Thomas L. Friedman

Friedman writes the New York Times foreign-affairs column and has won three Pulitzer Prizes, in 1983, 1988 and 2002. He first floated the pottery-shop analogy for Iraq on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday in September 2002 and put it in print the following February. He has been blunt about authorship — “yes I coined that phrase and not just in whisper. I wrote a column about it” — while admitting he wrote “pottery store rule” in the paper but said “Pottery Barn Rule” in speeches, because he was afraid the chain might sue the Times.