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Important Book Reviews on Middle East Affairs

March 1, 2006, 9:29 am
  


 



Middle East Quarterly*
Winter 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/915
* Cross-posted with permission

American Oil Diplomacy in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea

by Gawdat Bahgat
Gainesville, Fla: University Press of Florida, 2003. 214 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Brenda Shaffer
Caspian Studies, Harvard University

Energy will be a defining issue in international relations in the twentieth-first century, yet few political scientists have tackled the geopolitics of oil and gas. Bahgat’s welcome addition to this short list will be of special interest to policymakers and journalists. His study examines trends in the global energy market, focusing on the U.S. strategy for global energy security, and Washington’s relations with Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea region states. The overview chapters are particularly valuable to assign to students, who will also benefit from the book’s excellent glossary.

Some observations on the book: Bahgat’s important contention that “independence, not dependence, is the cornerstone of today’s global energy markets” underscores why U.S. policies aim to ensure not only U.S. energy security but also global energy supplies. It also highlights why supply interruptions affect not just specific consumers but cause global price hikes.

Another important point is that Iran and a number of other Middle East states do not allow foreign oil companies to have a real stake in production and infrastructure projects. This, more than U.S. sanctions, has proven a barrier to foreign investment in the Iranian energy sector.

This reviewer disagrees, however, with the author’s contention that Azerbaijan chose to export its oil on an east-west pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) as a result of U.S. pressure. Actually, Baku never seriously pondered exporting its main strategic resource through Iran.

Bahgat correctly points out the gradual erosion of Saudi Arabia’s surplus oil production capacity and notes how its absence greatly affects the dynamics of today’s world oil market.

He often highlights the discrepancy in estimates of oil reserves, a matter researchers should bear in mind. In fact, there are few independent estimates on oil and gas reserves, so all reports should be used judiciously.

In some of the chapters on specific regions, such as Iraq and the Caspian region, the author’s attempts to keep the text up to date actually hurt their shelf life. For instance, the book discusses the merits and disadvantages of the various pipeline options for export of oil from Azerbaijan while the debate on the main export pipeline was determined with the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to open for operations in late 2005. In addition, the book discusses the merits of different policy scenarios toward Iraq under Saddam.

Arab Human Development Report 2004: Towards Freedom in the Arab World

by United Nations Development Program
New York: UNDP, 2005. 248 pp. $24.95, paper.

Reviewed by Patrick Clawson

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 broke from the usual blame-the-foreigner excuses by Arab intellectuals and concentrated instead on the shortcomings of Arabs themselves as the principal reason for the problems of Arab societies. Not surprisingly, this candor sat poorly with Arab governments and hate-the-West intellectuals. As a result, this report, the third annual volume in the series, includes an executive summary and a chapter that bow in the direction of Arab political correctness, departing from the rest of the volume in its focus on the pernicious West as the source of restrictions on Arab freedoms. A particularly bizarre box criticizes Israel for its restrictions on churches—this in a volume that says not a single word about religious freedom for non-Muslims in the Arab world, not even about the ban on organized non-Muslim worship in Saudi Arabia.

The 2004 report focuses on freedom with chapters on the intellectual basis of freedom, an overview of problematic issues, human rights (”denial of fundamental individual freedoms”), legal architecture (”legislative restrictions on freedom”), political architecture (”the vicious circle of repression and corruption”), and societal structures (”the chain that stifles individual freedom”), before closing with a chapter offering “strategic visions of freedom and governance.” In the areas it covers, the analysis is quite solid if usually abstract: the authors obviously felt constrained from offering specific examples about freedom deficits in particular countries.

Even accepting those limitations, the report’s approach suffers from some obvious omissions, such as ignoring the rampant discrimination against non-Muslim and non-Arab populations, which are significant minorities in most of the Arab world. (In the four large Arab states of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan, which between them have a majority of the population of Arab states, minorities constitute a larger share of the population than do blacks in the United States.) The report also suffers from the mythology that an “Arab world” actually exists when problems and accomplishments differ remarkably from one Arabic-speaking country to another. Still, Nader Fergany and the rest of his large team are to be congratulated for being blunt about the Arab world’s freedom deficit, a topic that only a few years ago would have been unthinkable as a subject for a report from an international organization.

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq

by George Packer
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 454 pp. $25.

