Customer Reviews

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

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I had read Robin Wright's "The Last Great Revolution" about Iran and was excited to buy this book. However, I felt it was a bit too much of a chef's tour. Some of the anecdotes were interesting, even inspiring, but overall I felt the book was a bit too shallow. Wright recalls a few interviews here and there, but we don't get the depth of what we get in her prior book. It's one thing to use interviews and anecdotes in pursuit of a well-argued thesis, but another just to do so to give us a flavor of the Middle East. This makes much of the book a forgettable blur rather than a true learning experience.

Having said that, I thought her chapter on Iran in this book was by far the best. And if you do want a "chef's tour" or sampling of the Middle East, this book does do that well. I hope Wright expands her prior book on Iran and updates it, since she covers Iran very well.

For three decades Robin Wright has worked in the Middle East as the best kind of reporter -- a messenger who really listens to people and conveys their messages straight. In this book she draws on a vast network of people who trust her to convey the real experience of Middle Easterners struggling for a better future. She introduces numerous local heroes from Morocco to Iran, who have risked themselves standing up to despotic rulers. Where the West once supported conservative Muslim rulers against Communists, Wright finds that many of the strongest voices for fairness and liberty are socialists or communists. Where the West has backed Muslim autocrats against Islamists, she finds a new wave of popular movements for religious values have become the strongest challengers to autocracy. Wright honestly conveys the difficulties and courage of these activists. She also conveys their despair over the destructive role of US interventionism in the region. As Syrian dissident Yassin Haj Saleh puts it, "However opposed Syrians are to our own regime, they now distrust the Americans more".


I think this is the kind of direct dialogue with local leaders that we need most from our news professionals.

Robin Wright has been reporting on the Middle East for over 35 years, interviewing a wide-spectrum of the political players of the area. She did get off the "beaten path," finding ascendant political figures on her own, and even going to Iran so that she could walk into "Kurdistan" prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. One of the best portraits is of the charismatic leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Nasrallah, whom she concludes is not only a local leader but also a regional "Che Guevera." Two other enlightening interviews, which are generally conducted over a period of time, are of politically active women in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi, and Latifa Jbabdi, whom the author "brought to life", certainly for this reader. In Egypt, Wright highlighted the work of Ghada Shahbender and the organization she helped found, "We're watching you"; an organization, as its name implies, that monitors and reports on the activities of the powerful, certainly including efforts to monitor electoral fraud. And in Syria she presents portraits on true "profiles in courage," or sheer obduracy, in the persons of Riad al Turk, Yassin Haj Saleh, Samara al Khalil, all of whom spent numerous years in prison, in a country with one of the most repressive governments of the region. I found the background on the Assad assassination attempt, as well as the background and origins of both Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani in Iran particularly illuminating, and certainly relevant today. The focus of her reportage are interviews of the individuals promoting change, barely inside, or completely outside the political establishment; rarely is there an interview with the actual leader of the country, who might articulate their own interests in change.

In terms of books by reporters, Wright largely avoids the `cut and paste' style, with its inevitable redundancies, though her description of Qatar in the early part of the book, twice, would be the exception. She also tends towards annoying "People magazine" style descriptions of people, such as "...wearing a deep-red polo shirt."

Structurally though, I believe the book is profoundly flawed. The book is subtitled "The Future of the Middle East," yet two of the most essential countries of the area are omitted, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, as Wright acknowledges in her introduction, and for reasons that do not seem to be very convincing. Furthermore, relying on the deficiencies in geographic knowledge of many Americans, she places Morocco in "the Middle East."

Wright is very much an "establishment" reporter, as evidenced by her comment on page 409: "In October 2006, I made my fourth postwar trip to Iraq with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice." The question that others, particularly more independent-minded reporters have raised and this book helps answer is: To be invited on the plane, what sort of self-censorship must be practiced, particularly during the days of the Bush administration? In terms of other countries, be it Syria or Morocco, Wright repeatedly covers the fact that political dissidents are tortured in prison, and are all too often held without charge. A point she rightly makes. But Wright manages an entire chapter on "Iraq and the United States" without ever mentioning Abu Ghraib. Likewise, Guantanamo is nowhere in the Index, yet both places have had a profound impact on America's relationship with this region. Another litmus test of self-censorship is the CIA's coup of 1953 in Iran which overthrew their democratically elected government - not because, in any way the country was a threat to the United States; rather it was all about denying the Iranian people a greater benefit from their oil resources. Stephen Kinzer's book, "All the Shah's Men" covers this event well. Wright does mention the coup twice, a paragraph each in two different chapters. In one of those paragraphs she relates Iranian upset to the "radicalism of their youth." This coup is not an end all, but for an understanding of the American-Iranian relationship, as well as the Iranian world outlook, the coup merits more than passing mention, it is the starting point - the comparison with a reverse situation, how Americans would feel if Iran had overthrown Dwight Eisenhower, and installed their own "man" would greatly facilitate American understanding. Although she does not cover Israel, she does have a chapter on the Palestinians, and conforms to the establishment press "style book" that always starts with the Palestinians doing something outrageous, and then the Israelis respond. Only once did she reverse this, inferring that the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 might have been "payback" for the assassination of the predecessor of Nasrallah as head of Hezbollah. She mentions "targeted assassinations" on several occasions, but never explains why it is in quotes, and, of course, never ties it to terrorism.

