Customer Reviews

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst)

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This is an easy book to read in one sense (159 pages, doubled spaced) but it's hard going in many other senses. It's a scholarly read which tends to assume that the reader is already highly familiar with the Middle East and is comfortable with distinctions such as "Islamic Pan-Arabism" vs "Pan-Islamism". I had to spend a lot of time re-reading paragraphs until I understood them. It would have benefited from a glossary to explain terms such as irrendentism, millenaranism and ummah.

Essentially Roy's argument is that the Middle East is significantly more fractured than commonly thought and that Islam is not a uniting denominator. He believes that most countries in the region now accept the existence of Israel and that peace is more attainable than ever before. He also believes that the West should avoid focusing on Al Qaeda (which sources most of its personnel from outside the Middle East) and instead concentrate on Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood if we are to achieve political stability in the region.

The sections that I found most interesting were when he analyzes US foreign policy (bear in mind that the book was written in 2007) and also when he discusses Iran. (He writes: "the day the United States bombs Iran, all the Arab capitals will protest but more than one will be quietly jubilant".) However I wondered about the support for some of his statements - eg when he says that the Saudis don't have any real quarrels with Israel but feel duty-bound to pronounce anti-Zionist rhetoric to remain credible (also, if this is true, what practical significance does this distinction have?). Or when he says that Iran's Holocaust denial is not an expression of grassroots anti-Semitism (rather, he says, it is negating the justification for the existence of Israel).

I'm not sure what audience this book was intended for (presumably Academics and specialists in International Relations), but it's too scholarly in tone to be the primer on the Middle East than this reviewer was hoping for.

This is a terrific book that summarizing the current political situation in the Middle East. It covers the effects of the war in Iraq on the key issues there, which need to addressed if we want to lessen the instability in that region.

This is a needed critique of the neo-con manifesto for the Middle East, a manifesto that has, apparently failed. This book has its conservative credentials and thus offers a new conservative interpretation of what is happening and has happaned in the Middle East. The author correctly shows that the idea of extending democracy and human rights to the Middle East was originally a leftist one built on universalism and the Carter love of 'human rights'. This theory was opposed by Jeane Kirkpatrick in the famous essay 'dictatorships and double standards' which argued that it was wrong for America to force its allies to be democratic while facng the Soviet threat that undermined democracy from within and used democracy to set up dictatorship. In such a world the American support of local cultures, be they dictatorships, was fine.

The Neo-cons adopted the leftist ideology after the success at expelling the soviets from Afghanistan. At the same time the left came to beleive that culture dominates political reform and that dictatorship was endemic to the middle east. Neither point is entirely correct. In Latin America democracy did penetrate what was considered a culture of Catholic dictatorship. However it is not clear what will become of the Middle East. This book tries to examine the chaos of the Middle East and answer questions about the correct policy on Iran. In that it proves an interesting read and an important contribution.

Seth J. Frantzman

Roy, research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, is best known for his work on political Islam. In The Politics of Chaos, he transitions from scholarly research to policy advocacy and presents a sharp indictment of U.S. foreign policy in general and neoconservatives specifically. "While it is fitting to blame the arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration" for instability in the Middle East, Roy argues, "the ideas that drove the American neoconservatives are still part of the current climate, muddying the traditional left/right divide."

Some of Roy's criticisms are valid: The Bush administration poorly described its adversary after 9-11, and postwar planning left much to be desired. Roy understands traditional neoconservatism better than most and explains the nuances of neoconservative views toward democratization, civil society, and free markets. He assesses the failure of U.S. democratization policy and suggests the problem underlying U.S. policy has been choosing wrong interlocutors. "Negotiation is always possible and, furthermore, it is desirable," he declares. There follows a plea to engage political Islam and groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Roy's arguments are nuanced. He separates terrorists from Islamists (who campaign for a political entity), from fundamentalists (who seek Islamic law), and from "cultural Muslims" who may promote the veil, for example, but also pave the way for the other two. He examines Arab state and Iranian concerns and grievances and argues that the West should "abandon" the global war on terror because it "leads to the wrong perceptions and policies."

However, Roy's polemic falls flat. He is sloppy, has a tendency to make straw-man arguments, and shows little understanding of how U.S. policy develops. Rather than use primary source documents to support his descriptions of U.S. policy and its practitioners' motivations, Roy provides vanity references to his own work. On occasion, he appears to embellish. He relates a November 2001 conversation with the "Deputy Secretary of State for Defense" in which Paul Wolfowitz confided that the "true objective" was "Iraq, of course!," comments both inconsistent with Wolfowitz's style and fact.

To advance his belief that the campaign against Iraq was preordained, he ignores the 2002 National Security Strategy that outlined the concept of preemption, Saddam's bluff with regard to his weapons capability, and the fact that presidents make decisions based on the intelligence they have, which is sometimes flawed. Nor is Roy's dismissal of Saddam's relationship with radical Islam justified. The official study of documents seized from Iraq demonstrates cooperation between Saddam's regime and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's number two.[1]

Roy also gets wrong the discussions surrounding the decision to occupy Iraq. In contrast to his narrative, neoconservatives sought to transfer sovereignty and authority immediately to a new Iraqi council; they opposed occupation of Iraq until the president made the decision.

Exaggeration undercuts his analysis in other ways. He criticizes neoconservative "unconditional" support for Israel, an argument that may play well in Europe. Neoconservatives certainly argue that the United States should not force allies to make concessions to terrorism, but the same neoconservatives also condemned Israel for its earlier military dealings with China. This suggests that Israel is not the primary issue but rather U.S. national security.

Rather than provide a basis upon which U.S. policymakers might better approach the Middle East, as some of the book's endorsers have suggested, what Roy produces is an impassioned plea for surrender, and through sloppy methodology and logical somersaults, he provides yet more evidence of just how poor a resource so many professors are when it comes to formulating foreign and national security policies.

Michael Rubin
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2009