Reviewed by Michael Rubin

“The story of the Iraq war is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world, and of the individuals who conceived and acted on them,” New Yorker staff writer Packer opines in the preface to Assassin’s Gate. Largely assembled from a series of articles penned in the wake of Saddam’s fall, the title alludes to the gate separating the U.S.-protected Green Zone from Baghdad proper.

Packer seeks to explore U.S. involvement in Iraq through sketches of participants, both American and Iraqi, civilian and military. His chapters are both chronological and thematic. A chapter on “Fevered Minds,” for example, traces think-tank analysts and policymakers involved in counseling for regime change in Iraq. “Exiles” features Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya and Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi. “Special Plans” seeks to expose Pentagon civilian policy advisors. “The Palace” features Coalition Provisional Authority aides while “Occupied Iraqis” sketches the lives of ordinary Baghdadis.

Assassin’s Gate fails to elucidate, though. While the debates surrounding Iraq policy were complex, Packer’s narrative covers only one side. His stories belie his contacts: while he delves into long passages about the thoughts and even the dreams of State Department officials such as Barbara Bodine, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Andrew Erdmann, he gets Pentagon office and staffs confused. Harold Rhode, for example, was never in the Office of Special Plans. Those who talked to Packer become complex individuals; he portrays those who did not—chief among them Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—as two-dimensional foils. Veracity is further undercut by Packer’s willingness to allow confidants to reinvent themselves with the benefit of hindsight.

Many errors derive from the author’s failure to evaluate sources. He relies, for example, on descriptions of Iraq planning provided by former Pentagon official Karen Kwiatkowski. But Kwiatkowski, who has since associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement,[1] never stepped foot in the office she described. Long before Packer completed his research, the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded she was a fabricator.[2] Packer lifts other episodes from secondary accounts, themselves based on anonymous and often self-promoting sources. His failure to assess information is confirmed by an endnote acknowledging that he “benefited from” the blogs of Juan Cole and Laura Rozen, two unabashed partisans, neither of whom has been to post-Saddam Iraq nor is personally knowledgeable about the foreign policy analysts on whom they comment.

Packer’s inability to separate wheat from chaff transforms Assassin’s Gate into an echo chamber for conspiracy theories. Rather than succeed in his goal to shed light on the human element of the Iraq enterprise, he has written a monument to the tendentiousness that continues to undercut Washington’s Iraq policy.

[1] The Jerusalem Report, Oct. 4, 2004.
[2] “Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, July 7, 2004.

The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power

by As’ad AbuKhalil
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. 248 pp. $9.95.

Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz
Center on Islamic Pluralism

AbuKhalil, a representative of the American academic Left and a Lebanese-born academic who teaches at California State University/Stanislaus, attempts in this small volume to explain to his ideological constituency such matters as the history of Wahhabism, the relationship of the Saudi state to Al-Qaeda, the current crisis of the Saudi kingdom, and the resulting challenges to regional and global peace and order.

This commission could not have been a plum assignment. The oppression, corruption, and extremism of the Saudi monarchy are by now so notorious that to make the case that the United States and neoconservatives are prone to unjust interfering with the Riyadh rulers requires a real talent. It means detailing grotesque inhumanities but blaming them all on the United States and Israel, as well as on colonial rulers past and the fantastical specter of “Orientalism.”

AbuKhalil does not disappoint. He derides Western authors (this one included), who have exposed the bloody past of Wahhabi Islam, as “Orientalists” (a flattering description, in my view). He recapitulates the Wahhabi historical time line but adds nothing to what is already known, except for occasional flings into the typical Western academic idiom, aimed at softening or explaining away Wahhabi extremism. Thus, the main Wahhabi-Saudi theologian in the second half of the twentieth century, Ibn Baz, “may not have been as principled in his hostility to Jews and Christians as his earlier edicts may have led us to believe.” To identify the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bigotry of Ibn Baz with a “principled” position might seem sycophantic but it fits the prevailing ethos on American campuses.

The author presents himself as the revealer of authentic Saudi reality, but his portrait of the country differs from that described by the most acute critics of the kingdom only in its ideological vocabulary. After enumerating the usual atrocities and undeniable instabilities, AbuKhalil has no solution to offer aside from condemning, yes, Washington neoconservatives for provoking “fanatical and radical forces” in Iraq, and thereby threatening the Saudi state.

The litany is tediously familiar: America was wrong to enable Saudi tyranny, just as it is wrong to try to end it. The Battle for Saudi Arabia is not of use to those hoping to learn about Saudi Arabia. Its only value is to provide insight into current leftist intellectual gymnastics.