The most startling error in the book is in the last chapter, the one on Iraq and the United States, where on page 410, she says: "The most ambitious and costly U.S. intervention since the end of World War II felt like it was in free fall." An error at so many different levels, because you don't have to worry about the "lessons" of Vietnam, the ones the first George Bush felt he had overcome in the war of 1991, if you completely "airbrush" Vietnam out of history. The Iraq, Afghanistan, and interventions in other Middle East countries may yet exceed the 58,000 plus dead on the wall in Washington, DC, who died over a 16 year period, and at a cost in economic terms, on an inflation adjusted basis, that still exceeds current war expenditures in the Islamic world, not to mention the social turmoil in the United States--but we are still not there yet. It should be no surprise that Vietnam is not in the index, and certainly not "lesson learned there."

In one of the classic works on Vietnam, Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," the author said of Alden Pyle, the CIA operative who was modeled on Kermit Roosevelt, the real life CIA operative who was responsible for the 1953 Iranian coup: "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance." Greene saw the links between American mistakes in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia. Shouldn't we all?

In her prologue Wright explains that the title to her book was derived from Musafa Kemal Ataturk, the "modernizer" of Turkey, who said: "Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence our policy. Away with dreams and shadows!" Good advice for the United States also, and how we perceive both our interests and the Middle East. Wright used an epigraph from Riad Al Turk, the Syrian dissident who said that: "Democracy cannot be brought on the back of a tank." Indeed, by setting a better example, we could recover the Shahbenders who states, as quoted by Wright at the very end, that: "Most Egyptians now raise their eyebrows and speak quite sarcastically about American democracy." Away with our own dreams and shadows.

Nice overview of the Middle East with boots on the ground, heard on the street analysis. Would have liked at least a page on Saudi Arabia to provide contrast. Inevitable Bush bash at the end.

A clearly-written account of the current political and social roadmap in the Middle East. This book contains a lot of information and is worth reading more than once in order for everything to sink in. All Americans, especially Republicans, are recommended to read the final chapter - "Iraq and the United States", which has a long list of shocking stats associated with the war in Iraq.

This book is written from a rare POV, a female journalist who has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East in both Arab and non-Arab countries. This book is her examination of the historical trajectories of various countries, who the key players are in each country, and how past, present, and future are interconnected. She does a good job of following the lives of key individuals, both men and women, who have played important parts in their nations' histories. These include religious leaders, political leaders, and those outside of the governing elites. The author also provides balance by not spending too much text on individuals like Saddam Hussein, Qadhafi, and Ayatollah Khomeini who already have dozens of books written about them.

My primary critique of the book is its minimal emphasis on the roles of several key actors in the Middle East. These neglected forces include oil companies, both national and multinational, foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA, MI6, KGB, and Mossad, and closely related to the former two, weapons suppliers. For example, many former Middle East leaders have been employed by The Carlyle Group, an enterprise whose ranks include members of both the Bin Laden and Bush families. A lot of torture, spying and manifestations of the police state in the Middle East were taught by the CIA; a fact unmentioned in this book, even though the author devotes a lot of text recounting the imprisonment and torture of many Middle East leaders and icons.

Overall, this is an engaging book to read. The author keeps editorial comments to a minimun, and balances her text with stories of locals, summaries of pivotal events, and her own experiences.

I found this to be a hopeful book. Robin Wright has spent years in the area and has contacts with the power structure. That plus her interviews with "ordinary" people gave her book validity. The middle east world has been expanded with access to the web and television. The seeds for change are there if we just get out of their way and give them time to develop.

Finally we have a thoughtful work on the Arab & Persian middle east which is country structured and serious in its depth. Robin Wright offers us a cogent and intense look at each nation, its history, its people, its politics, and whether any real hope is evident for a better future. Now we in the west can grasp why Hamas & Hezbollah have come to be. We know who are their parents and who are their big brothers. We also begin to understand why the people might support such groups which we deem "terrorists" but who appear to those living there to be bearers of the only hope they know. Grab this book and learn.

Robin Wright, the author of Dreams and Shadows, has a uniquely engaging writing style. She tells the story of the countries she is analyzing through particular individuals who represent important tides or movements within those countries. By reason of the transitions that these seven countries (Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Morocco, and Iraq) have been experiencing, these individuals tend to be men and women of heroic courage. Many of them have spent long years imprisoned by the powers that be.

With respect to almost every one of these countries, American foreign policy stands indicted. In almost eery case, we have tended to judge them by our own supposedly superior standards rather than by their own, and partly by reason of our relationship with Israel, we are not regarded by any of them as an honest broker, but rather as a continuation of colonialist empire-building in our own interest, and in that of Israel. Shame on us!

What we see in each of these countries is the rapid break down of an old order and the harrowing experiences of those who are in the forefront of attempting to found a new, less autocratic order.

Complicating and framing this transition is the enormous power of Islam in all of its many variants.

Robin Wright is a brilliant story-teller, and she tells a story that is immensely engaging.

The book arrived at my house very quickly and was in great condition when i recieved it. It is an excellent read!