late Ayatollah’s son for years. They certainly knew where the Ayatollah and his top people would be on February 28. But they don’t appear to know where the son is now. The Israelis have killed a couple of Iran’s military leaders over the last weeks, but we already knew that Iran does everything in depth, as the military likes to say. They had layers of leadership, political and military, ready to go if the original guys were knocked off. So how deep did our research go on the new guys?
Trump’s geniuses have at least located a couple of guys through the good offices of Pakistan whom they appear to be attempting to negotiate with. And so we must ask now what kind of negotiating are they doing?
Well, their first move was to tell the Iranians what they want, which is like telling the rug guy upfront, before he’s said a word, what you’ll pay. It’s the usual stuff that the Iranians already knew – stop working on your nukes, give us all your enriched uranium, stop producing missiles and drones, don’t give any more money or weapons to Hamas or Hezbollah, and open the Strait of Hormuz and let us manage ship traffic in and out of the Gulf.
Ri-i-i-ght.
That’s like telling the rug merchant to give you all the rugs the shop you’ve set on fire and tell him that you’ll help him put the fire out, after you’ve loaded up all the rugs.
It sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, it’s worse. All those missiles and bombs we’ve dropped on Iran have cut off their communications to the extent that the leadership has a great deal of difficulty talking to one another – probably because they’re all in bunkers and all the cell towers are down and their military super-secure commo networks are destroyed. So, they can’t get together and decide how to respond to our 15-point “offer,” other than to tell us to stick it and where. The negotiations, if they can be called that, are therefore much slower than they might have been if we hadn’t bombed the shit out of everything in Iran.
So, what’s the result, as of today? Well, Iran is still shooting missiles at Israel, and Israel appears to be running low on its Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and more of Iran’s missiles are getting through. Iran is still sending drones across the Gulf to hit its neighbors, and its drones are getting though, because it turns out that Iranian drones are hard to shoot down.
Back here in the U.S., we’re raiding the stockpiles of our missiles wherever we can find them, because we’re running low, and it turns out that our F-35 fighter is not as stealthy as we thought, because one of them has been shot down. So we’re not going to be using zillion-dollar F-35’s to drop bombs on Iran, of which we still have many.
Meanwhile, gas prices are going up, oil prices are still ugly, the Fed kept interest rates where they are and the word is that they have no plans to lower them over the next year because of Trump’s war, and lower interest rates is one of those pesky things that keeps him up at night tossing and turning and messing up his Golden Locks.
And the “R” word is making its way into stories about Trump’s war. Yes, there is talk of recession, and that means higher inflation, and that means the Fed will be increasing interest rates, not dropping them. Trump’s poll numbers hit 36 percent disapproval again this week, and a Democrat – a traitorous, nasty, leftist commie Democrat – won the state legislative seat for the district where Mar a Lago sits and where Trump votes…by mail, of course, because mail in voting allows cheating, and Trump cheats like a mofo.
Persian rugs have been made in what is now Iran for 2,000 years. They’ve been bought and sold there just as long. Wars have been fought in Persia for twice as long as they’ve been trading rugs. They know every nook and cranny of that country of mountain ranges and deserts and foothills and valleys and waterfront on the Persian Gulf – there’s that word “Persia” again – because it’s been their land for thousands of years.
Today, Donald Trump went into the rug shop and this is what he said when he came out: “They are talking to us, and they’re making sense.” Here is what Ebrahim Zolfaqari, the spokesperson for the unified command of Iran’s armed forces, said in response to Trump. “Has the level of your inner struggle reached the stage of you negotiating with yourself?”
See, that’s what you don’t do when you walk into the rug shop in the bazaar in the Middle East, where they’ve been buying and selling things and negotiating with each other for several thousand years. You don’t tell the rug merchant what you want. You wait for him to tell you what price he’s charging.
Even if you think you have the time to wait them out, you’ve already lost, and you may as well go home, because you’re not getting a rug today – not even one of the rugs you can tell are the cheap ones just by looking at them. They just keep those on display to suck you in and give you hope. But there is no hope if you’re so stupid that you’ve burned down the rug shop and all the rugs are gone, just like the oil tankers that aren’t chugging through the Strait of Hormuz. A world without a rug in your living room can be lived, but a world without gas in your car and oil and natural gas to generate the electricity that powers the entirety of Asia and makes it possible to produce the computers that run everything in our lives – well, that’s a world that nobody wants to live in, as Donald Trump is about to find out.
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