'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English,' by John McWhorter

"English is subjected to a great number of descriptors in “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,” John McWhorter’s brief and engaging look at some of the history of our language. It is, among other things, “very special,” “not normal,” “miscegenated,” “interesting,” “peculiar” and, in case we haven’t yet gotten the point, “genuinely weird.” McWhorter’s goal is to shine some light on topics he feels that authors of the typical “grand old history” of English, with their “fetish” for vocabulary at the expense of grammar, have left out.



McWhorter is a past professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell; a current senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; and the author of numerous books on both language and race. Refreshingly, this book is neither a dry examination of academic minutiae nor an excessively simplified history. McWhorter’s book is a welcome change from the sort of scholarly book in which the foundation of an idea seems often to be built on the ­corpses of the author’s enemies. He may disagree with a number of his predecessors, but he is unflaggingly polite in doing so, either not mentioning them by name, or emphasizing that he enjoys and respects their other work immensely.

“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” is by no means a complete chronicle of our language. McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, “the untold history of English.” He points out that English has what he calls “kinks” in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that “untold histories” have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter’s persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish.

McWhorter states that he has two lessons that he intends to get across. “First, there is nothing unique about English’s ‘openness’ to words from other languages.” And “second, there is no logical conception of ‘proper’ grammar as distinct from ‘bad’ grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness.” (“Grim little rules” like the one against using “they” as a ­gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense — hey, Shakespeare did it — but laymen cling to it “like Linus to his blanket.”)

It’s not so surprising that English’s “openness” to words fails to overwhelm McWhorter — he’s a linguist, and as a bunch linguists tend to be less impressed with the words that make up a language’s vocabulary than they are with how those words fit together. Along the way he also touches on what the Vikings took away from our grammar, takes a skeptical look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which holds that language affects thought patterns) and raises the question as to whether the ancient Phoenicians may have had more of a hand in our language than is currently thought.

As for his own language, McWhorter occasionally adopts a tone that is jarringly colloquial. He has already established a relaxed yet informative style in which to explain linguistic history to a general audience, and he does it quite well — he gains nothing by beginning sentences, as he is wont to, with “Yeah” or “But check this out.”

A more comprehensive history of the language can be found in David Crystal’s “Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language” or “The Story of English,” by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. But McWhorter has provided a pleasingly dissenting view — one that wears its erudition lightly."




OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE
The Untold History of English
By John McWhorter
230 pp. Gotham Books. $22.50

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'The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan,' by Gregory Feifer

"In early January 1988, 39 Soviet paratroopers were positioned on a cliff overlooking the Gardez-Khost road in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job was to protect the soldiers below, who were trying to open up the dangerous, heavily mined route. All around waited Islamic fundamentalists who had spent the last eight years fighting the Red Army and the government it had installed in Kabul just after Christmas 1979.



Soon, groups of black-clad mujahedeen, probably from Pakistan, were crawling toward the Soviets from all directions, machine guns blazing. The Soviets fought back valiantly. A helicopter soared in daringly through heavy fog to deliver ammunition. One soldier died while trying to wire together weak spare batteries to make a radio work.

For all their courage, though, the Soviets were adrift. They were outsiders, fighting outsiders, in a third country — and they didn’t really understand why. The Pakistanis believed they were on a mission from God and screamed “Allah Akbar!” as they headed toward battle. The Soviets could think to respond only with the names of their faraway hometowns. “For Borisov!” one hollered as he threw a grenade.

The scene sums up much of the folly of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians held off the attackers and got the road open. But the paratroopers soon left their position, the tanks below moved on, and the mujahedeen quickly retook it all. The fight was won, but the battle was lost — and of course the war would be too. Three and a half years later, Borisov became part of a newly independent Belarus.

Gregory Feifer relates these events in his fascinating new book, “The Great Gamble.” It’s a highly readable history of the conflict, which began with so haphazard a decision to intervene that Feifer gives credence to the assertion of one general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.” It just happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The author, NPR’s Moscow correspondent, tells the story mainly through the eyes of Soviet veterans and spies. The results are vivid and original — even though there are limitations to basing so much of the book on individual, self-serving recollections. For example, Feifer describes in detail how the K.G.B. hustled four Afghan ministers out of the country in ammunition boxes. It’s a great story, but Feifer appears to rely on one K.G.B. intelligence operator for most of the dialogue and drama. And two pages after it ends, Feifer reveals that one of the allegedly smuggled ministers denies the whole thing.

