12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mess indeed - and a good job of explaining it, September 24, 2007
This review is from: The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq (Paperback)
George Bush and his neo-con delusionaries set out to remake the Middle East and, by golly, it was going to be easy with predictions of a cakewalk and people littering the streets with rose petals to honor the conquerors of the new American Empire.
They have remade the Middle East, but the rose petals are missing -- along with thousands of young American lives and countless Iraqi civilians who continue to die in the horror of a civil war unleased by a rash, immature president who has always managed to escape any consequences for his behavior. The son who described himself as the"family black sheep to Queen Elizabeth during his father's administration - has fully lived up to it.
But the GOP was going to install the grownups. Instead we've got a wrecked economy that is heavily war dependent, deficit spending greater than WWII, fat defense contractors ladled with corruption and a nation that is more unhappy than ever with where it is going.
But it is the Iraq war that overshadows everything. It was the means for bullied election winning, based on fear. Support the Troops came to mean Support My War and to hell with the troops, who continue to pay the price for idiocy at the top. Iraqis thought for some time before this book was published that they were better off under the brutal rule of Saddam than the brutal mess made by a group of incompetent ideologues, the best and brightest conservatives the GOP could find.
Iraqis who can afford it and many of those who can't are fleeing Iraq for safer havens. There is still the irrational calls for victory in a war that lost its purpose before it started. No WMDS or any of the other fictional intelligence fed us to allow Bush Junior to pretend he had grown up to be a man. Even now, he runs away from what he has inflicted on us.
To be sure, Mr. Dyer, is to some degree rendering a polemic verdict on the Mess of Potamia, but it is an informed one by someone who has written extensively on war and of the Middle East.
What we're failing to understand is what Dyer is talking about. This is not simply a losing war, But a war that is consuming the innards of the World's only Superpower, if indeed, that appellation still applies. We are far more ordinary to the world as a whole, much more vulnerable than ever. Our weaknesses are exposed. And if we could still defeat any conventional military, that is not our choice in a war where we do not even know the enemy. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war and even now, the faction that claims the name is more of a local insurgency than a bin Laden affiliation. It plays a relatively minor role despite yet more Bushian attempts to rationalize his foolish war that had only a beginning and no end in sight. The Democrats have lost their spines and cannot find it in themselves to stop the disaster from getting worse. In the meanwhile, what is left of the GOP subverts free speech, espouses foreign and domestic surveillance of American citizens without cause and continues tp push the boundaries of oppression at home and abroad. If Big Government is such a danger, Big Brother GOP government is unAmerican.
The result in the Middle East is already chaos. We look for scapegoats, e.g. Iran. But we rebuffed signs of progress in Iran in Bush's early bully phase and now in the late bully phase, we blame them for things they may or may not be doing in a war that should never have happened. Israel is more at risk than ever, which should be a warning to those supporters of that nation who cowered before the right wing's attempt to dominate our Israeli policy. We have dismayed our other friends and allies as well. We have diminished the shared interest of nations in the MIddle East and not only is democracy less vital than ever in the Middle East, we have undermined those that do exist and done serious damage at home.
Go back to 2002 nd 2003 and you'll find a lot of today's supposed critics of the Iraq War give loud hoorays for a war they thought was over -- because they weren't looking. Now they find that they were critics all along, except no one can find their criticism unless it's quickly invented.
It was unpopular after 2001 to say that the military was not the answer to terrorist attacks on the U.S., but it was true then and now. There may be instances where military force is useful, but fewer and rarer than anyone thinks. We accept tens of thousands of traffic deaths each year, smoking related deaths in the hundreds of thousands, but we've slobbered and bowed to give away our basic American rights to a president who does not know how to govern, only to rule by fiat.
Perhaps the people who have so blindly supported this mess, its endless abuses and all of its consequences deserve the reverse of the medal, but it would be better if the nation did not endure that as well.
Dyer offers a hard look at some of the consequences of the Bush Presidential disaster, enabled by a corrupt congress of simpering GOP toadies and too many simpering Democrats. We need to understand that much of this damage to foreign policy cannot be reversed. We need to start anew, rebuilding the links and common interests. Others are reaching out to us as the President in denial finally nears the end of his dictate -- and with good luck, people of good will can once again work with the world. We have our interests and they have theirs and we need to preserve the real common ground.
As Dyer suggests, the mess the Bush people made won't just disappear and its consequences will live on. We are almost certainly going to find ourselves having to deal in a more fundamental way with energy issues than more of the same old Texas swagger by people who couldn't find oil with other people's money.
