Circles In the Sand

Kenneth Pollack is a hard man to pin down. A former CIA analyst and member of the Clinton administration's National Security Council now affiliated with the left-leaning Brookings Institution, he made a qualified case for invading Iraq in "The Threatening Storm," which appeared six months before the invasion itself. Two years later he produced "The Persian Puzzle," which urged the U.S. to pursue a negotiated settlement with Iran.

Now Mr. Pollack has given us "A Path Out of the Desert," billed in its subtitle as a "grand strategy for America in the Middle East." It's a misleading title, except perhaps metaphorically, since his path requires the U.S. to remain in the desert for decades in order to help sort out the region's myriad problems and set it on a path toward greater democracy, better governance, stronger economic growth, less cultural insularity and so on. Sound familiar? It could almost be called the Bush Doctrine, were it not for the author's embarrassment about all things Bush.

That's not a bad thing, either, at least if it gives the author whatever liberal street cred he needs to remain an influence on the thinking of the Democratic Party. At his best, Mr. Pollack is a thorough and clear-eyed analyst who knows his subject well and isn't prone to wishful thinking. The book's early sections examine U.S. interests -- oil and Israel take pride of place -- to show why we cannot easily disengage from the Middle East.

Mr. Pollack is particularly good at exposing the myth that close U.S. ties to Israel worsen our relations with other Arab governments or explain popular hostility to America: Our patronage of Arab dictators such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak has more to do with that. Nor has America's "tilting" toward Israel complicated efforts at Mideast peacemaking. On the contrary, as he writes, U.S. support for the Jewish state "helped convince the Arabs that they did not have a military option against Israel."

Also persuasive is Mr. Pollack's diagnosis of much of what ails Arab societies. The region has the world's highest unemployment rate. Oil-rich states cosset their industrial and service sectors with subsidies, guaranteeing inefficiency. The quality of education is low, and there's too much of it: Every year, Arab universities graduate thousands of young men and women whose aspirations exceed their actual skills. Legal systems don't work, corruption is rampant and bureaucracies are almost comically bloated: In Kuwait, more than 90% of the national work force is employed by the government.

It gets worse. In Mr. Pollack's reading, the Arab world exists in what he calls a "pre-revolutionary" state, similar to that of Russia in the late czarist period. There is a dangerously bulging youth cohort: 44% of Egyptians, 48% of Palestinians and 53% of Yemenis are between the ages of 15 and 29. Violence -- in the form of government repression, terrorism, revolution, ethnic and sectarian conflict, inter-state war, and civil war -- has been pervasive from Algeria to Lebanon to Bahrain. Islam, often radical and politicized, is on the rise: In Egypt, there is now one mosque for every 745 people, up from one for every 6,031 in 1986, despite a doubling of the population. And rather than attempt genuine reform, Arab governments are constantly finding pretexts and methods to go on with business as usual, thereby aggravating the problems described above.

Having laid out a mostly accurate picture of where the Middle East stands today -- and how it got there -- Mr. Pollack proceeds to offer his version of a cure. In its broad contours, it's a sound one: The U.S., he writes, must begin "draining the swamp" in which the Arab world's various pathologies fester. It must prod both our allies and our enemies in the region to mend their ways. And it must have faith that more democratic systems can take root even in the Islamic world. "Despite the fact that George W. Bush said it was the best thing for us to do," he writes, humorlessly, "it actually is the best thing for us to do."

Where Mr. Pollack errs is in the details, in matters large and small. In his rage against the Bush administration, for instance, he laments that the president failed to raise the subject of political reform with Mr. Mubarak "in April 2004, less than three months after the second inaugural address." Er, fact check, please: Mr. Bush gave his second inaugural, which vowed to put freedom at the center of U.S. foreign policy, in January 2005.

More substantively, Mr. Pollack seriously underrates the specifically Islamic contribution to the region's woes. Instead, he blames religion generically -- along with the usual socio-politico-economic sourness -- for radicalizing so many young Middle Easterners. Yet not a single Christian became a suicide bomber during the second intifada, never mind that Palestinian Christians suffered as much at the hands of Israelis as Palestinian Muslims. That's not to say that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But Islam, at least as it's widely practiced in the Middle East today, has often been in sharp tension with the liberal habits of mind that sustain democratic institutions over time. A religion that preaches death for apostates is not necessarily one that will easily tolerate other forms of dissent.

Finally, Mr. Pollack's policy prescriptions on such key issues as Iraq, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis amount to the usual mush of olive branches, carrots and sticks, peace processes, and tactical options for policies A, B and C. This is not a new grand strategy but a continuation of what the U.S. has been doing, with varying degrees of emphasis and success, for decades. If that's any indication of how an Obama administration might act, I won't sleep any worse at night. But neither will I get my hopes up for a Middle East that's any better than the declining place of Mr. Pollack's grim telling.
By Bret Stephens (WSJ)