"Viewed through realpolitik’s disinterested prism, the central place that the protection of Israeli interests occupies in American foreign policy priorities seems counterproductive, even a liability. Smaller than New Hampshire, with fewer inhabitants than New Jersey, ringed by mostly hostile neighbors, fighting repeated wars like the latest bloody conflagration in Gaza, entangled in an apparently unsolvable territorial dispute, Israel consumes vast amounts of manpower, expertise, and diplomatic and intelligence resources, if not whole presidential careers, as Patrick Tyler demonstrates in “A World of Trouble,” an authoritative, richly detailed account of American policy in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio warps the United States’ relations with the Arab (and wider Muslim) world, Arab leaders faithfully tell every new occupant of the White House. Midwife a meaningful Palestinian state, they claim, and all would be sweetness and light from Rabat to Riyadh.
If only the Middle East, as so many American presidents chronicled here seem to believe, were that simple; indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a most useful alibi for the region’s creaking dynasties and dictators, diverting domestic attention from their own sclerotic economies and dismal human rights records. A democratic Palestine, plugged into the global economy, is the last thing they want, for fear their restive populations will demand the same.
If only the Middle East, as so many American presidents chronicled here seem to believe, were that simple; indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a most useful alibi for the region’s creaking dynasties and dictators, diverting domestic attention from their own sclerotic economies and dismal human rights records. A democratic Palestine, plugged into the global economy, is the last thing they want, for fear their restive populations will demand the same.
George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, also blamed the Jews for many of his troubles, if the extraordinary scene Tyler describes in the book’s prologue is to be believed. He recounts how in 2004 a furious Tenet, dressed in his underwear, drank half a bottle of Scotch, supplied by Prince Bandar bin Sultan at his palace in Saudi Arabia, in a few minutes, while raging at the Bush administration’s duplicity. “They’re setting me up,” he said, but “I am not going to take the hit.” The hit that needed to be taken was for the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, over which the United States had gone to war. The White House, Tyler writes, expected Tenet “to fall on his sword to protect the president.” Tenet raged against the “bastards” in the administration and mocked the neoconservatives who supported Israel’s right-wingers as “the Jews.” He then jumped into the swimming pool and did impressions of Yasir Arafat and Omar Suleiman, the chief of Egyptian intelligence. (Tyler’s report is based on the recollections of three witnesses, but Tenet denies making the comments.)
“A World of Trouble” covers 10 American presidencies, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s. An experienced foreign correspondent who has reported from across the Middle East for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Tyler draws on decades’ worth of notebooks, numerous interviews and declassified documents. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs like a thread through the narrative, but Tyler also ranges much wider, to Suez, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq conflict and both Iraq wars. He writes vividly, allowing the reader access to White House meetings, huddles in the corridors of power, seats at international summits.
There are finely drawn pen portraits of the key players. Few of the presidents impress: Jimmy Carter dithers, Ronald Reagan and his advisers are clueless, Bill Clinton is distracted by the Lewinsky scandal. The local leaders seem more serious: Menachem Begin, who equated Arafat with Hitler; Yitzhak Rabin, who made peace with Arafat; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who — along with Hamas suicide bombers — helped destroy any chance of a peace agreement. Here too are crucial Arab figures: the party-loving Prince Bandar, confidant of numerous presidents; the brave but doomed Anwar Sadat; King Hussein of Jordan; and Saddam Hussein, the onetime ally against whom America eventually went to war.
It may not be a surprise to learn that the White House — like every government in history — is always riven by factions, duplicitous advisers pushing their own agendas and secret cabals plotting in the washrooms. But it still makes for delicious reading to discover, for instance, the power of Mathilde Krim, a fiercely pro-Israel Swiss Calvinist who was a former member of Begin’s right-wing underground, the Irgun. Krim, along with her husband, Arthur, had the ear of Lyndon B. Johnson, apparently more so than did Dean Rusk, his secretary of state, and Robert McNamara, his defense secretary. On Memorial Day in 1967, while Israel and Arab countries were preparing for imminent war, President Johnson was “cavorting” at his Texas ranch with the Krims and other friends.
Tyler is especially good on America’s relationship with Iran. He dissects President Carter’s tortured pusillanimity as he tried to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the need to prop up an American ally, the shah, whose regime was kept in place by secret-police torturers. Not surprisingly, the mix soon turned rancid, especially when the United States backed Iraq in its war against Iran. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja. Tyler, along with other foreign correspondents, was flown there by the Iranians on a risky mission inside Iraqi airspace. As many as 5,000 civilians perished. Tyler remains haunted by what he saw that day: “the bodies of a dozen or so small girls who had been playing the day of the attack. They lay like dolls splayed randomly on the gravel bed, eyes open in some cases, staring skyward. The faces seemed to beckon, as if impatient for the living to gather them in.” At the time, Hussein was an American ally. The Defense Intelligence Agency sent two officers to Baghdad with comprehensive plans for an air war, showing Iranian air defenses and fortifications. The agency knew Iraq was using chemical weapons, but still the intelligence flowed. When Congress protested the Halabja gassing, Republican leaders, including Dick Cheney, blocked the calls for sanctions against Hussein.
Despite its 600-odd pages, “A World of Trouble” feels unbalanced in places. The chapter on George W. Bush’s presidency, which covers the rising threat of Al Qaeda, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is compressed into 30 pages, while the American entanglement in Lebanon gets almost double that number. When the subject is not the Middle East, Tyler is less confident and makes several errors. He writes that during the Yugoslav wars, President George H. W. Bush was unwilling to commit American troops to Bosnia partly because he feared humiliating “Gorbachev” in “the heart of what the Soviets saw as their sphere of influence.” In fact, when the Bosnian war started, Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia and the Soviet Union no longer existed. Tyler also writes that “a quarter-million” were slaughtered in Rwanda; the usually accepted figure is 800,000.
“A World of Trouble” is an important account of the White House’s interaction with a volatile and strategically vital region, but it stops too suddenly in 2008. Its episodic structure would have benefited from a thoughtful concluding chapter on the obsessive, self-contradictory relationship between the United States and its friends-turned-enemies-turned-potential-friends-again across the Middle East. Tyler briefly touches on this in the prologue, arguing that the United States’ Middle East policy has been consistently inconsistent, “as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity,” but policy zigzags are common to all newly elected democratic governments. Perhaps the armed, bearded Revolutionary Guard who stopped Tyler at a Tehran roadblock in 1989 said it best: “Excuse me, sir, but if you were going to select the best American university to study electrical engineering, which one would you choose?”
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
The White House and the Middle East — From the Cold War to the War on Terror
By Patrick Tyler
Illustrated. 628 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30
