This is an excellent review of US relations in the Middle East. While I thought Tyler was generally even handed, I felt he was more sympathetic to the Palestinians regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. At one point, as Arafat was ready to torpedo a peace resolution on the most trivial basis, Tyler says, "that was Arafat being Arafat." Not the most insightful or well reasoned explanation of Arafat or his motives. I also think Tyler's critique of Carter was far too forgiving, especially given Carter's subsequent actions and statements regarding foreign policy the last few years. Having said all that, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the complexities of the Middle East.

"A World of Trouble" is a history of the US involvement in the Middle East, which offers an accessible and insightful, if overlong and somewhat uneven, introduction to the story of the turbulent area in our times.

Given that the book covers some fifty years - from the mid 1950s until the second administration of George W. Bush, it resists easy summery; There's simply too much going on, from the complicated relationship of Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran, to the minuet of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations. The book also skips forward and backwards, touching some issues only very briefly (the George W. Bush presidency and the transformations it brought are treated particularly lightly).

One theme is the general incompetence of US Presidents. Only Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush come out of the book with their reputation more or less intact; Jimmy Carter wins praise for his assuring of the Egyptian-Israeli peace, but is severely criticized for his ineffective policy vis a vis Iran. Reagan, Bush Jr., and Clinton receive little but scorn, although Tyler acknowledges that Clinton had great empathy to both sides.

Richard Nixon is the most interesting case. Tyler asserts that Nixon understood the Middle East well enough, but that he let his policies be shaped by Henry Kissinger, who, rather than a cold hearted Realist, is portrayed here as a Sentimental, instinctive pro-Israeli player. I'm not familiar enough too judge, but other accounts of Kissinger's involvement in the Middle East present him in a much more positive light - see particularly Aaron David Miller's The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.

One theme that runs through the book is that US Presidents are usually effective when they pressure Israel to behave itself, and ineffective when they give in to its militaristic impulses. Thus Eisenhower forced Israel to evacuate the territory it gained in the Suez Crisis (what Israeli know as the Sinai War of 1956), and Carter leaned hard on Prime Minister Menahem Begin leading to the signing of the Israeli Egyptian Peace. LBJ, on the other hand, encouraged Israeli aggression by avoiding pressuring Israel to return the territories it has gained during the Six Days War.

I'm not sure Tyler is right; His account seems to underestimate the extent to which US cooperation with Israel led to the promotion of American interests in the Middle East. Standard accounts of the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations hold that Egyptian President Sadat pursued them as a strategic mean of getting close to the United States. According to Michael B. Oren's brilliant Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the Six Days War broke out because Israel did not receive enough US assurances.

The most problematic aspects of Tyler's narrative come when he discusses the Clinton years, in which the US pursued Israeli-Arab peace aggressively. In a sense, this is the most redundant part of the book - there has been many good books published covering the same ground, often written by participants in the drama or people who have had better access to the principles. I have to confess that in discussing the Peace process, I found Tyler's mostly even handed approach to the conflicts replaced by one more skewed towards the Palestinian narrative.

Thus Tyler shows great sympathy to the Palestinian perspective that little changed after the Oslo accords. That was, to an extent, correct: Most of the Palestinian territory was still ruled by Israel. But from the Israeli perspective, the concessions it has made, while minor, actually made things worse - it led to far worse violence against Israel than ever before. While Tyler acknowledges that Arafat smuggled weapons to the Palestinian territories - allegedly for Palestinian self defense - he ignores the widely held view that Arafat did not reject terrorism, but applied it opportunistically, leashing and unleashing Hamas terrorism as it suited his purposes.

Perhaps the worse offense is Tyler unequivocal statement that the second (Al Aqsa) Intifada was not initiated by the Palestinian leadership. Tyler does note cite any sources in reference to this statement, which to the best of my knowledge is not true. US negotiator Dennis Ross, at least, was agnostic about the possibility (see The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace), and many Israelis and pro-Israeli commentators present considerable (although not necessarily conclusive) evidence to the contrary (See Alan Dershowitz' The Case for Israel).

I think Tyler is overly critical of Clinton's role in the Mid East process and not critical enough of the role played by Israeli Premier Ehud Barak and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat. In Barak, Clinton found an Israeli leader willing to go far beyond what any other Israeli leader, including Rabin (whom Tyler lionizes, downplaying the fact that Rabin's outlook was both inconsistent and relatively conservative). It would have required inhuman caution to put the break on Barak's admittedly wild schemes. Barak wanted to press for a final agreement with both the Palestinians and the Syrians - how could Clinton say no? It was Barak who placed Arafat before a do or die decision, and the responsibility of both of them that the deal did not come through.

