CURRENT AFFAIRS: A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East By Patrick Tyler Portobello Books, 628pp. £25 and Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American PowerBy Fred Kaplan Wiley, 246pp. £9.99
‘THEY’RE SETTING me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said. “I am not going to take the hit.” George Tenet, the director of the CIA, was standing in his underpants in the palace of Saudi Prince Bandar, a bottle of scotch in his hand and thunder in his eyes, as he railed against the “assholes” in the Pentagon, the “crazies” in the White House, the sneering ideologues around Vice-President Dick Cheney. It was 2004, a year into the war in Iraq, and someone had to take the blame for the missing weapons of mass destruction, the overarching pretext for invading Iraq in the first place. Tenet, it will be remembered, was the US intelligence supremo who had reassured the same assholes and crazies that the weapons were there for the finding. “Don’t worry”, he had told President Bush, “it’s a slam-dunk.”
Patrick Tyler is kinder than most to the CIA director. His story of Tenet swaying in his boxer shorts with a scotch in one hand, a Havana cigar in the other, as he pondered the logistics of a swim in the Saudi prince’s pool, is referenced with care, even if the author tells it with evident relish.
While Tyler addresses the cumulative effect of 60 years of American blundering and miscalculation in a key region of national interests, Fred Kaplan’s book is concerned with the more recent bungling in the Middle East. His subtitle speaks of the grand ideas which wrecked American power, by which he means the strategies devised by the new policy intellectuals brought into the White House to settle, once and for all, who was number one in the post-Cold War world.
Now, as the Bush administration slinks away into ignominy, leaving behind it a wreckage in the Middle East of incalculable damage to the interests and reputation of the United States, these two books together make for sober reading.
Kaplan’s account of the hubris of the Bush administration in sweeping aside time-worn principles of decency and respect for others in the international arena starts with the basic error of the Bush-Cheney worldview: the idea that 9/11 changed the international order and opened up unlimited possibilities for the sole superpower to re-model the world in its own interests. In six brief chapters, Kaplan presents a well-considered critique of the Bush Doctrine and the damage it has done to the United States. Much of the ground covered is familiar, but as a short introduction to the zany ideas of neo-conservatism Kaplan is very readable.
Patrick Tyler, by contrast, writes a whopper. As in his earlier analysis of US foreign policy in China – A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China – he looks at history top-down, examining here the record of 10 US presidents in their dealings with the Middle East. While some coherence can be seen in American Cold War policy, he can detect none in regard to the Middle East. “What stands out is the absence of consistency from one president to the next, as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity”.
Drawing on declassified records from the archives of successive presidents and administrations, he takes the reader through successive periods of peril and mismanagement in the Middle East, from Dwight D Eisenhower in the 1950s to George W Bush. There is understanding but little praise for the statesmanship of any of them apart from Eisenhower. He was the only president to face down the major interests in his day – Israel, France and Britain – during the Suez crisis in 1956. “The Suez crisis was Eisenhower’s finest hour as president in the sense that every public step he took anchored America firmly within the principles of the United Nations Charter.”
The six-day war in 1967 coincided with a White House administration that had least interest and showed least competence in dealing decisively with the Middle East. Lyndon B Johnson had the opportunity, but failed to exercise the authority, to force an Israeli withdrawal from the captured Palestinian territories.
His successor, Richard Nixon, was preoccupied with extricating his country with some dignity from the swamps of Vietnam, and the Middle East was not a top priority. Before he took office, he sent an envoy, William Scranton, to investigate the diplomatic possibilities and Scranton recommended an even-handed approach that did not favour one nation over any other. “The blowback was so intense”, Tyler writes, “that Nixon dropped Scranton instantly.” Unfortunately for the Arabs of the Middle East, he took up with Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger’s personal vanities and ambition were never absent from the scheming for career advantage that marked his incumbency of high office. He promoted the interests of Israel over its rivals in the region even against the express wishes of the President, and secretly withheld a Nixon proposal to the Soviet Union for a joint peace initiative. “More than any other official”, Tyler writes, “Kissinger authored the notion that without a disproportionate bias in American policy towards Israel, the Arab camp would sense a loss of American support for the Jewish state and rush in to annihilate it.”
Ronald Reagan supported Iraq in the war against Iran and Iran in the war against Iraq. Jimmy Carter, “the obsessive bureaucrat who wore his idealism like a crucifix”, invested his energy and political capital in working for peace in the region, but his second term of office was denied him by the guile of Reagan in deflecting credit to himself for the release of American hostages in Iran.
Tyler has given us a magisterial sweep of Middle East history since the second World War, painting a bold and colourful panorama of the violence, cruelty, and mistrust that are endemic in the region, and of the cumulative muddle that is American foreign policy in that arena.
But he hasn’t said the half of it. The panoramic vision from the height of presidential policy-making ignores the domestic developments both in the United States and in the Arab world which inescapably add to the problem of peacemaking. Since the end of the Cold War, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism has altered the prospects for agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. More serious is the growth of Christian Zionism in the United States, effectively expanding the influence of the Israel lobby in Washington beyond what was dreamed of four decades ago. The Southern bible belt, once a repose of anti-semitism, has become the cheerleader of the Israeli right.
Where Eisenhower could be even-handed, Johnson indifferent, Nixon even nurture his private stock of anti-semitisms, no one now becomes president without obeisance to a hidden army of lobbyists. America’s new president and his secretary of state have paid due deference to the lobby during the campaign. Time will tell how even-handed they can afford to be.
Bill McSweeney teaches on the international peace studies programme at Trinity College Dublin