'You Guys Just Don't Understand'

A World of Trouble The White House and the Middle East - from the Cold War to the War on Terror, by Patrick Tyler Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 640 pages, $30

When you log on to the White House home page these days, it proudly announces that "Change has come to America." Indeed, anyone whose heart is not made of New Hampshire granite had to be moved by January's swearing-in of Barack Obama. Even George W. Bush said it would be a "stirring sight" to see the Obama family move into the White House.

One of the key areas where tens of millions of people, both at home and abroad, are longing for change is in foreign policy. This is especially true with regard to the Middle East, where worldwide opinion polls show that with the notable exception of Israel, almost every country regards Bush's tenure as disastrous.

But perhaps Obama should take it slow - after all, the Middle East isn't going anywhere. Rather than rush into a new policy, he might give himself a little time to think, and to read journalist Patrick Tyler's illuminating new book about America's miserable record in the region over the past half-century.

Tyler makes a convincing argument that one of the overarching problems the United States has had in relation to the Middle East is an almost complete lack of consistency in its policies since World War II. In contrast to its broad and ultimately successful policy of containing the Soviet Union and its allies, America, Tyler shows, has lurched like a drunken sailor when it comes to its Middle East policy.

Almost every one of the past 10 American presidents has differed from his predecessor in his approach to the region and its myriad troubles. John F. Kennedy focused on preventing Israel from developing nuclear weapons. Israel ignored him and went right ahead, and with good reason; a few years later, under Richard Nixon, the nuclear issue was ignored and the U.S. used its power to build up the military capabilities of its regional allies, including Israel. During the 1956 Suez crisis, Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Egypt, but 11 years later his successor, Lyndon Johnson, immediately accepted Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Sinai, and took no step to force a withdrawal.

The same oddly disjointed approach has applied more recently as well. Bill Clinton invested a vast amount of time and political capital on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only to see the entire problem almost completely abandoned by Bush - who, until his last year, made it almost a point of honor not to get involved in any kind of peace process.

In "A World of Trouble," Tyler makes a convincing case that this lack of an overall strategy has been bad for both America and the region. Given the sweeping geographic scope of its subject matter, the book is not very detailed on any single period or war, but Tyler, who has reported on the Middle East for The New York Times and The Washington Post, manages to paint a convincing, if bleak, overall picture of America's impact on the region. He spends more than half the book on Israel, and provides only a fairly cursory treatment to important countries such as Syria and Jordan, which gives the book a somewhat distorted focus, but also serves to illustrate the enormous role Israel occupies in the U.S. political arena.

Tyler enlivens his book immensely with some very well-written prices of personal reportage from the region, and tells some great White House anecdotes - though presumably not from personal experience - that linger in the mind long after you close the book. There is Johnson during the Six-Day War, a political animal so eager to find out how the 1967 war is going that he sticks his head inside the wire-service teletype machine to see the news as it comes off the printer.

A generation later, George H. W. Bush holds his hand in front of him to see if it's shaking just before he goes on air to explain to the American people that he is sending troops to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. A few years later, Bill Clinton is fretting to aides about whether Yasser Arafat plans to kiss him in front of the entire world when the PLO leader and Yitzhak Rabin come to the White House to sign the Oslo Accords.

Such scenes serve as potent reminders that despite all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the American presidency, even the most powerful person in the world is just a person - and not necessarily a very sophisticated one. In 1952 Eisenhower apparently told then-foreign minister Moshe Sharett and Israeli ambassador Abba Eban that when he was growing up in Abilene, Kansas, he thought the Jews - or "Israelites," as he called them - were mythological creatures like angels or cherubs, and that he had been greatly surprised to discover they existed outside the Bible.

Nevertheless, from Eisenhower to Dubya, these men made far-reaching decisions, and one of the shocking things about Tyler's book is how random and poorly thought-out many of these were. Nixon's sudden decision to initiate a massive airlift to resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 may have been wise, but appears to have been made without the realization that such open support of one side would essentially mean the United States had become a player in the conflict. Tyler also gives a good account of the Camp David negotiations that led to Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, and describes how the final late-night session before the agreement was reached would end up haunting Jimmy Carter. The president thought Menachem Begin had pledged to suspend settlement construction in the West Bank indefinitely, whereas Begin afterward said he had agreed only to a fairly insignificant three-month moratorium.

Equally stunning is the admission by Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, about why the administration failed to realize just how fragile the Shah's regime really was. "Our decision-making networks were heavily overloaded," he said later. That's an amazing, and scary, statement; if the U.S. administration can be so overloaded that it fails to anticipate the collapse of one of its closest Middle Eastern allies, what else can fall though the cracks?

A lot, apparently, as Tyler shows again and again. Most of the conclusions are fairly obvious, so it's a shame Tyler undermines himself by at times appearing biased against Israel. According to Tyler, the helicopter trip Israel routinely offers foreign leaders and journalists in an effort to show them the country's geographic vulnerabilities is "propaganda," yet he fawns over Arafat, declaring that "no objective analysis of Arafat's leadership from the mid-1980s onward could fail to conclude that he personally had pulled and tugged the PLO into a political process that he hoped would lead to peace."

This is a bit much. Surely it's legitimate to show outsiders the country, and surely, if Arafat was anything, he was a political survivor. To ignore that Arafat - who in 1993 was still stranded in Tunis and had made a colossal blunder in supporting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War - would personally and financially benefit from the peace process is to oversimplify history.

There are also a few annoying factual errors and strange omissions that ought to have been caught by a diligent editor, like the remark that in 1946 Harry Truman was "running to succeed Roosevelt," which seems odd given that Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, Truman was already president and the election was two years away. And why is the pro-Israel lobby, including AIPAC, mentioned only a few times in passing? Surely it has been a major factor in determining U.S. policy toward Israel and the rest of the region. And given the fairly detailed treatment Tyler gives the Iranian revolution, why does he breeze through the 1953 Western-sponsored coup against Iran's prime minister at the time, Mohammed Mossadegh, which continues to play a very large role in Iranian public opinion? And why is the topic of oil virtually ignored?

But of course no book can cover everything, and overall, Tyler has produced an illuminating and very readable book about how America has bungled its relationship with the Middle East over and over again. It's a measure of how difficult it has been for America to understand the region and take action in it that I found myself nodding in agreement to Saddam Husssein's statement after he was captured: "You guys just don't understand. This is a rough neighborhood." Exactly. And if Obama and his team hope to have more success than their predecessors, it's vital that they do come to understand this.

The new administration could also do a lot worse than listen to Nadav Safran, who was born in Cairo in 1925, fought in Israel's War of Independence, and died in 2003 after a long career at Harvard. He summed up the sorry Israeli-Palestinian story in one sentence, which Tyler quotes: "Both the Arabs and Israelis have unassailable moral arguments, and anyone who does not understand how this is true cannot understand the true nature of tragedy." Nor, one might add, can they help solve the conflict and get the region on a path to a better and less destructive future.

Marcus Rubin is a commentator for the Danish newspaper Politiken. He lives in Jerusalem and Washington.

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