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A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East

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I've spent my adult life in the foreign affairs community and much of it in the middle-east, so have been directly involved in the events so eloquently presented in Mr. Freedman's excellent historical summary. I would divide the material presented in Choice of Enemies into two categories: One, the obvious historical presentation of facts and events that have so deeply effected not only the middle-east but the U.S. as well. Two, the more subtle but no-less profound exposure of ineptitude on the part of various U.S. presidents and their administrations (and other foreign leaders as well). It's the latter that I'd like to comment on.

Every 4-8 years we have elections in the United States to select a President, and every 4-8 years a new administration assumes power with its own agenda. The president is fully aware of the very limited time he/she has in office and is also acutely aware of how history treats success/failure. I find it intriguing that our nation's foreign policy and its immediate impact on the world and human lives can be so intertwined with the chief executives personality quirks and his administration's intellect (or lack thereof). I remember a line from All the Presidents Men when Deep Throat responds to Woodward's (Redford)rhetorical comment, "How can these guys do this" with the comment, "These guys (Nixon and company) aren't really all that bright." Example, a Baptist peanut farmer with near-fundamentalist views of right and wrong in power in 1979 during the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis. Completely incapable of viewing nuance in international relations or regional affairs, he often bases his initiatives on his own evaluations of other world leaders and his personal relationships with them. Fast forward to Bush the younger; a rehabilitated alcoholic and life-long slacker who assumes power at the outset of a shift in the global security paradigm with a dysfunctional foreign policy team at odds with one another from the outset. Colin Powell and the State Department were the only elements of government openly against the initiation of the war in Iraq, THE foreign policy establishment in the government yelling danger, danger. Completely ignoring the obvious historical issues, cultural elements in-country, and even the most basic elements of civil control...Iraq is invaded, the governing infrastructure is cast out in its entirety (we didn't even do that in Nazi Germany), and the Army and police are all fired. In sum, not only is the country defeated militarily, we have also removed its entire management and security force and put over a million working-aged men (most of whom are armed) into the streets with no means of economic support. The ignorance, no ...the stupidity of these actions reveal a critical flaw in our decision making process, controls on the use of force, and development and exercise of our foreign policy. In this case, by a group of well-placed amateurs led by an incompetent and disinterested president. The economic costs, the human losses on all sides, and the damage these actions have caused to the United States on a global scale are difficult to calculate and border on the criminal. On the other hand, Bush the elder was a superb professional who dealt with the region and its intrigue as a realist, always consulting and careful to draw in allies before acting and establishing clear goals/objectives before initiating action. And now - we have a new president - with yet another personal vision of the world and America's place in it, and it starts with an announcement to the world (and Taliban) that we'll be out of Afghanistan in 2011. Brilliant.

I found the book hard to put down as I raced through thirty years of American history in the middle-east, but repeatedly found myself questioning my country's wisdom and leadership as the steward of this massive military power we control but have so much difficulty in using wisely and effectively. Vietnam wasn't all that long ago, but we simply refuse to accept the historical lessons that have so often been taught and at such a high price. We continue to believe our vision is the only vision, and insist on imposing our system and values on a part of the world that simply doesn't play by those rules nor do they want to. Where's a realist when you need one!

This book is a history of how the U.S. formulated and executed Middle Eastern Policy over a thirty year period from the Presidency of Jimmy Carter (1978-1982) through that of George W Bush (2000-2008). It also provides a useful, but concise summary of U.S - Middle East relations from the end of WWII to 1978. Essentially it provides an analysis not only of each presidential administration's Middle East Policy, but provides a description of how the policy formation process of each administration actually worked. Not surprisingly it was different for each president.

As the book makes clear, the U.S. has held two remarkably consistent strategic goals for this entire period: the security of the State of Israel; and the security of Middle Eastern oil production. Yet in a volatile region like the Middle East events well beyond U.S. control often erupt to disrupt the most carefully planned policy implementations. Freedman recounts for example how President Carter's tenure was defined by the Iranian Revolution and its subsequent hostage crises, even though Carter really wanted to be remembered for establishing peaceful and enduring relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians. Often the success or failure of U.S. policy in the region was a function of being able to cope with unexpected events or unintended consequences that suddenly threatened one or both of the strategic goals. Reading this book one is struck by how dicey even the best formulated policies are for this region.

Of course Freedman devotes a good deal of attention to the current administration and its involvement in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) and Iraq/Iran. He attempts to trace the thought processes that gradually coalesced into what was known as Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. In doing so he identifies the emergence of the doctrine of preventive war and concept of a Global War on Terror. He then tries to provide a balanced summary of U.S. operations in Iraq up to the current partially successful surge that has brought a measure of stability to that unhappy country.

In the end he suggests that the U.S. might be well advised to adopt a Middle East Policy similar to that suggested by Ken Pollock in his latest book, "A Path Out of the Desert", which the book reviewer of the UK Magazine, "The Economist" suggested should be read together with the Freedman book. Both by most standards are pretty good books.

thoughtfull marvelously readable and timely written withut the angst and i saw it all tone of most of the current crop of personal reflections that masquarade as learned analyses provides important backgroumd context and history that helps to make some sense of the current state of affairs recommended to anyone who really wants to learn more

Here is the Economist's Review of A Choice of Enemies. Although it spends more space on Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert, it also does treat Freedman's book.