British Muslims: Loyalty and Belonging

Edited by Mohammed Siddique Sedon, Dilwar Hussain, Nadeem Malik. Markfield, U.K.: Islamic Foundation, 2003. 116 pp. $8.95, paper.

Reviewed by Caroline Cox
House of Lords, Westminster, London

This summary of a seminar opens with an introduction by Manazir Ahsan highlighting problems confronting the Muslim community in Britain, including perceived increases in “Islamophobia,” verbal and personal attacks, “irresponsible” media reports, and legal problems.

Responses include a wide-ranging paper by Tim Winter, using a psychosocial perspective, analyzing sources of identity crises for many Muslims, including “young zealots,” who may be driven by fear and despair to apocalyptic measures. He suggests that such desperation is unworthy of the umma (nation) of Islam and should be replaced by a via positiva through loyalty to “the balanced, middle way.” Muhammad Anwar’s paper details statistics of socioeconomic problems, including unemployment, educational underachievement, and political representation. Other papers specify responses, including more political involvement and jihad in various manifestations.

As chapters are interspersed by contributions from seminar participants, the publication may be seen as an overview of concerns felt by the British Muslim community. While it is important for such concerns to be on the record, it is also interesting to note the omission of relevant perspectives—such as appreciation of positive characteristics of the host community.

There is no appreciation of democratic freedoms enjoyed by Muslims—such as freedom to build mosques, establish schools, publish books, papers, and websites, and to participate in public life, with representation at every level from local government to both houses of Parliament. There is also no mention of the asymmetry between Muslims’ freedoms in Britain and the lack of such freedoms for minorities in Islamic societies—ranging from dhimmi (second-class citizen) status of Jews and Christians in countries such as Egypt to the total prohibition of Christian activities in Saudi Arabia. If Muslim leaders were to acknowledge the freedoms, as well as the multiple social welfare benefits, available in Britain, many Muslims, especially the younger generations, might feel less hostile, alienated, and negative about living in Britain.

The vast majority of British Muslims are peaceable and law-abiding, wishing to dissociate from violence and terrorism. For them, some of contributions in this book may be helpful, playing a positive role in identifying legitimate concerns and responses compatible with the values of democracy. But the overall impression is one of partial interpretations of complex issues that may have detrimental effects on feelings of loyalty and belonging. Such an outcome would not only be regrettable academically and politically but could be dangerous for everyone—helping to promote interpretations of Islam resulting in the kind of violence unleashed on New York, Madrid, Moscow, Amsterdam, and London.

Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran

by Kenneth R. Timmerman.
New York: Crown Forum, 2005. 392 pp. $25.95.

Also:

Iran’s Nuclear Option: Tehran’s Quest for the Atom Bomb
by Al J. Venter
Havertown, Pa.: Casemate, 2004. 451 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Patrick Clawson

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have uncovered one hidden Iranian nuclear program after another during the last two and a half years. Tehran has now acknowledged having concealed (for eighteen years) a wide range of nuclear activities. Some of them have few peaceful applications but are directly useful for nuclear weapons. This surprising nuclear progress fits a context, for the Iranian regime has also tested long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and its Supreme Leader has proclaimed that Israel is a cancer that should be excised by being wiped off the map.

Iran’s nuclear program has attracted much attention from governments and from authors intent on highlighting the Iranian threat. Some books are scaremongering, ill-informed, or both; in contrast, the Timmerman and Venter books are solid accounts (as the forthcoming Iran’s Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment from London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies also promises to be).

Timmerman writes in a chatty style with much color about the various players, structuring his account around the interaction among the actors. Learning, for example, that German foreign minister Joschka Fischer is married to the daughter of an Iranian dissident illuminates the dynamics of policymaking. Timmerman’s account is also extraordinarily well-informed, reflecting his years of association with the policy circles he describes. Unfortunately, he undermines his credibility by accepting too readily the accounts of some Iranian exiles, especially the defector Hamid Reza Zakeri, who tell hair-raising stories about Iranian hidden capabilities. Timmerman is correct that U.S. intelligence agencies have a bias against defectors, preferring assets they themselves cultivated, but Zakeri’s accounts are at times suspiciously convenient. That said, Timmerman’s Countdown is the book to read for an engaging peak behind the curtain.

