Patrick Tyler
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
America in the Middle East
628pp. Portobello. £25.
978 1 84627 020 8
US: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. $30.
978 0 374 29289 8
The years after the First World War were the high point of what the historian
Elizabeth Monroe called" Britain's Moment in the Middle East". The
years after the Second World War saw Britain hand over to the United States,
symbolized by the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and Britain's
surrender of the Palestine mandate in 1948. Neither Britain nor America has
much cause to be proud of its record. For Britain the context was the
British Empire, with the Middle East seen as a route to the East and the
Antipodes( Gladstone compared it with the Great North Road). For America the
context was the Cold War. This, as much as internal American politics,
continually drove the US to a false understanding of the conflict between
Israel and the Arabs, the poisonous legacy of the British period.
The past sixty years have seen a tragic series of events in the region,
including at least one war in each decade, several of them longer than the
Second World War, and latterly the widespread abandonment not only of
international law but of principles of humanity and decency which supposedly
underlie it, the ultimate degradation being imprisonment without process and
torture encouraged at the highest level by America's leaders.
The prime cause, and what marks out the Middle East region from other
tormented parts of the world, is the injustice done to the Palestinian
people in the name of reparation for the injustice done elsewhere, and by
others, to the Jews. The remedy, the" two state solution", has
been clear for decades. Yet it seems further away now than ever.
The" special relationship" between Israel and America, as President
Obama called it after his meeting on May 18 with the new Israeli Prime
Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is facing a critical test. Obama is committed
to the two state solution and to stopping Israeli settlements in the
occupied territories, and he repeated these commitments on May 18. Netanyahu
has refused to subscribe to either. He will almost certainly have to make a
verbal concession on both, but if he continues to stall in his actions as
all Israeli governments including his own have done in the past, Obama will
have to decide: will he give in or will he use muscle in a way we have not
seen since Eisenhower? There is plenty of muscle to be used: for example, US
aid to Israel runs at about$ 3 billion a year, and it would be a simple
matter technically, though far from simple politically, to deduct from that
aid an amount corresponding to expenditure on the illegal settlements, which
are probably unaffordable in the long run for Israel itself. The first round
took place on May 18, two hours behind closed doors, and what passed between
the two has already sparked a propaganda storm. The New York Times, not
always unsympathetic to the Palestinian point of view, played up the subject
of Iran( which Netanyahu would far rather talk about than Palestine), and
has been accused in the Huffington Post in a banner headline of"
falsifying" the meeting, first by overemphasizing the Iran theme and
second by reading into Obama's" careful and measured remarks"
exactly the hostile intention towards Iran that he had taken great pains to
avoid.
In A World of Trouble, Patrick Tyler presents a fair picture of the period of
American hegemony. Hefty and without pictures or maps, his book is
nevertheless easy to read. The main strength is Tyler's deep knowledge of
American political culture and personalities, and his clinical analysis of
American actions. For example, he steers the reader through the astonishing
combination of naivety, recklessness and lies which characterized American
actions in the Reagan period: the soliciting of funds from the Saudi
Ambassador, Prince Bandar( Israel had turned them down), to finance
counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, contrary to American law; the smuggling
of arms and provision of strategic intelligence about Iraq to Khomeini's
Iran as ransom( also illegal) for the release of American hostages in
Lebanon; the provision of strategic intelligence( again) to Saddam Hussein
to facilitate his use of poison gas against Iran; the bid to plot with
Saddam the assassination of a Palestinian political leader( Saddam turned
them down).
Tyler largely glosses over what he refers to as" means that many would
later call torture", saying that" the public was unaware until
long afterward that George Bush had sanctioned torture in 2002 and 2003".
This is wrong. The Washington Post, Tyler's own old paper, published a long
report in December 2002 which made clear that the Americans were
systematically using methods which they had denounced as torture when used
by other governments, and were also handing prisoners over for brutal
treatment by other intelligence services. The article, by Bob Woodward and
others, quoted American officials at length:" We don't kick the[
expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick
the[ expletive] out of them". And again:" If you don't violate
someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job".
