Review: A Choice of Enemies

Abstract

A CHOICE OF ENEMIES America Confronts the Middle East Lawrence Freedman New York: Public Affairs, 2008. 640pp. US$29.95 clotn (ISBN 978 1586485184)Serious tomes on Middle East politics often make for depressing reading because missed opportunity, ideological blindness, territorial obsession, and incompetence litter the playing field, befuddling and confusing successive and ill-prepared American administrations. So reads A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East by the noted professor of war studies at King's College London, Sir Lawrence Freedman. A Choice of Enemies offers an exhaustive and detailed narration stretching from Jimmy Carter's presidency to that of George W Bush.Freedman's core thesis is that successive administrations, plagued with their own profound shortcomings, have managed the affairs of complex and difficult region, occasionally with limited success, but most often with abject failure.The Oxford dictionary defines Catch 22 as a difficult situation from which there is no escape because it involves mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. This is the overwhelming message of Freedman's book. At times he tries to temper this skepticism with prescriptive passages for Washington policymakers on reviving diplomatic skills or the need for better intelligence, but these assertions pale beside the evidence demonstrating that crisis situations and the motivation of the players are so complex and variable that getting it right is near impossibility.For this reviewer, political analyst increasingly focused on the effects of culture, narrative, and collective belief on peacemaking, A Choice of 'Enemies was needed corrective. Comprehension of underlying belief systems is essential but so is an awareness of complex personalities, their vulnerabilities, interrelationships, and temperaments.In many ways this 600-page work can be characterized as series of micro-histories, ranging from Iran-Contra to the Golan Heights, in which personalities and their idiosyncrasies determine results. Domestic pressures caused PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to change tone and message continually in order to protect his standing during the Oslo and Camp David processes. While Ehud Barak's social autism, lack of warmth, and inflexibility contributed to the failure of the peace plan he himself had initiated, Arafat's penchant for playing the members of his team off against each other created internal confrontations that trumped negotiating strategies. Itzak Shamir turned tail and rejected his own proposals, having sold them to the Americans, because of pressure within his own party.These challenges faced successive American administrations but Freedman believes that recurrent crises were as much the result of Washington's incompetence and presidential misjudgements as they were regionally generated. Sadly, most often there was no effective third party.Instead, Washington's attitude was characterized by ideological rigidity, lack of sensitivity, indifference to other cultures, narratives, and behaviour patterns, the inability to think long term or to devise clear policies, and indeed simple laziness. For Freedman, US policy can be seen as case of strategic overreach, prompted by the superpower's belief that inconvenient realities on the ground can be brushed aside because its own power and influence will determine the outcome. …