Presumed Innocent

Indyk follows the events of these eight years through the activities of the handful of individuals who were designing the United States' Middle East policy. His narrative serves as a reminder that the hammering out of policy is never without a clash of ideas. Two examples: the Syria-first policy emerged from a bureaucratic battle lost by those who favored a policy of putting the Palestinians first, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, soon after the Gulf War, proposed considering some kind of accommodation with the defeated Saddam. Indyk is also well aware of the part played by contingency in history -- when events that could not have been anticipated transform the diplomatic landscape. In this case, these include the February 1994 massacre of Muslims at prayer in Hebron by the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein, the flight to Jordan of Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel in August 1995, and the assassination in November of that same year of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Innocent Abroad even has its comic touches. Before the September 1993 White House meeting between Rabin and Yasir Arafat, Clinton and his team went through frenzied efforts to make sure that Arafat did not kiss the president at the public ceremony to inaugurate the Oslo peace process.

CLINTONIAN DIPLOMACY

Throughout the book, Indyk offers maxims about what works in diplomacy and what does not. Persistence is critical. When the United States demonstrates serious intent in addressing Arab-Israeli problems, and works hard toward that end, it reaps advantages even if the immediate issue is not resolved. Indyk also argues that pushing for multiple Arab-Israeli negotiations (put crudely, playing off one Arab state against another) can be effective. Much is made of the way the timing of King Hussein's opting for a peace treaty with Israel was pegged to his desire not to be at the end of the queue, as he was hearing peace rumblings from Syria and the Palestinians.

Some of Indyk's maxims seem a bit off target. He maintains, for example, that "American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." Would an embrace have worked wonders with that hard-edged realist Rabin? Would a little tough talk not have been useful with the slippery Benjamin Netanyahu?

Overall, Indyk comes across as a team player, offering the most positive possible appraisal of Clinton's Middle East policy. At the same time, he does criticize aspects of the Clinton administration's performance, including that of Clinton himself. The most telling example concerns Clinton's behavior following the breakdown of the negotiations between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the last days of his presidency. Clinton openly blamed Arafat and told the incoming U.S. president, George W. Bush, that negotiating with Arafat was useless. If Clinton had instead abstained from blaming Arafat and let his own celebrated parameters (included in the book in an appendix) stand as a possible basis for later negotiations, Bush might have attempted to revive the talks. Instead, Bush concluded -- as he told Indyk when, as outgoing U.S. ambassador to Israel, Indyk accompanied Ariel Sharon, who had just been newly installed as Israel's prime minister, to the White House -- "There's no Nobel Peace Prize to be had here."

That Indyk manages to get in a jab at Bush even in the context of criticizing Clinton illustrates a rhetorical touch used throughout the book: burnish the Clinton record by holding it up against the eight years of the Bush administration. It is surely easier to make the Clinton administration look good in a book written in 2008 than it would have been eight years earlier.

BOXED IN

Rather than follow Indyk's lead of contrasting the Clinton years with the Bush years, it may be more useful to ask whether the Clinton administration's policies and performance made the missteps of the Bush administration more likely. At the time of the 2000 presidential election, the Clinton administration's record in the Middle East was seen as a failure. Yes, an Israeli-Jordanian treaty had been achieved, but that had been early on. Of more recent memory was the bleak reality that there had been no progress with Iran or Syria and that, devastatingly, no Israeli-Palestinian settlement had been reached. (The many informed appraisals of the failed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations throughout the last months of the Clinton administration may be roughly broken down into a majority view that places ultimate responsibility for the failure on Arafat and a minority view that faults Barak and Clinton in varying degrees. Indyk's account fits into the majority view, but he does detail many mistakes by Barak and Clinton.) And Saddam, nine years after Desert Storm, remained in power -- weakened by sanctions and restrictions on his control of the Kurdish north and the Shiite south but still defiant and apparently dangerous. Nothing that the Clinton administration had tried during its eight years seemed to have worked.