The book’s structure and style mean that Feifer adds little specifically to the question that will draw many readers: What can the United States learn for its own wars today? Feifer flicks at the topic, but the grim answers he offers have already been absorbed: don’t shoot up wedding parties, never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain, and remember that all politics in Afghanistan are messy. Remember, too: Fighting these guys is hard. According to Feifer, the mujahedeen were canny enough to smuggle heroin into Soviet barracks to get their adversaries hooked.

Even if Feifer fails to offer what his publisher calls “striking lessons for the 21st century,” he succeeds in his main goal: presenting a new side of a long, sorry war that would leave an estimated 1.3 million Afghans dead and the Taliban surging through the ravaged countryside toward Kabul. It’s “a tragic human story,” Feifer writes — and one that he recounts with skill."




THE GREAT GAMBLE
The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
Illustrated. 326 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

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'A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub,' by Bill Barich

"If you close your eyes and imagine an old-fashioned Irish pub, you might think of worn wood floors, bric-a-brac on the walls and gents in flat caps. According to Bill Barich, an American writer based in Dublin, this stereotype is great for tourism worldwide but wields a culture-sapping strength that’s killing off pubs in Ireland itself. Nothing less than the country’s national identity is at stake.



Driven by a need to experience a timeless tavern like the one in John Ford’s 1952 film “The Quiet Man” — a place with a strong sense of community, where the art of conversation flourishes — Barich travels throughout Ireland and is routinely disappointed. The pubs he finds are either lifeless “museum pieces,” corporate sports bars with TV screens or shameless fakes hawking manufactured nostalgia. The old cereal boxes and tin signs advertising tobacco at E. J. Morrissey’s are, Barich laments, “just for show.” The banjo-and-bodhran-playing musicians at the Brazen Head resemble “a tepid version” of the Clancy Brothers. Throughout Ireland, literary giants like Joyce and Yeats are memorialized in ways that suggest they were regulars at a laughably improbable number of spots.

Inauthenticity and modernization, Barich concludes, have ruined bar fun (or “craic as it’s known to the Irish). Interviews with elderly publicans like Dessie Hynes help Barich understand why the old-fashioned businesses are dying: Tougher drunk-driving laws keep people from venturing to local taverns, and members of the community no longer convene in public houses. (Yet another reason to dislike Starbucks, shopping malls and the Internet.)

Greed also takes some of the blame. “Pubs aligned with the leisure industry,” Barich explains, describing popular gimmicks like quiz nights with cash prizes, Texas Hold ’Em tournaments, bingo and karaoke. At one low point, he finds himself surrounded by five Bud-drinking jocks watching a soccer match while the barman sends text messages on his cellphone. Elsewhere, Barich encounters a device that lets patrons pour their own pints, “thereby reducing the contact between people even further.” He’d cry into his beer if only he could find a decent one: Even the local Guinness — “flavorless,” “sticky,” tainted with burnt barley — falls short.

But as rural pubs are dying in the mother­land, the concept has become a hot commodity around the world. The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has built about 500 bars in 45 countries. Their advice: Add an “& Son” tag to make your place sound older. The multinational drinks conglomerate Diageo-Guinness sells Irish Pub Concept (I.P.C.) business plans. And statistics suggest that more stout is now sold in Nigeria than in Ireland.

These changes — insidious byproducts of globalization — come across as relentless downers, but Barich weaves a ­never-ending stream of oddly engaging historical and literary references into every dead end. In explaining why some publicans doubled as undertakers up until the mid-1900s, he notes that “under the Coroners Act of 1846, any coroner had the right to dispatch a dead body to the ­closest pub, and the proprietor was obligated to store it, usually in a cool cellar with the kegs of beer, until an inquest could be held. The law stayed on the books until 1962.”

To shed light on the manly art of drinking (and perhaps lend credibility to his beer-soaked pursuit), Barich invokes all kinds of Irish literary heavyweights, including Conor McPherson, William Carleton and Flann O’Brien, whose poem “The Workman’s Friend” inspired the book’s title. Occasionally his digressions seem overly indulgent — not every reader will care that a bartender named Helen McLean, in the crossroads hamlet of Bally­scannel, was once fond of ballroom dancing — but Barich’s passion for boozy subjects is broad and undeniable. He’s equally at ease covering the effects of the temperance movement and introducing regional slang terms for being drunk.

