Brute force and ignorance;Current affairs;Books

A CHOICE OF ENEMIES: America Confronts the Middle East

by Lawrence Freedman

Weidenfeld Pounds 20 pp629

Caspar Weinberger, secretary for defence in the Reagan administration, argued that his country should choose its enemies carefully: "They should have earned the hostility of the American people and should be likely to be defeated by means available to the American military." If this seems mere common sense, it has been carelessly or recklessly ignored by successive American administrations dallying in the Middle East. They have accomplished miracles, in uniting against their country societies that otherwise have nothing in common. To be sure, the hostility and resentment of Muslim nations are also driven by their own tensions, failures and irrationality. But Washington's misjudgments have made matters much worse.

Consider the case of one of the Bush neo-conservatives' favourite gurus, Bernard Lewis, cited in Lawrence Freedman's book. Lewis's works played a significant part in persuading the Bushies to invade Iraq. He wrote in 2002 that allied victory in the second world war was not a feat of domination, but instead afforded Germany and Japan "the chance to redeem and liberate themselves. The long-oppressed Iraqis deserve no less". It seems almost imbecile, to have launched the 2003 invasion on the basis of such a grossly misleading historical comparison.

Freedman is one of Britain's two important strategic thinkers, the other being Michael Howard. Acute analysis and characteristic fair-mindedness inform his latest book, which chronicles the experience of successive US administrations in the Middle East since Jimmy Carter. Freedman writes: "This is a depressing, at times tragic story."

Carter, seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement, presided over the first Camp David summit, between Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat in 1978. It was unlikely to achieve strategic success, since Begin was a fanatic who considered the West Bank rightfully part of Israel. It achieved a settlement between Israel and Egypt at the cost of destroying Sadat's standing in the Arab world. Carter subsequently squandered much political capital in wooing the PLO. His presidency was destroyed by the mishandling of Iran. As the Shah faced increasing domestic opposition, he vacillated, and turned to Washington for guidance about how to respond. "The Americans were not prepared for the question," writes Freedman, "and lacked the knowledge to provide a sensible answer." Half-hearted repression proved disastrous. The Shah fell, to be succeeded by the Ayatollah Khomeini. American embassy staff spent 444 days as Iran's hostages, a humiliation Americans have never forgiven.

Ignorance is a running theme of this book. It is extraordinary that America, with its vast wealth, suffers from a chronic lack of intelligence about Middle East societies. When Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state, she was amazed to discover that the state department did not even possess an Iran desk. Ronald Reagan is widely perceived as a great president, but in his years of office everything was seen though a cold-war prism. "The consistency in his conviction about the Soviet Union's rottenness and his eventual willingness to let it fail gracefully ...represented the greatest foreign policy achievement of his presidency," says Freedman wryly. When the Russians blundered into Afghanistan, it seemed natural to the Reaganites to arm the mujaheddin against them. This, in turn, required the assistance of Pakistan. The trade-off was Washington turning a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear programme. During the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency, a dramatic surge in Islamic radicalism took place in the region, but Washington was heedless of such incidentals. In the same fashion, because Iraq was Iran's enemy, Reagan's people gave a helping hand to Saddam Hussein, indifferent to his domestic tyranny.

There is a widespread delusion that the American bombing of Libya in 1986 persuaded President Gaddafy to abandon his sponsorship of terrorism. This is untrue. Gaddafy sustained his terrorist activities for years, including the killing of 270 people in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. In 2004, the British and Americans agreed to indulge his oppressive rule at home in return for his abandonment of nuclear weapons research.

Much of this book is about Israel, of course. The Arabs' tragedy is that they have never produced a single spokesman, with the marginal exception of Sadat, whom westerners have found worthy of sympathy and respect. The Israelis, by contrast, seem to Americans socially compatible, ideologically congenial and impressively militarily capable. Many Americans listened with straight faces to prime minister Begin's talk of the need to destroy "the scourge of terrorism", when, like his successor Yitzhak Shamir, he himself had been a prominent sponsor of terror during the British mandate in Palestine. While desultory negotiations continued between Arabs and Israel, so, too, did large scale settlement expansion on Palestinian soil, as it does to this day.

Freedman meticulously charts the failure of successive presidential peace initiatives. Bill Clinton was exasperated by Ehud Barak's soldierly inability to understand the art of negotiation, and even more so by the "insufferable" Bibi Netanyahu's lectures about how to handle Arabs. At every step, Arafat obliged the Israelis by rejecting deals that omitted Jerusalem. Arafat made a colossal blunder by supporting Saddam's 1990 seizure of Kuwait, which confirmed his friendlessness in America. George Bush Sr, on the advice of General Colin Powell, bungled the 1991 Iraq war by halting the coalition army on the brink of victory. He thus allowed 100,000 Iraqi troops, 8,000 tanks and 14,000 armoured vehicles to escape, sustaining Saddam's rule through another decade. The Israelis gained further useful points, merely by not retaliating when Saddam fired Scud missiles at them. Again and again, the American people were given cause to regard Israel as their friend, Arabs as their enemies.

Freedman's account of recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq is, inevitably, familiar territory, but necessary to the completeness of his story. One senses a weariness as he writes of George W Bush's January 2008 visit to the Middle East: "He did what many presidents had done before him. He chastised Iran, urged Israel and Palestine to make up their differences, promised Saudi Arabia a vast new arms deal, and asked if it could help hold down oil prices. He spoke as optimistically as he dared about Iraq's future."

Freedman concludes that it is hopeless for any American government to set its sights too high in the Middle East. The scale of the problems defies anything that could be dignified as solutions. Instead, they must be "managed or endured". It is fatal for Washington to strike moral postures about good and evil. What is needed is a revival of patient, long-term diplomacy, backed by an understanding of the limits of power.

If these sound modest prescriptions, they are also sensible ones. Freedman omits one point that seems to me important: we talk much of what America should do in the Middle East, but not enough of what Arabs might contribute. They will achieve none of their own objectives as long as they remain essentially friendless in the West. The United States is simply too big for Arab societies profitably to fight, even by the methods chosen by Al-Qaeda. If America bears much blame for making bad and sometimes gratuitous choices of enemies, the Muslim world makes even worse ones.

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