Venter’s Nuclear Option is the place to turn for technical details and footnoted references. It offers the most systematic exposition to date about Iran’s nuclear program and its role in world affairs. After a solid introduction to the history and political culture of the Islamic Republic, with a solid exposition about Iran’s support for terrorism, especially by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Venter carefully walks the reader through Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Along the way, he incorporates essays by leading experts from the Institute for Science and International Security (David Albright and Corey Hinderstein) and the Federation of American Scientists (Charles Vick). As might be expected from a South African author, Venter highlights the parallels between South Africa’s successfully concealed nuclear program and what is known about Iran’s efforts. Some of the most technical information is in appendices; nevertheless, his account does make for heavy reading.

Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington

by Paul Sperry
Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson Current, 2005. 360 pp. $24.99.

Reviewed by Beila Rabinowitz
Director, www.MilitantIslamMonitor.org

Sperry portrays his work as “an indictment of subversive Muslim leaders representing Saudi Wahhabi interests … who are planting the seeds of insurrection”; its subtitle could be The Concerned Citizens Guide to Radical Islam in America. He explores how a network of Muslim groups and individuals are exploiting America’s religious freedom and ethnic sensitivity in order to undermine America from within. According to the author, “The Muslim establishment plays an elaborate word game … it is easy to be fooled by such duplicity, so I have provided readers with the intellectual tools to easily identify it.” He argues that religiously sanctioned dissimulation (taqiya) enables Muslims to penetrate the U.S. political establishment to further an Islamist agenda. Anticipating accusations of anti-Muslim bias, he hastens to add that he “respects all Muslims as individuals.”

Infiltration breaks down the threat to American security into seven broad categories: how Muslims conceal their Islamist agendas to gain acceptance in Washington; the hegemony of politically correct myths about radical Islam; the “silent” terror network that operates as Muslim social and religious organizations; the use of Islamic centers, charities, and mosques for terrorism; penetration of law enforcement by Muslim fifth-columnists; subversion in the military and nuclear research facilities; and corporate infiltration under the guise of religious accommodation in the work place.

Of particular note, in the chapter “The Dark Lair of CAIR,” Sperry shows how groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations exploit catch phrases such as civil rights to push for the implementation of Shari‘a (Islamic law) in American public life and thwart law enforcement efforts to prosecute the war on terror.

Infiltration offers readers a glimpse of the “Wahhabi corridor,” along Leesburg Pike that contains the “fastest growing population of Middle Eastern immigrants” in the United States and, according to Sperry, a sleeper cell community. He traced four of the hijackers to the Skyline Towers in northern Virginia (which also houses the offices funding terror) and interviewed a tenant of Pentagon area apartments popular with Saudi diplomats and Muslim immigrants who told him that, “residents … cheered … that very day as the Trade Center fell … The people in these buildings are animals.”

Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists

by Raymond William Baker
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. 309 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

Baker’s books on the Abdel Nasser and Sadat eras, 1954-81, bespeak his familiarity with the Egyptian political scene; as he puts it, he has made “a voyage to an intellectual, cultural, and moral world into which I was not born but where I no longer feel a stranger.” Islam without Fear clearly shows the strengths and weaknesses of this voyage. On the plus side, Baker not only knows his topic but has a feel for the Egyptian scene, both Islamist and otherwise. His survey of the “New Islamists”—a group of important Egyptians (such as Kamal Abul Magd, Muhammad Selim al-Awa, Tareq al-Bishry, Muhammad al-Ghazzaly, Fahmy Huwaidy, and Yusuf al-Qaradawy) at the vanguard of Islamist ideological development—is informed, smart, and supple. He documents their thinking, assesses their achievements and failings, and points to their significance.

On the minus side, Baker, professor of international politics at Trinity College, Hartford, has lost any sense of objectivity and instead adopted the outlook of his New Islamist subjects, for whom he serves as an English-language cheerleader. Rehashing the silly and discredited trope distinguishing between moderate and extreme Islamists, he treats the leading lights of the world’s most vibrant totalitarian movement with an overt and embarrassing enthusiasm (centrist, positive, impressive, human, and humane are adjectives describing them that appear in just the book’s first five pages). Worse, the study contains an element of deception, a hiding of problems, symbolized by Baker’s long account of a headline-making debate in January 1992 between Qaradawy and an arch-secularist named Farag Foda but his omission that this exchange contributed directly to the assassination of Foda five months later by an Islamist terrorist.