By the end of his travelogue, Barich admits that “there’s a good deal of hand-wringing . . . over what it actually means to be Irish” and that plenty of Irish men and women don’t actually mind the disappearance of old pubs. And while he finds a few worthy spots, he never deeply contemplates the paradox that makes them worthy. He has, after all, based his notion of authenticity on a few plays and poems and an American movie — on a romanticized stereotype."




A PINT OF PLAIN
Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub
By Bill Barich
242 pp. Walker & Company. $25

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'1848: Year of Revolution,' by Mike Rapport

"Two thousand eight was not a change year. Eighteen forty-eight was a change year. A series of liberal revolutions exploded from one end of Europe to the other, toppling governments from France to Hungary to many of the small German and Italian states. The revolts are not well known in the United States, but they rank in the annals of upheaval alongside the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of European Communism in 1989 (relatively gentle though that was).



In “1848: Year of Revolution,” a lively, panoramic new history, Mike Rapport describes the uprisings of that year while making clear their modern resonance. The revolutionaries, he argues, were overmatched by near-impossible challenges that sound remarkably familiar today. They had to wrestle with the demons of nationalism, which threatened to drag liberal revolutions down into the muck of ethnic conflict. They had to forge new constitutional orders that could temper violent radicalism. And they had to confront the grinding poverty and social misery of the freshly empowered masses, who had unattainable expectations for economic growth and social equality. The book’s descriptions of impoverished serfs and alienated city dwellers could equally well be about peasants in the Chinese countryside and migrant workers in Beijing and Chongqing today.

Rapport, a lecturer in history at the University of Stirling in Scotland, begins by explaining that European order had been frozen since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, with conservative rule imposed by the great imperial courts. Chief among the absolutists was Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s icy chancellor, haunted by memories of the cataclysmic wars after the French Revolution. “In times of crisis,” the loftily paranoid Metternich wrote, monarchs had to show themselves as “fathers invested with all the authority which belongs to heads of families.” The flesh-and-blood emperors were rather less impressive: Czar Nicholas I was a pioneer in creating Russia’s brutal secret police, while Austria’s “mentally disabled” Emperor Ferdinand was called “Ferdy the Loony” by his subjects.

During a deep economic crisis in the 1840s, the desperate misery of peasants, artisans and the urban poor generated popular rage at the Metternichian system. In the past, nervous governments had censored their press, clamped down on labor unions and froze the middle class and professionals out of politics. When liberals rose up in places like Naples and Piedmont, they were crushed by Austrian forces. Polish nationalists got stomped under Austrian, Prussian and Russian boots; in 1830, a Polish revolt ended with Russia hauling 80,000 Poles off to Siberia in chains.

What were wild demands in 1848 are democratic dogma today: free speech, parliaments, religious liberty, jury ­trials. But despite such noble goals, the revolutionaries were easily enraptured with violence. The great Italian democrat Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Metternich called the most dangerous man in Europe, believed that “ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.”

The insurrections were astonishingly widespread, with different local grievances detonating in sequence across the continent — a virtual European Union of rebellion. They were ignited by a riot in Austrian-ruled Milan, which was followed by a revolution in Sicily. Next, protest marchers in Paris clashed with the munici­pal guard, prompting riots across the city. The French government had no stomach for the military onslaught necessary to crush the revolt, and King Louis-Philippe helplessly fled to Britain with his queen, assisted by a British vice-consul who provided the royal couple with the alias “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Then German liberals and workers, thrilled by the news from Paris, took to the streets. In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth, a noble turned vehement radical against Austrian domination, thundered for self-government free from “the pestilential air” of Metternich’s absolutism. In Vienna itself, troops opened fire on rebellious crowds; the shaken Austrian government allowed a constitution and forced Metternich to resign. Even in reactionary Prussia, where soldiers unleashed artillery against the mutinous citizenry in Berlin’s streets, the king had to grant a constitution. The only great powers spared bloody chaos were Britain, where constitutional government and middle-class support were already established, and Russia, where the czar choked off any hint of revolt, radicalizing subsequent generations of revolutionaries.

After the electric jolt of success, the revolutionaries staggered under the weight of governing. One of the most neuralgic issues was nationalism. Metternich had struggled to maintain an empire made up of at least 11 nations, including restive Hungarians and Italians. After him, the “springtime of nations” left the continent awash in conflicting ethnic claims. In Frankfurt, radicals demanded a unified German state. But what about non-­Germans living in that future Germany, like Danes and Poles, and what about Germans living outside a united Germany? One German politician chillingly noted “the preponderance of the German race over most Slav races . . . is a fact.” Many Austrian monarchists and Catholics, although ethnically German, disliked the prospect of joining their ostensible brethren.

