Present at the Re-Creation

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Author Lawrence Freedman

Publisher PublicAffairs

Year 2008

Pages 569 pp.

ISBN 2147483647

Price $29.95

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There is a feature of my seminars on U.S. Middle East policy at Princeton that I call "déjà vu all over again" -- with apologies to Yogi Berra. I ask students to assess the bungled efforts and missed opportunities of generations of U.S. diplomats and seek in them lessons for the future. They examine the hubris that drove the U.S. government to engineer the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq's democratically elected government in Iran. This traumatic episode was conveniently forgotten by 1979, when National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to use force against the opposition, ignoring the warnings of U.S. diplomats on the ground in Iran that the shah's reign was doomed. Similarly, the United States forgot the lesson of the limited and United Nations-approved 1991 war in response to Iraq's aggression in Kuwait when it launched an ideologically inspired invasion of Iraq in 2003. Likewise, in 2006, Washington seemed to have forgotten the fiasco that followed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Rather than learn from the past, Washington backed Israel's ill-advised attempt to deliver a knockout blow against another Lebanese foe, this time Hezbollah. My students and I conclude -- only half-jokingly -- that U.S. policymakers ought to take the class before taking office.

They should also read Lawrence Freedman's provocative new book, A Choice of Enemies, a sweeping overview of the United States' responses to foreign policy crises in the Middle East over the past 30 years. The book poses a crucial question: Has the United States' Middle East policy consistently failed since World War II, or have the region's problems become so entrenched that they are impervious to change? Freedman, a professor at King's College London, is best known for his writings on war and is an admitted novice when it comes to the Middle East. Nevertheless, he has assembled an impressive array of sources and presents them well in A Choice of Enemies.

Taking the dramatic events of 1979 and the early 1980s -- the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David peace accords, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and the rise of Hezbollah -- as his starting point, Freedman argues that a sea change occurred in the politics of the region, from secular Arab nationalism to Islamist-based politics. The United States, Freedman contends, failed to adjust: its policies were haphazard and self-contradictory, its officials spent more time arguing with one another than trying to understand what was happening in the region, and it chose enemies based on a shortsighted appreciation of what its own interests were.

Freedman is not optimistic when it comes to resolving the region's vexing foreign policy dilemmas. Toward the end of his book, he argues that the Middle East's problems cannot be solved and "must be managed or endured" instead. But coming after hundreds of pages about pain and suffering in the region and so many poor -- but easily avoidable -- U.S. policy choices, this conclusion is somehow comforting. Freedman seems to be assuring policymakers that these problems are not of their own making, thus absolving them of the responsibility to fix them. His temptation to give up is understandable to those who have studied or worked on the Middle East at any time during the past six decades. Nevertheless, Freedman's conclusion is odd given that the earlier chapters of his book make a compelling case that the United States' missteps in the Middle East have stemmed from ideological obstinacy, a failure to understand history, and often plain obtuseness. If such blunders lie at the root of the United States' policy failures in the region, why does Freedman argue for throwing in the towel rather than repairing the policy process by recruiting experts, pragmatists, and those who have learned the lessons of the past -- and entrusting them with fixing the Middle East?

BEFORE THE THAW

Freedman recognizes the degree to which Cold War competition and a commitment to containing communism motivated U.S. policy and actions in the Middle East for decades. The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was so encompassing that it overshadowed and dominated the dramas of regional politics throughout the world. After World War II, the United States flirted with the idea of supporting decolonization and, for a short while, saw Gamal Abdel Nasser's revolution in Egypt as an opportunity to organize secular Arab politics in the postcolonial era and keep the region out of the Soviet sphere of influence. But this was a short-lived romance, and the hard realities of containment quickly discredited the idea that nation-states could remain nonaligned in an era of superpower competition. Washington saw Nasser's insistence on driving the British out of their base at Suez after 1952 and establishing Egyptian control over the Suez Canal not just as the logical consequence of decolonization but also as a dangerous opening for the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East.

Nasser's revolution led to economic and social upheaval that had essentially bankrupted Egypt by the early 1970s. Nasser attempted to destabilize and overthrow conservative regimes, such as the Jordanian monarchy. His government went so far as to align many aspects of Egypt's foreign policy with that of the Soviet Union -- a price it was willing to pay in exchange for the massive amounts of Soviet aid that helped finance the Aswan High Dam and the arsenal Nasser needed to pursue his military adventures in Yemen. But the Soviets did not get much out of the alliance. Indeed, both superpowers should have learned early in the Cold War that their competition for regional allies yielded only meager payoffs.