Kidnapped in Yemen: One Woman’s Amazing Escape from Captivity

by Mary Quin
Guilford, Conn.: The Lyons Press, 2005. 248 pp. $23.95.

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

In her mid-40s, a successful executive just placed in charge of Xerox’s Color Solutions Business Unit, Quin had a taste for exotic travel that took her in late 1998 to Yemen with a group of eighteen other Western tourists. She and they had the misfortune to have their Land Cruisers driven directly into a war between the government and an Islamist outfit called the Aden Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA). The entire tourist group was taken hostage on December 28 and held for more than a day before Yemeni military forces attacked the AAIA, leading to the deaths of four tourists, two terrorists, and one soldier. Quin herself had a close brush with death, but the terrorist holding the gun in her back was hit before he could do damage to her; in an act of daring-do, she managed to pull from his still-live hands his AK-47, an act which left her a changed person. (The mild-mannered, liberal feminist admits that as she exultantly fought for the gun, she had a revelation: “So this is why men like war.”)

The story of the capture takes up but the first quarter of Kidnapped in Yemen; the remainder consists of Quin’s personal account, mixed with her sleuthing to figure out what had happened to her and her companions. Through assiduous press research plus personal investigations that took her to London’s Finsbury Park mosque (to meet the notorious Abu Hamza) as well as a journey back to Yemen and the scene of the crime, she comes up with a coherent account of the tensions that culminated in her seizure. In addition to making available the story of an important terrorist incident, once which foreshadowed the current problem of Western Muslims traveling to Iraq to engage in violence, Quin provides a fine account of her own growth, indeed transformation, as a result of her brief but searing experience as a hostage.

The Kurds in Iraq

by Kerim Yildiz
Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005. 236 pp. $75 ($22.50, paper).

Reviewed by Michael Rubin

The liberation of Iraq propelled Iraqi Kurdistan into the international limelight. The Iraqi Kurdish militia plays an important role in Iraq; Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, is a former Kurdish guerilla leader, and the Kurds have an important role in the new government’s politics. The Iraqi Kurdish experience is now central to discussion over the fate of Baathist officials, and Kurdish demands remain at the heart of the debate over federalism.

Yildiz, executive director of the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project, has compiled a guide better than many other surveys of Iraqi Kurdish history, society, and politics. The Kurds in Iraq is a valuable guide not only for the policy practitioner but also for the general reader who wants a clear, concise study to aid understanding of a people and a region increasingly in the news. Unlike many other authors on this subject, he neither indulges his emotions nor does he artificially extend backwards Kurdish nationalism. He is precise, noting that while the term “Kurd” first appeared in the seventh century C.E., it would be almost a millennium before the term “Kurdistan” entered common usage and even then with a lack of precision as to its boundaries. His narrative is exact. Yildiz details not only Washington’s 1975 decision to withdraw support for the Kurdish uprising but also the often ignored 1974 Kurdish decision to turn down Baghdad’s autonomy offer. He also gives context to Saddam Hussein’s 1987-88 Anfal campaign and does not limit its discussion to its most famous episode, the March 1988 use of chemical weapons against civilians in Halabja.

While Yildiz emphasizes human rights and international legal responsibilities, he glosses over intra-Kurdish human rights abuses. There is no mention, for example, of the 2-3,000 Kurds executed during the 1994-97 Kurdish civil war, nor does he discuss Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masud Barzani’s appropriation of land and property from rival tribes, nor is there coverage of Iraqi Kurdistan’s corruption problem. Small errors of fact mar the account. The Iran-Iraq war, for example, began in 1980, not 1983. Likewise, despite the nickname, the “Swiss dinar” currency used in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1991 and 2003 was printed in the United Kingdom and not in Switzerland.

Looking toward the future, Yildiz highlights conflicts over the death penalty likely to occur between the European states and the Iraqi Special Tribunal trying Saddam Hussein and other former top regime officials. He also questions the extent to which American and European civilians serving in the Coalition Provisional Authority and its successor organizations conform to international law. His background in humanitarian law contributes to some bias. He states that many “have called for the U.N. to take over administration of Iraq,” something perhaps true among his human rights colleagues in London but certainly not among Iraqis, the vast majority of whom wish for a return to full sovereignty.

Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco

by David L. Phillips
Boulder: Westview Press, 2005. 292 pp. $25.