The Economist
Books and Arts
America and the Middle East
How they got in, how to get out
Jul 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Foresight and hindsight in the world's bad places
A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East
By Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House; 539 pages; $30

A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
By Lawrence Freedman
PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $29.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £20

HOW did America get into its current mess in the Middle East? And how can it get out again? Kenneth Pollack's book is all about the second question but he starts by making a confession relevant to the first. He was a champion of the invasion of Iraq. In 2002, in an influential book entitled "The Threatening Storm", he argued the strategic and moral case for removing Saddam Hussein. Mr Pollack admits now that the intervention a year later was a fiasco, and that after such a disaster the inclination of most Americans is to turn away from the region completely and focus on problems at home. But that is not his view. His latest book is a powerful argument for continued, and perhaps even greater, American involvement in the Middle East.

As befits a former CIA analyst and member of the National Security Council, Mr Pollack builds his case on a hard-headed examination of America's interests in the region. Of these, the most important is oil. If a big percentage of it were suddenly to be removed from the market, the shock of higher prices could on some estimates spark a global recession akin to the Great Depression. American policy, he concludes, should therefore be designed principally to prevent "catastrophic oil disruptions". This means guarding against possibilities such as a revolution in Saudi Arabia or a massive terrorist attack on the oil-supply network.

You might expect a book that starts this way to dwell mainly on how America can maintain military forces in the region. Mr Pollack, however, wants nothing less than "an integrated grand strategy" to secure American interests for the long run. Such a strategy, he admits, may take "many decades", just as it took nearly half a century for America to help Europe and East Asia repair themselves after the second world war. For this grand strategy to work, he says, America will first have to harmonise its separate policies towards Iraq, Iran and Israel. It must also transform the region's politics and economics. That is to say--let no one accuse the chastened Mr Pollack of imperial hubris--America must help along the efforts of the locals, since outsiders "cannot possibly know how to change the society of another people".

But do the people of the Middle East want what America wants for them? Given the growth of political Islam, and the fact that Mr Pollack deems many Arab countries to be on the point of revolution, perhaps not. Nonetheless, a policy of continuing to prop up repressive regimes is like "playing Russian roulette" with foreign policy, as America discovered when the shah's fall turned Iran from staunch friend to implacable foe. Far better, he says, to encourage the region's governments to address popular grievances by embracing political freedom and social equality.

This will not be easy, not least because of the hated Bush administration's insincere or at least incompetent pursuit of this very policy. But Arabs tell pollsters that they want both democracy and Islam, and Mr Pollack reckons these two are compatible. Quoting an Egyptian activist who says that what her countrymen need is a job and a voice, he thinks America must find its path out of the desert by helping all Arabs get both.

A simple summary of Mr Pollack's main ideas does scant justice to this thoughtful and informative book. None of its prescriptions is especially novel. The patient promotion of reform, careful containment of the spillover from Iraq, a policy of carrots and sticks (but no military pre-emption) for Iran, building the sinews of a Palestinian state: to all except isolationists and the few surviving neocons, this has become a fairly conventional prospectus for America's post-Iraq policy in the Middle East. But Mr Pollack binds the strands together deftly and imparts a good deal of learning and wisdom along the way.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is less interested in how America should proceed after Iraq and more in working out how it tied itself in such knots in the first place. As an historian, he is more tolerant than Mr Pollack of George Bush, noting that after September 11th this president faced a challenge more complex in some ways than the one Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with after Pearl Harbour in 1941. Whereas Roosevelt knew who the enemy was and what America would have to do, Mr Bush had to choose and name an enemy in a new sort of war without obvious rules, aims or front-lines. He did so, moreover, in a region where no power had exercised a consistently sure touch, and where America had long been torn between an underlying dissatisfaction with the state of affairs and the traditional instinct of a great power to protect the status quo from aggressive states or radical movements.

It is instructive to read these books together. Sir Lawrence's aim is not to lay out a policy. He has no grand unifying theory of the Middle East. His aim is only to render the "most credible" account possible of momentous events such as the fall of the shah, the three wars in the Persian Gulf, invasion and jihad in Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter's half-success at peacemaking at Camp David in 1978 and Bill Clinton's failure there two decades later. All these and more formed the treacherous backdrop of American interests and alliances against which Mr Bush had to formulate his response to the attacks on the twin towers. Sir Lawrence's subtle narrative is a marvel of concision, even over more than 500 pages. By the end it cannot but make the reader wonder how realistic it is to advocate, as Mr Pollack does, an "integrated grand strategy" capable of being sustained for decades in such a violent and unpredictable part of the world.

To that Mr Pollack has a simple answer, in the form of a question. What is the alternative? Thanks to its energy needs, America is locked into the region for the foreseeable future, even though the future is so hard to foresee in the unhappy Middle East. Since there are no quick fixes, it had better reconcile itself to the long slog. And although unexpected events will continue to knock it off course, it is more likely to succeed if it can cling to at least some general sense of where it is trying to go.

Very good analysis on how/why American Confronts the M.E issues of the last 5 Presidents, give you a whole pictures of how they are related and dragged on to present time...

The black and white battle between good and evil is a common element of fantasy. But that's all it is - fantasy. "A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East" is an examination of America's involvement in the growing conflicts with the middle east, conflicts which are almost as far from black and white as something can possibly be. Many of America's alleged 'enemies' are not in fact working together, and are just as antagonistic towards each other as they are America. An intriguing look at America, its enemies, and their countless interrelations with one another, "A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East" is a top pick for community library current events collections.