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Reading the Conflict - A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East - from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Yesterday President Obama stood up at a podium and said a thing or two.

To my mind, one of the most powerful take-aways from the President's now famous/infamous Middle East speech is to be found in the long list of countries he talked about well before he got to the Israel/Palestine part.

The fact is, as important as Israel/Palestine is, it is part of a much larger region, and the United States acts all across that region. Indeed, the United States is currently trying very hard to get on the right side of history as that region changes before our very eyes. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, whether we like it or not, part of a bigger picture.
And this has always been so, whether or not we remember it.

This week, I recommend A World of Trouble, an outstanding history of American diplomacy in the Middle East, stretching from the Eisenhower era through the Administration of George W. Bush. It's big, it's sprawling, and it is admirably readable.

Author Patrick Tyler, a veteran journalist (New York Times, Washington Post), brings a reporter's sensibility to events that stretch out across decades, allowing him to cut through the fog of history, wars, and enormous egos to get at the heart of the region's story - and it's not a particularly encouraging journey.

Tyler makes a powerfully convincing case that the various Mideast disasters that greeted Obama in 2008 - little-to-no success in Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, or in the war on terror - were essentially the results of hubris, miscalculation, and the personal foibles of past Presidents and the people they hired. Jointly, they serve as a primer in what not to do.

As Americans have come to understand, the people at the top are as given to making mistakes as the next guy - indeed, the mistakes are enormously bigger, because the stakes are enormously higher.

The Carter and Reagan White Houses, two separate Bush Administrations, and the Clintonites as well spent years acting as if merely declaring the desirability of an Israeli-Palestinian peace would make it appear. Clinton and George W. Bush failed to anticipate the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, and Bush invaded Iraq with barely a glancing knowledge of the place he was leading America to.

"What is most striking about the half century of U.S. effort [in the Middle East]," Tyler writes, "is the record of vacillation, of shifting policies, broken promises, and misadventures, as if America were its own worst enemy."

"The Middle East would never have been an easy region to master... but our mistakes have made it progressively harder to do so."

In addition to his 25 years of reporting from the Mideast and Washington, Tyler spent three years in intensive research, including many recently declassified documents. The avalanche of information might well have overwhelmed a lesser writer, but A World of Trouble is surprisingly crisp, occasionally funny, and an entirely disquieting text, revealing just how powerfully our government's perceptions, prejudices and anxieties - well over and above informed opinion - have shaped policy decisions.

Today, President Obama stands before a Middle East that is, in some regards, remarkably changed from the one he addressed at Cairo University in 2009 - and in other regards, is disturbingly the same. This is certainly true of Israel/Palestine where, if anything, there has been not progress but constant reversal. As Tyler says bluntly about the Carter Administration: "The region was simply larger and more complex than Americans had realized."

It's to be hoped that President Obama and his team have boned up on the material and lessons to be found in Tyler's excellent work, and that rather than allow themselves to be guided by old mistakes and outsized personalities, they make a genuine effort to base policy on what the region actually needs.

But why stop at the Administration? Anyone who wants to better understand that region would be well advised to read A World of Trouble.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli  freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter. She also crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles (despite being only an Angry Lady and not at all Black) and atheist-interfaith blog NonProphet Status. All recommendations are entirely her own.