Reviewed by Michael Rubin

Losing Iraq illustrates what went wrong with planning for post-liberation Iraq although not for the reasons its author, a Council on Foreign Relations staffer, intends. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the State Department hired Phillips to moderate seminar discussions among Iraqis. He uses this limited experience to conclude that the cause for difficulty in post-liberation Iraq was not lack of planning but rather a failure to listen. “How could such noble intentions [Iraq's freedom] go so wrong?” he asks. “The White House and Pentagon political appointees thought they could liberate a county without talking to those they were liberating,” he replies.

Phillips appears unaware that every Iraqi who met with him also visited the Pentagon, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency. U.S. officials would meet almost daily at the National Security Council, chaired by officials such as Zalmay Khalilzad, then the president’s special assistant for Iraq, and Stephen Hadley, then-deputy national security advisor.

Rather than researching and analyzing prewar planning, Losing Iraq becomes a testament to the author’s ego and pettiness, features that caused Iraqis and U.S. officials alike to push Phillips aside. He describes Kanan Makiya, with whom he clashed on issues including de-Baathification, as poisoned by neoconservatives who transformed him from an academic to a polemicist. Most Iraqis and Americans differed and questioned whether Phillips’s hostility was due to jealousy of Makiya’s prominence in fields in which Phillips sought to compete. Phillips also writes that he initiated ideas like a Kirkuk commission to adjudicate competing property claims but was ignored. Actually, such a commission was up and running weeks before his epiphany.

Phillips revises events liberally, saying, for example, that he and Ryan Crocker, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, opposed the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority because it did not empower Iraqis. Actually, Crocker opposed the transfer of sovereignty.

The irony of Phillips’s argument is hubris. He chides Bush administration officials for not listening to Iraqis, but he himself did not bother to travel to Baghdad in the wake of Iraq’s liberation. Rather, as revealed in a Wall Street Journal review by Rob Pollock, he lifted descriptions from newspapers.[1] His experience in Iraq was limited to a few brief trips to Iraqi Kurdistan before the war, the sheltered guest of a Kurdish politician.

Losing Iraq may try to castigate the White House but instead becomes an example of the arrogance about which so many Iraqis complain. Phillips treats Iraq as a template upon which to lay down his theories. The Iraqi voice is subsumed to his own. If the White House really lost Iraq—the success of the Iraqi elections suggests otherwise—it was because it subordinated the voice of Iraqis to outside advisors like Phillips, more interested in pumping up their own importance than in the welfare of Iraq.

[1] May 10, 2005.

Shaping the Plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Role of Military Intelligence Assessments

by Gregory Hooker
Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2005. 114 pp. $19.95, paper.

Reviewed by Tom Donnelly
American Enterprise Institute

What was the biggest intelligence failure on Iraq? Most would answer, “Failure to find weapons of mass destruction.” But far more important, given the long-running counterinsurgency campaign, was the failure to comprehend the nature of Iraqi society and politics. Many of the problems U.S. troops face today stem from the faulty understanding that shaped the original invasion plan.

The enormity of the failure merits scrutiny. Suffice it to say that the fault was general across all agencies of government and almost no one correctly foresaw the shape of post-Saddam Iraq. It will take some time to catalog the full scope of intelligence and policy follies, but Hooker’s monograph is a worthy entry.

Hooker had a ringside seat for Operation Iraqi Freedom planning as senior intelligence analyst at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) where he has worked since 1996. This job made him aware that military policy, particularly the Pentagon’s desire to fight a fast war in keeping with the theories of military transformation, militated against a deeper understanding of the potential for an Iraqi insurgency. Moreover, the inability to settle on a single war plan—in the two years prior to the invasion, CENTCOM was directed to prepare three separate plans—made for shallow analysis. Finally, the indecisive direction provided by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, euphemistically described as an “iterative” approach, “injected numerous ideas into the [planning] dialogue, many of which were amateurish and unrealistic.” As Hooker observes, “Rather than refining the plan in successive operational variants, this process ultimately drove the planners toward increasingly unrealistic assumptions” until they finally paid no attention to Pentagon directives.

Hooker suggests that disconnects between the Pentagon and CENTCOM had an even unhappier result. The squabbles over the invasion plan diverted attention from discussions about the post-invasion plan, the infamous “Phase IV” plan. “Although planners expected violence and civil disorder in Phase IV,” writes Hooker, “they generally thought it would be sectarian violence among Iraqis rather than predominantly insurgent violence against coalition forces.”

