Presumed Innocent

Innocent Abroad treats the United States' Middle East policy and performance in the region during the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency. It is an "intimate" -- or, better, an insider's -- account written by a former senior official. And rather than a history of "peace diplomacy," it is a history of agreements made, agreements missed, the aftermath of a war that left in its wake an untidy resolution, and covert actions gone awry -- all within the context of the sole post-Cold War superpower's defining its role in the Middle East.

Rather than titling this book Innocent Abroad, it would perhaps have been better to evoke directly Mark Twain's plural -- The Innocents Abroad. Americans, Martin Indyk asserts, are the innocents, seeking to "make the Middle East over in America's image." This generates "a troubling naivete in the American approach to the Middle East that is part innocence, part ignorance, and part arrogance."

Yet Indyk's account does not in fact exhibit the dominance of innocence or ignorance, and arrogance is simply the usual attitude of great powers in dealing with lesser states. There are, however, different lessons to be learned from Innocent Abroad, some asserted by the author and others to be gleaned from a careful reading of the book.

AN INSIDER'S ACCOUNT

Indyk, born in London and raised and educated in Australia, where he earned a Ph.D. in international relations, came to the United States in the early 1980s. For a time, he worked as a researcher at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself "America's Pro-Israel Lobby." He left AIPAC to found the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that he directed for some seven years. From there, he was recruited into the Clinton administration, where he served first as a senior official concerned with Middle East policy on the National Security Council and then twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel (April 1995 to September 1997 and January 2000 to July 2001), filling in the intervening years as assistant secretary for Near East affairs in the State Department.

Given Indyk's background in WINEP -- which is generally viewed as pro-Israel and thus anti-Arab (the former is fair enough, the latter not necessarily) -- was his an inappropriate appointment? This much can be said (although it will satisfy no one): a research organization, or think tank, is not a lobby. Think tanks come in all political hues; consider the Brookings Institution (where Indyk is now) or the American Enterprise Institute. And Indyk was in no way a stealth candidate for an appointment. The Clinton administration must have liked his resumé -- the White House even hastened the process of getting him U.S. citizenship -- and his take on the issues. One could argue that a more neutral candidate might have come from the career foreign or intelligence services, but career officials can be equally politicized, deliberately or in spite of themselves. (Think of "those Arabists in the State Department," "Arabist" being a misleading label but one that at one time had gained considerable traction.) Choosing outside specialists, especially from universities and think tanks, to fill high government positions has long been an accepted practice of presidential administrations. Such an appointment was as appropriate as, say, recruiting an Arab American specialist in Middle Eastern studies from an Ivy League university might be. And Indyk, in any case, is quite up-front about his attachment to Israel -- an attachment that he sees as consistent with U.S. policy. He supported the Clinton administration's efforts to bring about a negotiated and just settlement between Israel and its neighbors.

Innocent Abroad tackles the key developments in U.S. Middle East policy during Clinton's presidency. It discusses the inauguration and subsequent fate of the "dual containment" policy, which was announced in May 1993 by Indyk himself in a WINEP meeting. This policy statement, which rejected balance-of-power politics, proclaimed that the United States would contain both Iran and Iraq, adding that Saddam Hussein's regime was "irredeemable." Indyk also recounts the first try at a "Syria first" policy -- giving priority to seeking an Israeli settlement with Syria rather than with the Palestinians. This was derailed by the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, which reversed the priority. He goes on to address the frustrating U.S. efforts to hem in Saddam, with the ultimate goal of his removal, which included an ill-fated covert action in 1995 and then Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. The latter brought four days of U.S. aerial attacks against Iraq after Saddam had yet again stymied the United Nations inspectors seeking to carry out their weapons-monitoring duties. Meanwhile, efforts to achieve a breakthrough in U.S. relations with Iran (before and during the presidency of the reformer Muhammad Khatami) proved fruitless, roiled by such actions as those by U.S. Representative Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who led the fight to get passage of the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). Finally, Indyk addresses the second effort to orchestrate an Israeli-Syrian settlement, which also came to naught, in early 2000, and then the dramatic negotiations, pushed by Clinton through the last half of 2000, that came so close to achieving a grand bargain between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David.