Relax and Have Fun

I found Professor Shibley Telhami’s The Stakes: America in the Middle East in the Eastern Market’s great used book store, Capitol Hill Books, a few weeks ago.  Then Professor Telhami started showing up on my radar, most recently as one of the contributors to Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace.  The Stakes was published right as the Iraq War began and the edition I read included a new epilogue, written less than one year into the war.  So, the comments he makes related to the Iraq War are a bit handicapped in their accuracy given the timeframe within which he was writing them.   You could say he was prescient about the war, or you could say he was just being analytical and cautious.  Regardless, the book is not just about his views on the Iraq War, and the rest of his commentary is worth thinking about.  I’m bringing this up early, because it was the only distraction as I was reading the book.

Telhami’s first chapter covers five conflicting views of terrorism and concludes that the conditions in the Middle East which lead to terrorism are very important to the US.  The second chapter reviews the results of some polling before and after 9/11 regarding how the rest of the world (not just the Middle East, a key point) thinks of the US and also covers the propensity for embracing conspiracy theories in the Middle East.  Next, Telhami asks “does public opinion in the Middle East matter to the US?” and the answer is “yes,” because of the role public opinion plays in legitimizing state stances, the globalization of information technology (basically, everyone knows a lot more or thinks they do) and the empowering/repression balance that is affected by non-state actors.

Chapter Four covers the importance of the role of the Arab-Israeli issue.  Telhami comments on Osama Bin Laden’s references to the conflict and opines on why Bin Laden began to emphasize the conflict in his speeches, provides a mini-review of the peace process and describes the vicious cycle of a failure to have peace.  Chapter Five covers the role of the Persian Gulf region with a review of US policy on oil, Iraq, Saudi Arabia post-9/11 and more observations on oil and the US.  The final chapter includes Telhami’s guidelines for how to improve our reputation in the Middle East.   He argues against only using military power, with these four considerations:  1.) underestimating the limitations of power  2.) the motivations of others to challenge America 3.) the mischaracterization of the nature of the challenge and 4.) overlooking the values at stake. Two quotes from the end of this chapter sum up his tone nicely: “The thought that because we have the power, we should disregard the wishes of other people around the globe on issues that are often more vital to them than to us – and that we know what’s best for others better than they do themselves- would not be comforting to most Americans.” and “A policy toward the Arab and Muslim worlds that has the effect of turning America into a fortress, building barriers between the United States and nations that comprise over a billion people, and allowing fear to compromise civil liberties even in our own land is not the stuff of greatness.”

In the Epilogue, Telhami reviews some of the effects of the Iraq War to date and re-emphasizes the importance of the stakes at play.  Overall, reading the book was like listening to the author give a balanced presentation on how our actions affect public opinion in the Middle East, how we need to continue to differentiate between Arabs and Muslims, how important public opinion is for our fight against terrorism and how we need to carefully consider the costs of using only military power.  Throughout the book, Telhami does a good job of making the arguments for when to use military power as part of his discussion of the risks of using only military power.

The book’s cover indicates that is was a National Bestseller, but there is not much discussion of it left in the blogosphere.  It was favorably reviewed by Foreign Affairs, and you can read a very detailed review from Turkey here.

One of the reviews for The Much Too Promised Land also favorably reviewed Daniel Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky‘s Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, so I was interested to read this shorter volume by two of the Arab-Israeli experts complimented by Miller.    In less than one hundred pages, the authors define lessons learned and opportunities lost, give a report card on the peace process, delve into more details on lessons learned, and provide recommendations for future administrations (to quote the chapter titles).  Given the nature of the organization which commissioned this title and the brevity of the book, I felt like I was reading some sort of briefing paper for a new (or newly interested) administration.   The authors present a more pro-active stance than Miller did and, although they share many of his criticisms of past efforts, they do not seem to let that keep them from recommending that the US still take an active role in the Arab-Israeli peace process.