But if Hooker understands the effects of Pentagon shenanigans on military planning, he is on shakier ground when it comes to their causes. He repeats too freely the politically motivated complaints of former intelligence officials whose knowledge of Pentagon planning efforts was indirect and often inaccurate.

But this is a small quibble. Hooker has provided us with important insights into the shambles that was pre-Iraq planning. More needs to be done to tell the full story, but Hooker has limned the most important themes.

Sudan: The Contemporary Middle East

by Abdel Salam Sidahmed and Alsir Sidahmed
New York and Abigdon: Routledge Curzon, 2005. 180 pp. $105.

Reviewed by Yehudit Ronen
Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv universities

The Sidahmeds deal with the political history of post-colonial Sudan and a short but weighty postscript outlines developments of recent years. Their declared aim is to “provide an adequate background to understand present-day Sudan and its international relations, and to indicate a pointer to the way ahead as far as its political and economic development are concerned.” They have done a very good job explaining present-day Sudan and describing the crossroads at which the state now finds itself.

Abdel Salam Sidahmed is an honorary research fellow at the Institute for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Durham; Alsir Sidahmed is a freelance journalist. Both are Arab Muslims originally from northern Sudan.[1] The authors’ origins are relevant, for their book provides a distinctive perspective, one that complements the recent stream of books written mostly by either Western scholars, including Robert O. Collins and J. Millard Burr’s study of Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist state[2] (although Burr is originally from Sudan), and Douglas H. Johnson’s book on Sudan’s civil wars,[3] or Sudanese scholars and others sympathetic to the Christian and animist south, such as Mansour Khalid’s study of war and peace in Sudan.[4] This makes Sudan: The Contemporary Middle East an essential and enriching addition on Sudanese state and society.

Sudan focuses mainly on internal issues, including a brief chapter on economic affairs, in which they discuss the issue of oil, Sudan’s leading export and a commodity that increasingly dominates its politics. The book also examines the country’s broader geopolitical situation and its effect on domestic stability. Examining Sudan’s state formation from the nineteenth century onwards, the authors analyze the major features and functioning of Sudan’s political machinery, which has been characterized by a cycle of alternating civilian and military regimes. Their survey is illuminating, providing rich information and thorough discussion of Sudan’s political map.

In their conclusion, the authors find that the country has been “involved in a painful search for Sudan’s soul for the past half century.” It has also been engaged in an equally painful search for its “body,” that is, an ongoing attempt to maintain the country’s political stability and territorial integrity.

[1] “North Sudan” actually encompasses the east, west, and center of Sudan—a huge territorial expanse; the editors use it because “North” and “South” are commonplace in dealing with the sides in Sudan’s civil war.
[2] J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
[3] Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003).
[4] Mansour Khalid, War and Peace in Sudan: A Tale of Two Countries (London: Kegan Paul International [KPI], 2003). For details on the above-mentioned books, see Michael Rubin, “Brief Reviews,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2004, pp. 83-95.

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos

by Dore Gold
New York: Crown Forum, 2004. 320 pp. $25.95 ($14.95, paper).

Reviewed by Asaf Romirowsky
Middle East Forum

Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, tackles the infrastructure of the organization and the many problems for which it has been responsible, a timely subject given the growing size of the oil-for-food scam. Gold’s metaphor of the U.N. as the Tower of Babble is fitting because, like the Bible story (where the language barrier prevented proper communication), here, too, chaos is the name of the game; everyone is on a different page in a different language.

Over the years, the U.N. has shown particular indulgence for mass murder as we witnessed in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Bosnia but as horrendous as these acts were, the U.N. has taken a special liking to the Palestinian cause and has become a de facto front group for Yasir Arafat and his legacy of terrorism.

The author offers an insider’s perspective as he witnessed the U.N. from within; he saw, for example, how it failed to take any role in Afghanistan during the rise of the Taliban, and how it failed to deploy peacekeepers in Rwanda and Bosnia prior to the mass killings. However, these humanitarian global scandals pale in comparison to the U.N.’s terrorist ties, which are a special interest of Gold’s.

The most embarrassing illustration of this is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) established by the U.N. in 1949, following Israel’s independence. UNRWA’s appalling depth of terrorist infiltration demonstrates how much the U.N. has been compromised over the years. Many of UNRWA’s staff are known members of Hamas. According to Gold, having Hamas membership helps in getting a job with the U.N. on the West Bank. Retired Israel Defense Forces colonel Yoni Fighel, a former military governor in the territories, illustrates the depth of the problem: “as long as UNRWA employees are members of Fatah, Hamas, or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are going to pursue the interests of their party within the framework of their job … Who’s going to check up on them to see that they don’t? UNRWA? They are UNRWA.”[1]

Gold recommends that democratic countries bypass the U.N. in the short- term. For the long-term, he suggests reforming the essence of the U.N. through an agenda that serves democracies rather than dictatorships by building a council of democratic countries and a stronger NATO.