Sadly, we are simply delaying the day of reckoning because Bush will not allow otherwise -- and Congress lacks the backbone. But the crisis is there. It isn't going away and in the end, we won't be able to ignore it as we have the Bush War.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sometimes Spotty, Sometimes Spot On, May 31, 2009
This review is from: The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq (Paperback)
I've heard Gwynn Dyer speak and have to say that I enjoy the slow native Newfoundland drawl of his voice that I hear in his writing. To some extent I find his background insights invaluable especially when he looks at the Arab World and identifies different Sunni and Shiah factions. He correctly sees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the "Great Game of Nations" where the United State's main goal is the containment of Russia and China and the Arab/Israeli conflict is just a footnote when larger goals are afoot. I agree completely with his take on the "War on Terror" as being completely misguided and mismanaged and his assessment that the U.S. (up to the time of publication) had avoided falling into Bin Ladin's trap by essentially fighting the Afghan war by using wads of cash to bribe the appropriate war lords rather than putting troops on the ground. He then correctly (IMHO) castigates the Americans for not employing the same strategy in Iraq though if asked I think he ought to approve of some of the more recent changes under General Petraeus.
I have less confidence in Dyer's ability to predict however. For example he points out that in order to develop nuclear weapons Iran would need to develop massive arrays of centrifuges. . Since publication Iran has done that, constructed and a missile system capable to delivery (but may lack accurate targeting - but you can be off with a nuclear warhead and still score a hit) as well as purchase a small fleet of submarines and the latest anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems from Russia. He is correct in pointing out that it is not only the Israelis who worry about Iraq - if one looks at a map one can see that the Saudi Royal Family and the Sunni majority are largely in the West of the Kingdom, and the Shiites are in the East, just across a narrow Persian/Arabian Gulf and that they are sitting on the known oil fields. He also sees the influence of Tehran on the Shiites of Iraq as only slightly problematic - Iran is not likely to invade but may chose to disrupt with support for a Shiah based Islamic revolution.
The assessment of the Kurdish position between Turkey, Syria and Iraq is both fair and encouraging as the coverage of Syrian imperialism in Lebanon and the Alawite minority's hold on power which does have an element of American involvement I found to be enlightening.
What I find disappointing is his chapter "Israel's Dilemma" which he bases on Arab misrepresentations of Zionists quotes. Thus Herzl's singular reference in his 1895 diary to "transference" is made to appear as it it applied to Palestinians, yet Herzl was writing about a potential Jewish homeland in South America at the time, it was purely a diary speculation never meant for publication and he never mentions it again - truly minor material made out to be more significant that it was. Dayan's quote from 1969 omits the phrase "we bought the land" and the context of his delivery which was to a group of students in defense of, not in opposition to the idea of Jews and Arabs living together. Similarly the "land without a people for a people without a land" meme is NOT a Jewish Zionist quote but came from Christian theologians of the previous century. Dyer swallows these and other statements whole, as he does the notion that Arafat "moved the world towards a two state solution" - this appears to be more an American solution and Arafat never viewed it as anything other than an staging process. Nor does his usual insight into asymmetrical warfare serve when he claims that Israel's purported nuclear arsenal make it immune from attack.
I also agree with Trigg's review (above) regarding Dyer's misunderstanding of statistics, but I give it less weight. Dyer is a political journalist and people with his background are notoriously bad with figures.
I give this book a mixed recommendation.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clarity regarding the Middle East (with some critical concerns), July 30, 2008
This review is from: The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq (Paperback)
I have admired and read Dyer in the past and I remain a fan of his insights into an increasingly foggy world. This book, which is in reality a 296 page essay covering the predominant aspects of the contemporary Middle East, blows a clear wind over a media landscape bligted by American conservatives who collectively have the vision of a bat flying in broad daylight.
Dyer's clarity of vision (as opposed to the neocon press) brings the many disparate pieces of this hugely important yet hugely misunderstood area of the world into a clarity that is too often lacking in Washington much less the newsrooms of the American media centres. This vision sees through the disinformation spread by the major players: American neoconservatives and their bedmates, the Protestant fundamentalists, Iran and its trumped up threat, Israel with its Washington puppet and finally Iraq with her three major disfunctional sections, Shia, Sunni and Kurds.
Perhaps the most explosive of these major sections of his book is chapter eight, "Israel's Delemma" because lifting the lid on Israel and the Israli influence that seems to have spread throughout the American political system could prove extraordinarily adversely negative to Israli efforts to maintain a positive impression of all things Israeli.
There are two other primary problems that I have with Dyer's book: I do not believe that al-Qaeda exists as an international organisation as does Dyer and I do not, therefore, believe that such a non-existent organisation planned and carried out the 9-11 attacks. I know that this statement constitutes a very long bow but I have read enough, from both sides of politics, to come to this conclusion. That begs the question, therefore, why does a guy so intelligent and aware of current world events believe otherwise and my conclusion is simply that he is afraid to take the cork out of the bottle. 9-11, since it happened, has become the new worldwide sacred cow; something not to be questioned by legitimate writers becaus to commit the mortal sin (Catholic mythology here) of questioning the "truth" of 9-11 and that is to commit career suicide. I think Dyer is too smart or too rich to do that.
This book is insightful, rich and I would recommend it to any reader.
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