The main weakness of A World of Trouble is a lack of understanding of Arab
political culture and personalities. The Saudis in the 1970s are"
bedouin oil sheikhs who rejected the modern world, who practised a
fundamentalist version of Islam". Their culture is described as"
deeply mysterious", and their old King, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, is said
to have" detested the British" and seen America as" a more
idealistic power". He is also held to have looked to America to develop
Saudi Arabia's oil and to protect the kingdom from" the Soviet empire
and from the inherent instability of the Middle East". This is not
wrong, exactly, but it is wholly lacking in insight. Almost the only Arab
with whom Tyler claims to have had any long connection is Prince Bandar, a"
hard drinking and fun loving ex-fighter pilot"," the incandescent
pal, the fighter jock who loved Texas football". This is Bandar in his
role as friend of the Bush family, but, Tyler goes on," another face
was always turned east to the Oriental court of the House of Saud, with its
internecine politics and its distinctive agenda". It is this other face
that is missing from A World of Trouble.
Tyler's intention is to bring together the two worlds of American leaders on
the one hand, and the Middle East and its personalities on the other, and
his time frame is from Eisenhower, with a brief backward glance at Truman,
to George W. Bush. This would be a mighty task for the most accomplished
historian. Unfortunately, Tyler's account is marred by errors. King
Hussein's ancestral line did not rule in Mecca: they were governors
appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. The Arab revolt was not commanded by
Colonel T. E. Lawrence, although he was its most famous participant. Yitzhak
Shamir was not the leader of the Stern gang. Nasser was not born in Upper
Egypt, and" Saidi" is a geographical term, not a clan. The annual
flooding of the Nile was controlled by the old Aswan Dam built by the
British in 1902, not by the High Dam. Executions in Saudi Arabia take place
on Friday, not Thursday. Aden city, not Aden harbour, is in the crater of an
extinct volcano, and a Saudi prince does not refer to his king as" His
Royal Highness".
The cumulative effect of such blemishes is to undermine confidence in Tyler's
judgement on the big issues." What stands out is the absence of
consistency... as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity."
No: America's support of Israel has been consistent, with only the smallest
hiccup under Eisenhower. Tyler also writes that" if history has
revealed anything, it is that it takes American leadership... to bring the
two sides - Arab and Israeli - into a position where they have a chance"
to resolve their conflict. Wrong again. As Tyler recognizes, the first and
greatest resolution was launched by President Sadat of Egypt entirely on his
own, and the seminal Oslo process which brought the Israelis and
Palestinians together did not depend on American leadership at all. I would
draw the opposite lesson from history; the confidence the world has placed
in American ability to solve the Arab-Israeli problem is misplaced, and
American readiness in the last resort to be guided by Israel has repeatedly
frustrated the balance essential to a political solution.
The narrative is episodic, skipping directly, for example, from the Suez War
in 1956 to the Six Day War in 1967; President Kennedy appears only in
flashback. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the extended
narrative of various crises of decision-making where the issue was war or
peace. One example shows Brezhnev unsuccessfully pleading with Nixon, having
dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night in San Clemente in June
1973, to agree principles, essentially land for peace, which might make
talks between the Arabs and Israel possible. But" What if it leaked
that the superpowers had colluded at a midnight meeting in San Clemente to
establish a principle of total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied
territories? The onslaught from the Israel lobby and Congress would cripple
Nixon. He was already in the fight of his life with Watergate prosecutors".
Tyler describes this as" a tragic failure of American diplomacy,
strategic perception, and communication between the superpowers - a failure
that did in fact lead to a devastating war", when Sadat crossed the
Suez Canal on Yom Kippur. He goes on to accuse both Nixon and Kissinger of
distorting the record in their memoirs, suggesting that Brezhnev was
threatening war, which he was not.