Smaller nations weren’t much kinder. Hungarians simultaneously demanded an end to Austrian rule and authority over Transylvania, to the resentment of many Romanians living there. The prospect of allowing Jews to vote in a liberated Hungary set off a wave of anti-Jewish riots, scaring the government into postponing Jewish emancipation temporarily. Some members of minorities in Hungary, particularly many Croats, decided they had preferred Austrian rule. Croatian troops marched to within 30 miles of Budapest before being routed by Hungarian forces. When Romanian and Serbian peasants rose against Hungarian rule, they were slaughtered.

As the revolutionaries struggled to provide social and economic progress, the old order reasserted itself. The liberal government in Hungary was crushed by devastating invasions from Austria and its ally Russia. In German lands, disillusionment after 1848 paved the way for experiments in dictatorship. Asked what could restore Prussian authority, Otto von Bismarck, sitting at a piano, played the Prussian infantry’s charge march. He later said, “The great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions — that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by blood and iron.” In France, Louis-­Napoleon Bonaparte, the callow nephew of the famous conqueror, launched a coup d’état in 1851, rounded up dissenters and installed himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Rapport sees in 1848 the “germinating bulbs” of European authoritarianism.

He tells a good yarn, with a keen eye for ground-level details, like the “constitutional pastries” produced by revolution-minded Viennese bakers. Still, while trying to keep readers from getting lost in the deepening blizzard of revolts and interventions, Rapport sometimes strains for writerly effect, as when he calls Napoleon “the incorrigible Emperor” — a cutesy description of a military tyrant seen by many Russians at the time as the anti-Christ incarnate. He also stumbles when he says that Metternich “was not troubled” by the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule; in fact, the Austrian minister described it as “six years of torments.”

It’s hard to read this book without feeling a deepening reverence for successful postrevolutionaries like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, who first made revolution and then made the unheroic compromises that are the lifeblood of actual democratic government. People will always thrill to utopian demands for perfection, from Mazzini to Che. But it’s what comes next that counts: the daily humdrum of effective governance."




1848
Year of Revolution
By Mike Rapport
Illustrated. 461 pp. Basic Books. $29.95

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'The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found,' by Mary Beard

"In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer-­Lytton wrote.



In her engrossingly mischievous “Fires of Vesuvius,” Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton “fails to point out to his readers,” Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house’s only latrine. And worse: “Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a cloth-processing workshop, or fullery. Fulling was a messy business, its main ingredient being human urine. . . . The work was noisy and smelly. In the background to Glaucus’ elegant dinner party there must have been a distinctly nasty odor.”

Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University,takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii — sown over the years by archaeologists and classicists no less than Victorian novelists and makers of “sword and sandal” film extravaganzas. While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources. “There is hardly a shred of evidence for any of it” serves as her battle cry, and it’s a noble one.

The overarching notion she combats here is that when Pompeii was buried by volcanic debris from Vesuvius in the great eruption of A.D. 79, it became a city “ ‘frozen in time,’ as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim,” a pristine Roman town just waiting to be discovered. In fact, Beard points out that Pompeii, “disrupted and disturbed, evacuated and pillaged, . . . bears the marks (and the scars) of all kinds of different histories.”

Those scars didn’t begin with the eruption — there was a devastating earthquake 17 years earlier — and didn’t end with it. Ancient scavengers, looters of all eras and “the rough and ready approach” of early excavators have all severely damaged the site, making it much harder to reconstruct an accurate building history. For good measure, Pompeii was heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II; as Beard wryly notes, most visitors are not aware that many of the houses they pass through, now expertly restored, have in essence been destroyed twice.

A disheartening aspect of the book is the great number of paintings and painted signs, mentioned by Beard in passing throughout the text, that were recovered only to fade or vanish entirely, reminiscent of the subway-excavation scene in “Fellini’s Roma.” These have been as elaborate as a series of bright murals from the amphitheater’s curtain wall, destroyed by frost in the year after their discovery in 1815, or as homey as the sign “Women” over their separate entrance to one of the town’s sets of public baths.

