Present at the Re-Creation

Freedman, whose focus is on the past three decades, does not spend much time on this earlier period or on the crucial turning point of the Six-Day War. Historians have long debated whether there was a chance for peace after the war or whether the September 1967 Arab summit in Khartoum -- during which the Arab states refused to recognize Israel or negotiate peace with it -- pushed the conflict onto the path it has followed ever since. After June 1967, Israeli policy shifted from a politics of necessity -- securing its borders, integrating immigrants, and gaining international legitimacy -- to a politics of choice. As a result, internal debates in Israel since the 1980s have focused not on the country's survival but on the future of the territories the Israeli army occupies and the people it rules over. Freedman does not enter this discussion, and so his rehashing of U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli peace process after 1979, although adequate, breaks no new ground.

THE UNFORSEEN TSUNAMI

Freedman's strong suit is his focus on what he calls "the second radical wave" of Islamist politics, which emerged during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and displaced Nasser's secular Arab nationalism as the dominant political force in the region. Interestingly, both Islamism and Nasserism shared three important traits: vehement anticolonialism, a deep animosity toward Zionism, and ideological origins in Egypt. It is how they diverged, however, that has made all the difference. Political Islam represents far more than a way of ordering politics; it demands a fundamental reorientation of the organization and governance of all societies in which Muslims live.

The United States has had numerous interactions with Islamist actors. Not all of these experiences have begun badly, but all have ended badly. In the case of Iran, the fallout continues to pollute relations with Washington to this day. The United States did not much concern itself with the ayatollahs during the 1953 coup; in fact, the ayatollahs largely supported the U.S. effort to remove Mosaddeq from power. After that, however, Iran's Islamic clergy became increasingly radicalized, notably after the shah expelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from Iran in 1964. Still, U.S. policymakers failed to take this development seriously. As late as 1978, cables from the U.S. embassy in Tehran needed to identify Khomeini for readers in Washington, who were unfamiliar with him or his standing among the growing Iranian opposition.

Freedman makes much of U.S. policymakers' lack of historical understanding, as well as the bureaucratic infighting that resulted in a near-total breakdown in dialogue and policy coordination between the State Department and the National Security Council in the run-up to the shah's departure. He also provides refreshing reminders, here and throughout the book, about the competing priorities of Washington decision-makers. In 1978 and 1979, as the shah was weakening and his regime was collapsing, President Jimmy Carter was mostly preoccupied with the Israeli-Egyptian peace process. Referring to this and other episodes, Freedman points out that historians have the luxury of sorting out events neatly into separate chapters, but policymakers do not. Caught in the swirl of events and committed to the preconception that the Iranian regime was stable and capable of weathering the storm, they opted to maintain the status quo rather than abandon the shah or reach out to the opposition.

Three other "second wave" Islamist upheavals followed closely on the heels of the Iranian Revolution: the mujahideen's anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the rise of Hamas in Gaza. In all three cases, U.S. policymakers overlooked or underestimated the Islamist threat, or were too busy with other matters to give it the attention it deserved. In Freedman's eyes, Washington's reactions to these developments represent crucial moments in U.S. policy in the region. Freedman shows in great detail how the United States' responses were haphazard, driven by short-term thinking, and prone to the same push and pull of bureaucratic infighting that had afflicted Washington's responses to earlier, non-Islamist threats during the Nasser era.

By the 1990s, U.S. policymakers finally did recognize the threat of Islamism, but they treated it largely as a terrorism problem and failed to see the deeper significance: that radical Islam was replacing secular nationalism as the most powerful political ideology in the region. On this point, Freedman's analysis is not as biting as might have been expected, especially given the setbacks suffered by the United States in recent years. U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen blew back in a storm of terrorist strikes against the United States starting in the 1990s and culminating in the 9/11 attacks. Freedman should have had more to say about the Clinton administration's failure to understand the depth and the danger of the threat and its hesitant and tepid responses to the first terrorist attacks.

FRIENDS AND FOES

Freedman has provided an expansive yet tightly written overview of a complex topic and made good sense of it. A Choice of Enemies will likely become required reading in university courses on U.S. policy in the modern Middle East. The book will also serve the policy community well by making sense of a region that has in the past defied the best efforts of so many busy and conflicted decision-makers.