{"id":581,"date":"2010-04-25T15:35:21","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T21:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=581"},"modified":"2010-04-28T18:36:22","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T00:36:22","slug":"the-much-too-promised-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=581","title":{"rendered":"The Much Too Promised Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron David Miller’s The Much Too Promised Land<\/a> 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). \u00a0 Miller<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

In the first of the three chapters of “Part One:\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 Chapter Two covers the difficulties related to the huge difference in size and power amongst Israel, Palestine and the US.\u00a0 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).\u00a0\u00a0 Chapter Three covers AIPAC<\/a> (apologetically), the Christian Evangelical support of Zionism (for example<\/a>) and the historical and current role of domestic political pressure and how it affects US foreign policy.<\/p>\n

“Part Two: America’s Promise Kept” consists of separate chapters devoted to Miller’s “bad boys of Arab-Israeli peacemaking:”\u00a0 Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and James Baker.\u00a0 Kissinger the Strategist was successful due to his ego, his time spent on the ground and his known closeness to Nixon.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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<\/a> for another very positive review of the Bush\/Baker team).<\/p>\n

“Part Three: America’s Promise Frustrated” covers the Clinton administration in two chapters.\u00a0\u00a0 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).\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

“Part Four:\u00a0 America’s Promise Abandoned?” covers the George W. Bush administration and Miller’s conclusions.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Make the Issue a Top and Ongoing Priority…<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 …But remember:\u00a0 It’s a Long Movie.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0\u00a0 And Keep It Bipartisan.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Negotiations Can Work but Only in the Right Environment.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 The United State and Israel:\u00a0 Special but Not Exclusive.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0 Offer Love, but Make It Tough Love.<\/p>\n

Miller’s final word: “….although we remain vital to peacemaking, we can’t drive the train as much as I once believed.”\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 When the book was published in 2008, it was well received by the New York Review of Books<\/a>, the New York Times,<\/a> and Foreign Affairs<\/a> amongst others.\u00a0 Philip “Mondoweiss” Weiss was one of the few critics <\/a>of the book (although after several blog postings he appears to agree with most of the main message).\u00a0 An NPR Talk of the Nation interview<\/a> from March 2008 provides a good preview of the book.\u00a0 Last week, Miller published a new analysis of the peace process<\/a> in Foreign Policy.\u00a0\u00a0 Still gloomy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[16,36,13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":607,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}