Readers who expect significant insight into the actions of the second Bush would be wildly disappointed; Tyler breezes through his presidency, in a narrative that is critical but not particularly insightful.

Patrick Tyler's book is a good introduction to Middle Eastern politics and America's role in them. Tyler usually manages to combine narrative with (sometimes questionable) analysis in an attractive way. The earlier chapters are particularly good, and the chapter about the Suez crisis stands out in its excellence. Tyler's prose is very readable, although his habit of jumping in the middle of the story and than going back to explain gets old after awhile. All in all, I recommend "A World of Troubles" as one of the better books on the Mid East out there.

Patrick Tyler's approach is dispassionate and concise, and it's clear he has done his homework. Americans who have any interest in the Middle East must read this book or their understanding of their own leaders will be incomplete.

The only president who comes out looking OK is Eisenhower. The rest of them are a sad lot and a couple of them were outright disasters, and Tyler doesn't care how politically popular they are or how much trouble he is likely to get in from their apologists. His sole purpose in this book is to offer the reader a clear-eyed, non-partisan view of America's top officeholder. I recommend this book to the smartest people I know.

baltimoresun.com
'A World of Trouble' examines U.S. diplomatic history in Middle East
Tyler's 'A World of Trouble' is a history of America's attempts to attain peace in the region

By Tim Rutten

The Los Angeles Times

February 8, 2009
:

A World of Trouble
By Patrick Tyler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux / 640 pages / $30

Patrick Tyler is a veteran foreign and Washington correspondent who more recently has applied his formidable reporting skills and narrative gifts to diplomatic history. His latest effort, A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East - From the Cold War to the War on Terror, couldn't be more timely.

President Barack Obama has already appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who was instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, as his special Middle East representative and given a White House interview to an Arab-language television network. Clearly, the new chief executive plans to add the Middle East to his daunting, ambitious agenda, particularly the fulcrum question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

Tyler's strikingly readable new history argues that Obama inherits a decidedly mixed, though mainly unhappy, diplomatic legacy. The author's impressive research combines a careful combing of archival sources and memoirs in multiple languages, as well as wide-ranging original research. In Tyler's view, it adds up to a history of miscalculation, inattention, stuttering and almost inadvertent progress undone by contradictory aims, exhaustion and distraction. His choice of opening anecdote - and this is a writer with a novelist's eye - leaves no doubt that Tyler intends this book to be urgently instructive.

His prologue begins: "Night had long since fallen over central Saudi Arabia in early 2004 when George Tenet came trudging out of his bedroom in Prince Bandar bin Sultan's palace and asked for scotch whiskey." Tenet, then CIA director, had just gotten off one of his secure phones after learning from aides that the White House essentially planned to blame him and the agency for the faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Unable to sleep, though he'd taken a pill, Tenet emerged from his room clad only in boxer shorts and T-shirt, surprising Bandar and an aide, who were watching television.

After downing most of a bottle of Scotch, Tyler writes, and raging against "the Jews" (read, neoconservatives) in the Bush administration, Tenet decided to go for a swim in his underwear while continuing to ramble angrily, smoke a cigar and drink more liquor. Bandar and his aide, worried the CIA director would drown under the influence of medication and alcohol, hovered nearby at a poolside bar.

It's a compelling and - for the reader, at least - sobering story, replete with direct quotations. Characteristically, Tyler balances the portrait of an indiscreet and vulgarly self-pitying CIA chief with a fascinating account of Tenet's extremely successful efforts to ramp up the agency's Mideast presence in the wake of Sept. 11.

Tyler, by the way, is scrupulous about his sourcing and this anecdote comes with a footnote reporting, "The scene at Prince Bandar's Palace is taken from the accounts of three people who witnessed it, including the CIA Near East division chief ... who was not drinking." The extended note goes on to say that both Tenet and the CIA general counsel, who also was present, deny the director made the remarks attributed to him.

Highlighting anecdotes like this simply suggests A World of Trouble'sreadability is not meant to distract from the serious, thorough nature of the synoptic history Tyler has compiled. It's an account studded with interesting appraisals.

For example: "The Suez crisis was [President Dwight] Eisenhower's finest hour as president in the sense that every public step he took anchored America firmly within the principles of the United Nations Charter. He maneuvered cautiously and shrewdly, at times brutally."

President Lyndon B. Johnson's role in the run-up to the 1967 Israeli-Arab war is recounted in careful detail and emerges as worse than a hash. Tyler faults him not simply for misunderstanding the situation on the ground but for what the author assesses as a failure to force the Israelis to withdraw from the territories they captured.

Similarly, Tyler is hard on President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for failing to take up a heretofore undisclosed proposal by Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to force a territorial compromise between Israel and its neighbors.