If Pompeii is no time capsule, however, it is as close as we are likely to come on such a scale. Together with its lesser-known sister city Herculaneum, it is a place crucial to our conception of Roman art, domestic architecture and daily life. Beard leads a fine tour and lives up to her promise of surprises around every corner. She walks down the sewerless town’s streets (“a smelly mixture of animal dung, . . . rotting vegetables and human excrement — which was, just to complete the picture, no doubt covered in flies”); looks into houses (those empty atriums with the misleadingly modernist aesthetic would have been hung with gaudy curtains and stuffed with wooden furniture, storage cupboards, looms and whatnot); saunters into the baths (despite their hygienic reputation, in the days before chlorination, they were filthy); steps up to the bar (the big, unglazed jars set into the counter were for dry foodstuffs, not for doling out the hot stew of our fantasies); and ventures into the brothel (there were probably far fewer than is often supposed, and the one clear example, whatever it was in 79, is a cramped, grim place today, Beard says: average tourist visit, three minutes).

Over all, Pompeii was “an assault on the visual senses,” to use Beard’s phrase, not least for the range of art, public and private, it contained. For one thing, much of the art is highly eroticized, even when not bluntly pornographic. Much else can only strike the modern viewer as bizarre — something out of Petronius or Apuleius rather than Cicero or Horace — like a fresco of the Judgment of Solomon story enacted by pygmies. And under both headings fall the phalluses. There seem to be phalluses everywhere. Enormous ones, tiny ones, doubles, singles; attached to men, gods or satyrs in every medium, or in disembodied splendor; over doors, carved into the pavement, on chains and serving trays, turned into lamps, winged like birds, with bells on. Even some of the phalluses have phalluses. If they were good luck charms, as is sometimes thought, it obviously didn’t work.

Aside from the melodramatic and misleading American title (there’s a minimum of volcanology or disaster drama; in Britain, the title is aptly “Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town”), this is a wonderful book, for the impressive depth of information it comfortably embraces, for its easygoing erudition and, not least, for its chatty, personable style. Perhaps it’s no surprisethat Beard, who certainly can’t be accused of ivory-­towerism, writes an appealing blog for The Times of London, “A Don’s Life.” (She is also the classics editor for The Times Literary Supplement.)

If anything disappoints about “The Fires of Vesuvius” it’s that the mostly black-and-white photographs fall well short of conveying the sensual assault that Beard so skillfully evokes in her text. For that, we can turn to another general-interest book on the subject, THE COMPLETE POMPEII, by Joanne Berry (Thames & Hudson, $40). Berry, who teaches ancient history and archaeology at Swansea University in Wales, packs her magazine-style pages with large-format color photographs of the art, artifacts and buildings of the town, and the result is suitably dazzling.

Beard’s mild but persistent polemical tone — another mark of the successful blogger? — is a dynamic means of structuring her writing, but it often has the effect of casting a Yeats-like shadow over the mass of her fellow scholars: “All wear the carpet with their shoes; / All think what other people think.” One longs to leap up and shout, “Not all!” Berry, for example, has a drier style and makes no special effort to project a personality onto the page. But she seems no less critical of the evidence than Beard and discredits many of the same “myths.”

Both of these books, which make excellent companions, remind us that there will be more to look forward to: after 1,930 years, a quarter of Pompeii remains unexcavated. "




THE FIRES OF VESUVIUS
Pompeii Lost and Found
By Mary Beard
Illustrated. 360 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $26.95

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'Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East,' by Rashid Khalidi

"Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.



Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” ­Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire.

Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi ­looks to interests rather than principles. His ­story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if ­squalid acts of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the nationalization of his ­country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 1957 parliamentary election.

This brute meddling, Khalidi argues, not only kept the pot of civil conflict ­boiling in many already weak states, but also “profoundly undermined whatever limited pos­sibility there might have been of estab­lishing any kind of democratic govern­ance in a range of Middle Eastern countries.” That carefully hedged sentence shows that Khalidi is no conspiracy theorist, and recognizes the complicity of Arab regimes in their own predicament. And the Soviets occasionally play the ­heavy as well, ­though Khalidi sees the cold war as a very un­equal battle between a world-girdling United ­States and a defensive and fearful Russia.

“Sowing Crisis” vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi al­leges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-­Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by check­ing a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

But the most pressing question “Sowing Crisis raises is not whether American behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable auto­cracy experiencing rapid growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semiprosperous democracy. American policy makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained ­largely on the sidelines of globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom deficit,” from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

Since Khalidi inadvertently caused Barack Obama some grief during the presidential campaign when it came out that Obama attended a party in 2003 for a man some Republicans called a “ter­rorist professor,”the president is un­likely to dis­play this book in public. But he ­should read it, not so much to chasten his sunny view of our recent past in the Middle East as to be reminded how very hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long, and practically everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel). "




SOWING CRISIS
The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
By Rashid Khalidi
308 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95

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