Perhaps the most sensational story of all follows immediately afterwards. The
Egyptian assault takes Washington unawares. Nixon perceives an opportunity
to re-establish some balance and work for peace between the Arabs and
Israel; Kissinger on the other hand is driven by a sentimental regard for
Israel, unable to distinguish between standing up for Israel's security and
standing up for Israel's retention of the territory conquered in 1967,
combined with a determination that whenever the Arabs turn to Moscow for
support they should be humiliated. With Nixon bogged down by Watergate,
Kissinger unscrupulously withholds a personal message from Nixon to
Brezhnev, lies to the British ambassador, and encourages the Israelis to
disregard the call for a ceasefire. Tyler concludes that Kissinger's
manipulations raised profound constitutional questions.
That pattern was repeated a decade later, when Al Haig virtually conspired
with the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, to support the 1982 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon without the authority of President Reagan, with the
difference from Kissinger Nixon that Reagan was ready to be gulled, and Haig
was incompetent as well as disloyal.
Tyler documents the penetration of the US establishment up to the level of the
White House by Zionist activists. This had begun long before the period
covered here, with grandees like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frank-furterboth
members of the Supreme Court. Brandeis, then head of the Zionist movement in
America, told Arthur Balfour in 1919 that Palestine should be the Jewish
homeland and not merely that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine;
Balfour, never concerned about consistency in his policy, said that he
entirely agreed. Frankfurter represented the Zionists at the Paris Peace
Conference.
Tyler records that when America was taken by surprise by the Israeli invasion
of Egypt in June 1967, it just so happened that Mathilde Krim, a Zionist
hawk and former active member of Begin's terrorist organization, the Irgun,
was a guest at the White House. She and her husband had been frequent guests
at President Johnson's ranch in Texas, and he had given them top-secret
security clearances. Throughout the Six Day War she" sent a steady
stream of notes to the Oval Office". When Dean Rusk was arguing for a
more balanced position, Johnson put him on hold and" asked his
secretary for Mrs Krim's memo on Jewish anger so he could read portions to
the Secretary of State".
This phenomenon continues to the present. Robert Fisk points out that when
President Clinton sent" peace envoys" to visit Binyamin Netanyahu
and Yasser Arafat, he chose as their leader Dennis Ross, who is closely
associated with AIPAC, the main institution of the Israeli lobby in America.
Ross, no doubt a loyal American official, albeit one who believes in the
special relationship with Israel, turns up so often hand in glove with the
Israelis in the Clinton years that one almost feels sorry for him when he is
eventually labelled" Bibi[ Netanyahu] 's negotiator" and" a
Patsy for[ Ehud] Barak". Ross is now Hillary Clinton's special adviser
for the Gulf and Southwest Asia. One of her first actions as Secretary of
State was to send two emissaries to Syria; both were Jewish and one of them,
Daniel Shapiro, was brought into Obama's campaign team in 2008 as"
Jewish Outreach Coordinator". This follows the appointment as Obama's
Chief of Staff of Rahm Emanuel, whose father was a member of the Irgun,
though he himself does not appear to have been actively involved in Zionism.
Britain seems to have avoided the mistake of expecting committed Zionists to
take a balanced position on problems of the Middle East. The only exception
that occurs to me is the appointment of the moderate Zionist Herbert Samuel
as the first British High Commissioner in Jerusalem, effectively the
governor, in 1920. Tony Blair's appointment of Lord Levy as his
representative in the Middle East was foolish, because Levy was inevitably
seen by some, at least, of the Arabs as representing Ariel Sharon rather
than Blair, but at least Levy, like Emanuel, has not been publicly involved
in Zionism. It will be interesting to see if the fact that the mother of
George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, was an
Arab turns out to be his Achilles heel if and when the going gets rough.
In an interview in The Times on May 11, King Abdullah II of Jordan said that
the Obama Netanyahu meeting on May 18 would be critical for Obama's
credibility worldwide and in the Middle East; if the peace plans did not
succeed there would be another war. Unfortunately, the history of the region
suggests that anyone who predicts war is more likely to be right than wrong.
Oliver Miles read Oriental Studies at Oxford University, joined the
Diplomatic Service and served in a number of Middle Eastern countries
including a spell as British ambassador in Libya. He is chairman of a
business consultancy, MEC International Ltd.