Tyler is inclined to attribute rather too much blame for America's Middle East failures to what he regards as Israeli recalcitrance and excessive Washington influence by pro-Israel Americans. Putting aside the merits of any particular situation, it's simply a fact that we know more about Israel and its internal political struggles because it is an open society, where news and memoirs are published freely and current and former officials make themselves available for interviews. We have no similar access to the inner workings of Israel's antagonists. Moreover, it's easy to forget that - until relatively recently - the influence of Israel's friends in Washington was more than matched by the power of the State Department Arabists and the petroleum lobby.

Tyler also assigns a bit too much consequence to American policy in the region. The underlying assumption seems to be that if a preternaturally wise president formulated a perfect American policy that was flawlessly executed by supremely competent U.S. diplomats, the results would be deterministic. Maybe, but maybe not. It's a view that essentially denies agency to the people of the region, whether Israeli or Arab. Ultimately, the choice between peace and strife is in their hands and not those of even the best American president. As Mitchell recently pointed out, there's every reason for hope in the Middle East because people create problems and, therefore, people can solve them, if they want to

While I hoped this book would provide critical insights into the handling of the middle-east by the different American Presidents, it failed to deliver. What is worse, the book is profoundly flawed by a serious and distinct bias. That said, the book still has its uses and the mere fact that the book appeared on President Obama's bookshelf makes it an interesting read.

First, the publisher claims: "Tyler draws on newly opened presidential archives to dramatize the approach to the Middle East across U.S. presidencies from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. He takes us into the Oval Office and shows how our leaders made momentous decisions; at the same time ...lets us see the big picture as never before." Unfortunately, the amount of insights into the actual decision making process varies dramatically; much if not most of it is very superficial. Essentially, for most presidencies, the author reduces the president in question to a single sentence description and then repeats it ad nauseum. Additionally, while for some presidents (LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton) the author does have extensive material to draw on and can show the decision making process in some detail, for the rest of them, he really does not provide much information on. Essentially, he recaps the crisis at hand, and then slaps a few paragraphs together to describe the president's reaction to it. It does not provide the depth expected or promised. Put simply, the book fails to deliver in most cases the analysis or new information the author should have had. Without these details the book provides nothing new.

More disturbing, or at the very least more annoying, is the author's undisguised bias. This author tells the story of the middle east from a decidedly pro-arab/anti-israeli view. If you are one of those people who honestly believe that Israel is a universally malign force that is wrong in every case, you will find this a very well balanced book. However, for those who believe that neither side has a monopoly on the truth and on justice, the bias will be apparent. Not only are most of the author's best sources Arab leaders, which is in itself great, but his writing methodically and without exception seeks to denigrate Israel, its leaders, and anyone who supports it. In some cases the author had to do great violence to the chronology of events in order to show Israel in the wrong. For example, he starts the Six Day War with the Israeli strike on Egypt and only several pages later mentions the causus beli (the blockading of Israeli ports and the shelling of Israel's capitol and Jerusalem). Additionally, his use of language was slanted in every case. In the vast majority of events, Israeli losses are described in clinical terms (lessening their effect) while every Arab loss is described in heart-rending and bloody detail. In another case, often repeated, he describes sling wielding Palastinian youth firing rocks at Israeli ARMOR. While they did attack tanks with rocks, that is not what triggered the Israeli response, not mentioned in the book is that they attacked Israeli SOLDIERS. It was not chipped paint or dented armor that bothered Israel, it was cracked skulls and stove ribs. Omitting such pertinent facts robs the book of critical balance. (In the interests of brevity, I will not innumerate them here but if you ask in a comment I will provide more examples).

So despite the fact that I feel this book is both very biased and fails to accomplish its self-stated goals, I still recommend reading this book. Why? Because, first it is on the President's shelf. If we assume that he has read it or will read it, it is of immense value for that reason alone. More significantly, I found this book to be a brilliant exposition of the Arab view of history. By reading it, I was given a valuable insight into how the Arab nations have viewed the last fifty years and American actions. In a perverse way, the books very value lies in its extreme bias. I recommend this book for anyone who already has a strong foundation in MiddleEast history (and thus will be able to recognize the author's bias clearly) who would like to understand the moderate Arab viewpoint in more depth.

Not just a well-told tale that takes you deep into the history, places and players that have involved America in the middle east, this book smartly reveals the incredibly complex matrix from which today's problems emanated. Tyler's rich character portraits bring life to the names and figures that have been reported on and analyzed before, but not really brought alive for the reader until now. If you read only the opening chapter, you will know more about the personality and character of George Tenet than any other reporting has offered.

It's a great piece of historical reporting woven into a fast-moving, very informative and entertaining book. Very highly recommended if you have any interest in knowing what the middle east is all about or if you just want to understand why this part of the world so heavily shapes American policies.