[1] Allison Kaplan Sommer, “UNRWA on Trial,” Reform Judaism Magazine, Winter 2002, p. 42.

US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis

by David Houghton
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 252 pp. $75 ($29.99, paper; $10, digital).

Reviewed by Raymond Tanter
Georgetown University

Houghton, lecturer in government at the University of Essex, has written a case study on the Iran hostage crisis, drawing on the literature of cognitive psychology to explain foreign policy decision-making. The book is fascinating because of the manner in which the author casts his questions—as puzzles to be solved with corresponding solutions. At issue are two questions:

(1) Why did Iranian students, with the tacit support of the Iranian leaders, seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran? Houghton considers several explanations: radical ideology, using the hostages as bargaining chips to get the shah back from the United States, or to prevent a counterrevolution by the United States. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Houghton argues for the third explanation. He then searches for evidence to eliminate competing explanations and marshal support for the idea that students seized the U.S. embassy because they wanted to prevent a repeat of the 1953 outcome when U.S. and British intelligence services stage-managed a coup against Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the shah to power.

(2) Why did President Jimmy Carter choose military force to rescue the hostages, given that his world-view suggested relying exclusively on nonviolent means? He did so because the hostage rescue option was easily retrieved from the memory of Carter’s national security team due to two recent experiences, the May 1975 Cambodian seizure of the SS Mayaguez, an American merchant ship (when marines and naval forces captured the ship and the Khmer Rouge government authorized release of the thirty-nine American men of the Mayaguez), as well as the Entebbe, Uganda raid staged by Israeli forces in July 1976. But another case involving the North Korean seizure of a spy ship, the USS Pueblo, in January 1968 was resolved without force, using only diplomatic negotiations (the ship’s sailors were returned, but not the ship).

As he does for the Iranian students, Houghton assembles evidence to explain why Carter acted on the basis of the Mayaguez precedent rather than the Pueblo analogy. The Carter administration drew on the Mayaguez precedent because its key officials considered it a successful use of force. In contrast, and despite the return of American hostages without loss of life, they perceived Pueblo as a long-drawn out negotiation without the benefit of reinforcing future U.S. deterrent power or providing domestic gains, such as demonstrating strong leadership qualities by the president.

Houghton, thus, uses the “availability principle” from cognitive psychology to explain both the student seizure and Carter’s actions. That said, the explanation for Iranian actions are more persuasive than for U.S. ones. He fails to explain why the Mayaguez incident, with its loss of life, should be a precedent for a president who was indisposed to use force.

Warlords and Merchants: The Lebanese Business and Political Establishment

by Kamal Dib
Reading: Ithaca Press, 2004. 333 pp. $49.50.

Reviewed by Marius Deeb
Johns Hopkins University

Dib, an economist by profession, has written an interesting book, especially with respect to the economy and business practices of Lebanese merchants and bankers. The author’s survey of how the Lebanese banking sector emerged from the 1940s onwards is outstanding. The role of the powerful Intra Bank in the Lebanese banking sector and the financial crisis that engulfed it in 1966 are fully covered. Dib claims that the Lebanese political establishment plotted against Intra Bank, which had become by then the largest bank in Lebanon (with assets and reserves amounting to 56 percent of that of the whole Lebanese banking system’s total) because it was predominantly owned and run by Christian Palestinians.

Despite the Intra Bank crisis, Lebanon’s economic golden age continued until 1974. The lira, its mighty national currency, survived the first decade of the war in Lebanon and collapsed only in 1985. The author traces the destruction of the Lebanese economy as a result of the wars that overwhelmed Lebanon from 1975 until 1990. He also provides a very useful statistical appendix.

The political dimension of this book leaves much to be desired, however, as Dib either misinterprets events or simply omits them. He fails to explain the reasons for the fall of the Lebanese currency, in particular the political factors. He has no clue why battles raged between the various factions nor why leading politicians and major religious figures were assassinated. Finally, he hardly mentions that the Assad regime in Syria waged its terrorist war against the Lebanese polity for three decades.

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