War and Peace in the Middle East

Avi Shlaim

New York: Penguin, 1995 (Revised & Updated). ISBN: 0-14-024564-2. Pages: 151.

A concise bird's eye view of the Middle East conflict that is magisterial in scope and breath-taking in undocumented assertions, Shlaim's book is a typical British rant of anti-American (and occasionally anti-British) propaganda that offers many excellent insights that are marred by its other shortcomings.

Reduced to its most basic, Shlaim's thesis is that the Middle East problems were caused and prolonged by the failure of great powers and superpowers alike to take into account the regional interests of the local actors. He divides the history of the conflict into four phases: the Ottoman, the imperial (British/French), the Cold War (US/USSR), and American (now), and then traces how these foreign powers have shaped the region and intruded in the relations among the local states.

This is good stuff. How the British made various promises to both Jews and Arabs while simultaneously plotting the the French to divide everything into spheres of influence (which is what they did after emerging victorious in WWI). Or how the British carved up the territories under their mandate without regard for religious, ethnic, or linguistic composition of their inhabitants, and how they installed rulers who lacked legitimacy from the very start, basically setting the stage for the series of violent convulsions that followed.

The story continues with the two superpowers stepping in after the final twitch of the dying British Empire in 1956, with the Americans mistakenly treating every threat to the status quo as a Soviet attempt to expand communism, an attitude that only hardened with the years.

Unfortunately, this is where the good points end. The author presents the now traditional revisionist account of the Cold War, according to which the Americans exaggerated the Soviet threat, mistook nationalism for communism, overestimated the extent to which the USSR was interested in military expansion and to which it controlled its various proteges (p. 84). That is, the US got everything wrong, and so its conservative policy in support of the status quo was stupid and misguided. The bitter criticism of American policies is easiest to spot on pp. 77, 87, 103, and 108. In fact, despite his initial harping on British imperial policies and the dumb decision to launch the Suez invasion, Shlaim ends up exonerating the British who figure favorable in comparison with the Americans (61).

For example, he continues the old canard that the U.S.'s primary interests in the Persian Gulf are driven by the need for oil (79) without even mentioning that (a) America does not rely on oil from the Middle East to the extent that Western Europe does, (b) that the entire industrialized world has keen interests in a steady supply of inexpensive oil, and (c) the U.S. policy in the Middle East has, in fact, been quite consistent from a geopolitical perspective. If one traces the development of formal policy from the Eisenhower Doctrine until today, it is not difficult to see that the U.S. has always had one overriding goal: prevent any hostile power from assuming regional preeminence that could threaten both American interests and, by extension, Western interests with its choke-hold on the oil supply.

Shlaim has to resort to some rather bizarre reasons for the swings of American support during the Iran-Iraq War, for example. This is because he is trying to fit the facts into his interpretive framework. But if one simply considers the U.S. interests as outlined above, then it becomes perfectly reasonable behavior. On one side was Iraq, going socialist with the Ba'ath Party rule and drawing closer to the USSR. On the other side was Iran that has just undergone an Islamic revolution marked with extreme anti-American bias (because of the excesses of the pro-Western shah). Neither was a palatable choice but should anyone win, it would come to dominate the Gulf. The best policy would be to provide support for the losing side to prevent it from being completely overrun: the best the two states could do was weaken each other. And so it's not surprising that the U.S. sold weapons to Iraq and Iran as the tide of war shifted.

Furthermore, Shlaim readily identifies Soviet quiescence with lack of expansionist desire. This, of course, is quite debatable. It may have been the case that the Soviets were afraid to attempt anything risky given how trigger-happy the Americans appeared. Maybe they were deterred? I am sure this question will remain open for years, but let me offer a few tentative reasons for my argument. First, the Soviets did make significant attempts to limit the ability of their proteges to drag them into a conflict with the U.S. After 1962, any direct confrontation was unthinkable and the Cuban Crisis had shown just how volatile the Americans could be. Second, whenever they detected reluctance in the U.S. position, they did encourage probes around the globe. This was also in keeping with traditional communist doctrine: try, and if it does not work, step back and try again later. Third, once the USSR began rivaling the U.S. in military capability in the late 1970s and the U.S. had shown itself impotent in Vietnam, the Soviets did get bolder and did try expansion in Afghanistan. So were they security-minded nationalists who were interested in peaceful coexistence or commissars ready to exploit any opportunity to advance the cause of world communism even by violent means? I don't know but I would not be sanguine about the latter.

Shlaim further commits the cardinal sin of an elite academic: he assumes that if a president does not have an IQ, then his policy must be stupid as well. This is manifestly untrue and reveals deep misunderstanding of the complexities of the American foreign policy decision-making system. In the end, a president is only as good as his advisers and their staff, and the NSC, DoD, and DoS have traditionally had very good specialists who have been able to make good recommendations. In the end, it is up to the president to choose, of course, but once the situation has been analyzed and alternatives explained, the decision comes more from common sense than any deep knowledge of the world. In fact, traditionally it has been the case that presidents with pretensions about foreign policy knowledge that have made some really bad choices (e.g. Nixon but of course Carter is a counter-example), while others (Reagan) have done quite well (perhaps in spite of themselves).

My biggest complaint is that Shlaim criticizes but does not offer alternatives. It is not enough to say that the Americans were wrong and the Israelis did not understand Sadat. What would the author have them do? What alternative routes were available to them? In the end of the book (132), he offers something approaching wise counsel but when you read it, it boils down to a recommendation to devise policies that take the wishes of locals into account. As if this is helpful given the widely disparate wishes of the various locals.

Take, for example, Shlaim's discussion of the First Gulf War. He whines about "allowing" Saddam to attack Kuwait, then about not negotiating with him, then about not toppling him, and finally about not supporting the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions. Nothing the Americans do is ever right. But Saddam should have known that invading Kuwait would provoke a firm response had he only looked at U.S. policy in the region. No amount of references to supposed "green light" by Glaspie would correct this. And the author is a bit disingenuous in insisting that sanctions would have worked against him, or that the Russians would have mediated a withdrawal. Doubtful on both counts: as we saw later, Saddam was immune to sanctions, and several attempts to get him to withdraw voluntarily failed. Finally, toppling Saddam would have exceeded the mandate under which the coalition was operating, and would have opened the way for a potentially dangerous destabilization of the region (similar to the one we see today). The only way to ensure that Iraq did not fall apart or go Islamic at the time was to keep Saddam... again, in accordance with long-standing American policy in the region. And about the revolts, one question: how would the Arab allies in the coalition react to Kurdish independence or Sha-controlled Iraq? Not very well.

I am not even going to bother discussing the reasons America has supported Israel. According to Shlaim, Israel has mostly been a liability, not an asset. This is also debatable given the democratic nature of the state, its military strength, and its economic capacity...

In the end, the book offers a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been a great explanation of the conflict in the Middle East. But it's just a glimpse. The author fails to consider American interests preferring to chalk up every fact that does not fit his paradigm to American stupidity, short-sightedness, and general failure to appreciate the intricacies of international diplomacy. Now where have I heard all this before?

March 10, 2004