"With “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” Martin Indykhas written a timely and valuable history of his years as one of the Clinton administration’s top Middle East specialists. Indyk managed regional policy in the White House and State Department and twice served as ambassador to Israel. He worked closely with Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak in their unsuccessful efforts to negotiate peace treaties with the Palestinians and Syria. He had a chillier relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s he sees as a negative turning point in which the peace momentum set in motion by Rabin was deliberately brought to a halt.
Indyk also helped design the Clinton administration’s dual containment policy against Iran and Iraq, a policy whose results look better today than they did eight years ago, thanks to the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration in both arenas. But Indyk isn’t looking for historical vindication. That would have made for a less interesting and useful book. His main interest is drawing the right lessons from the Clinton administration’s failures and frustrations in order to design wiser regional policies for the future.
Indyk also helped design the Clinton administration’s dual containment policy against Iran and Iraq, a policy whose results look better today than they did eight years ago, thanks to the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration in both arenas. But Indyk isn’t looking for historical vindication. That would have made for a less interesting and useful book. His main interest is drawing the right lessons from the Clinton administration’s failures and frustrations in order to design wiser regional policies for the future.
Thanks to the November election results and the multiple Middle East crises the Obama administration now must confront, that future may be said to have arrived. And Indyk’s reassessments have been rendered even more relevant by the return of Clinton administration veterans to key jobs in the Obama administration, including the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
Many of Bill Clinton’s Middle East policy goals now look exceedingly optimistic, perhaps unrealistically so. Israel reached no overall peace agreements with the Palestinians or with Syria. Iran’s weak, embattled reformers spurned the Clinton administration’s tentative offers of re-engagement. Saddam Hussein continued playing cat and mouse with United Nations weapons inspectors — although, it later turned out, Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs were more effectively contained than Washington realized.
For all the disappointments, American prestige and influence in the region were far higher when Clinton left office than they are today. One main reason, Indyk notes, is that Clinton and his diplomats understood the crucial links between progress in Israeli-Arab peacemaking and the strength of America’s bargaining position with the countries in the Persian Gulf. Those connections are even more powerful today than they were in 2001.
But while the Clintonians got the big picture largely right, Indyk reports that they often tripped themselves up by mistakes of tactics or timing. For example, Clinton failed to grasp when Hafez al-Assad, then the Syrian president, was and was not serious about peacemaking, leading to botched summits and the failure to clinch an agreement that seemed within reach. Washington was often surprised and angered by the diplomatic thrusts and retreats of Ehud Barak, some of them, Indyk tells us, driven by advice from Clinton’s own pollsters, sent to help Barak shore up his domestic political support. And in the crucial months after the Camp David summit broke down, Clinton took too literally the multilayered messages and coded assurances he got from Yasir Arafat.
These mistakes flowed from a more basic problem — a failure to grasp that the Middle Eastern leaders the Clinton team was dealing with, Arab, Israeli and Iranian, had their own political needs and motives, which did not always coincide with Washington’s expectations or with the requirements of successful peacemaking. That is why Indyk titled his book “Innocent Abroad.” Indyk sees virtue in what he (too naïvely) characterizes as America’s innocence of ulterior motives. But he rightly sees the need to temper this innocence with a more realistic understanding of how Middle Eastern politics actually work.
Indyk’s own grasp of these larger Middle Eastern realities sometimes falters. He is too quick to reduce complex Arab societies to trite historical stereotypes about pharaonic traditions and desert kingdoms. He considers it legitimate for Israel to modify peace proposals to satisfy domestic constituencies but rarely thinks it legitimate for Arabs to do the same. Israel is a democracy, and the Arab societies it negotiates with are not. But no Arab leader is free to disregard public opinion on the fate of Palestinian refugees, sovereignty over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem or the return of territories conquered by Israel in 1967.
Given the deep hole the United States has dug for itself over the past eight years, it will not be easy to reclaim the role of honest broker necessary for successful Middle East peacemaking. No one expects Washington to be strictly neutral between Israel and the Arabs, but it must again be perceived as reasonable and balanced in its expectations and demands. Following Indyk’s advice in “Innocent Abroad” would be a good place to start."
INNOCENT ABROAD
An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East
By Martin Indyk
Illustrated. 494 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30