For the reader unfamiliar with the Arab-Israeli conflict, this book is not a good place to start.   But it does make a nice follow-up to Miller’s work on the subject (which may be a good place to start if the reader can get over Miller’s pessimism).  In addition to the well-researched and detailed main section of the book,  the book’s appendices include a timeline of 1967-2007, selected documents, online references, a recommended reading list and five fold-out color maps.   These reference tools in the last half of the book are really reason enough to have this book on your bookshelf.

(By the way, Ambassador Kurtzer has a brief entry in the current Foreign Policy Middle East Peace Special, scroll down a bit on the first page.)

Aaron David Miller’s The Much Too Promised Land was the first book we covered in our new book club at work (looking forward to more discussions on books about Israel and the Middle East with that group).   Miller spent decades in the State Department working on the Arab-Israeli peaces process and his book is a very interesting and readable account of those years.

In the first of the three chapters of “Part One:  America’s Promise Challenged” Miller recounts his personal history and the arc of his career, going from Dr. No to Mr. Yes to settling for “maybe.”  Chapter Two covers the difficulties related to the huge difference in size and power amongst Israel, Palestine and the US.  Miller invokes the Gulliver/Lilliputians metaphor and surmises that we (the US) are much more likely to foul things up and/or be duped, due to our overestimating our ability to help (amongst other reasons).   Chapter Three covers AIPAC (apologetically), the Christian Evangelical support of Zionism (for example) and the historical and current role of domestic political pressure and how it affects US foreign policy.

“Part Two: America’s Promise Kept” consists of separate chapters devoted to Miller’s “bad boys of Arab-Israeli peacemaking:”  Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and James Baker.  Kissinger the Strategist was successful due to his ego, his time spent on the ground and his known closeness to Nixon.  Carter the Missionary was boosted by his moralistic core, his strong relationships with the Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian leaders and by a lack of concern for domestic political pressures.   Baker the Negotiator was successful due to then-recent history (the Gulf War), his known closeness to George H. W. Bush and his conviction to actually hit the ground and get something done (see Dennis Ross’ Statecraft for another very positive review of the Bush/Baker team).

“Part Three: America’s Promise Frustrated” covers the Clinton administration in two chapters.   In summary, Clinton was Mr. Nice Guy to a fault, loved everyone too much and did not have a Plan B (or even a Plan A sometimes).   Making things worse, the expectations of America’s role in the peace process changed during his presidency, from Israel wanting us to mediate to Israel wanting us to just facilitate.

“Part Four:  America’s Promise Abandoned?” covers the George W. Bush administration and Miller’s conclusions.   Miller says that Bush was uninterested in the Arab-Israeli peace process upon entering office (partly due to some sense of not pouring good money after bad, and partly due to not wanting to validate anything done by Clinton (ABC)) and unable or unwilling to focus on it post-9/11 until late in his second term.  Miller’s final chapter outlines his analysis of the current state of the Arab-Israeli peace process and the Middle East in general, and includes a to-do list (author’s capitalization below) that must be part of any US strategy going forward:

1.  Make the Issue a Top and Ongoing Priority…

2.  …But remember:  It’s a Long Movie.

3.   And Keep It Bipartisan.

4.  Negotiations Can Work but Only in the Right Environment.

5.  The United State and Israel:  Special but Not Exclusive.

6.  Offer Love, but Make It Tough Love.

Miller’s final word: “….although we remain vital to peacemaking, we can’t drive the train as much as I once believed.”   Way beyond my chapter-level summary points above, the book was filled with self-deprecatory humor, interesting anecdotes, lots of credit where credit was due and served as a good historical review of the role of the US in the Arab-Israeli peace process.  Given Miller’s self-professed enthusiasm for the peace process during most of his career and given his gloomy outlook now, it was also a very sobering read.   When the book was published in 2008, it was well received by the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and Foreign Affairs amongst others.  Philip “Mondoweiss” Weiss was one of the few critics of the book (although after several blog postings he appears to agree with most of the main message).  An NPR Talk of the Nation interview from March 2008 provides a good preview of the book.  Last week, Miller published a new analysis of the peace process in Foreign Policy.   Still gloomy.