Customer Reviews

The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (The Contemporary Middle East)

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This book is not an easy read. The first chapter and a half are wasted in a diatribe about the proper approach to analysis of international relations, no doubt important for the academic community but of little interest for the lay reader. The book is dense and the author's writing style is disfigured by an excess of comma-delineated clauses I haven't seen since John Norman's 'Gor' fantasies of the early 70's: some sentences take four or five readings to decipher.

Once past these obstacles, the reader will benefit from the insight of someone who obviously has both extensive personal experience in the region and broad knowledge of the language, culture, and history of the Middle East, without any of the idealogical crap that passes for discourse in the US popular press. Prof. Halliday's basic points are: 1] the Middle East as we see it was mostly the product of the years 1918-1924 or so, when the political geography of the region was formed from the remnants of the Ottoman empire. Claims of ancient provenance for many disputes and attitudes are in the author's wonderful term 'ahistorical', that is, based on a highly selective view of the past hardly reflecting any reality. 2] the basic dynamic of the Middle East is the actions of the governments of states, and their opponents, competing for political power (and ruining the economies of the region in the process).

The reader who struggles through this book will be rewarded with the basis for a proper understanding of the region, devoid of both uber-terrorist paranoia and illusions about the role of the West in the region.