Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.
Kessler, Martha
Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East, by Leon Hadar. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 180 pages. $24.95, hardcover.
Leon Hadar's stated purpose for this book is to stimulate a
long-overdue debate in this country over U.S. policy in the Middle East.
He does not spend too much time second guessing past decisions with
"what if" analysis, but when he does, his command of the
history of U.S. engagement in the Middle East is impressive and used
adroitly throughout his criticism. What he does throughout the book is
to deconstruct the underlying assumptions and inaccurate understandings
upon which U.S. policies have been based and to suggest entirely new
approaches to securing U.S. interests. He has a view, argues it well,
and achieves his objective of stimulating thinking "outside the
box" about failures that have dogged the United States in this part
of the world for decades. Whether one agrees with his judgments or not,
he pushes the reader to examine a long list of so-called givens of U.S.
positioning in the region.
Central to Hadar's discussion is his characterization of what
he calls the Middle East paradigm, which has guided U.S. Middle East
policy since the 1940s. At the heart of this paradigm is the belief that
"competition with the Soviet Union made American involvement in the
Middle East a costly but necessary way to protect American interests as
the leader of the Western alliance." There were three drivers of
this vision: containment of the Soviet Union and its allies; protection
of free access by Western economies to the energy resources of the
region; and protection of a democratic Jewish Israel. Hadar argues that
this paradigm and its underpinnings are now obsolete as a result of the
collapse of the Soviet Union, changing relations between the United
States and its Western allies, and the transformation of the
Arab-Israeli dispute into a regional and cultural conflict or a
local--as opposed to Cold War dispute. Whereas these changes should have
resulted in a re-examination and evolution of our assumptions and
understanding of the dynamics of the region, Hadar contends that the
Middle East paradigm persists, producing increasing costly, dangerous
and ineffectual policy outcomes for the United States.
Hadar is quite taken with Thomas S. Kuhn, the historian of science
who coined the use of the word "paradigm," defined as a set of
received beliefs. The author spends a good deal of time explaining how
and why these received beliefs became so entrenched. War, international
crisis and other increasing costs sometimes force the foreign-policy
apparatus and the American public to examine those policies that no
longer benefit the interests of the American public, but usually inertia
fed by vested interests in "issue areas" blunts the will and
energy required to look hard at how best to serve American interests.
Hadar uses the language of science in analogies to foreign-policy
considerations. This is both effective and diplomatic.
The position that Hadar has come to, having deconstructed the
foundation of the Middle East paradigm as we know it, is that the United
States should disengage from the Middle East. The catastrophe of 9/11,
rather than stimulating a careful and thoughtful examination of the
causes of the attack, triggered what Hadar believes is a strong tendency
among foreign-policy practitioners to invest even more resources in
sustaining the existing paradigm. In this case, this would include
deeper intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq; a war on terrorism that has
no real boundaries, geographic or legal; and a closer embrace of
Israel.</p> <pre>
So it is not surprising that if and when an individual dares to
challenge the MEP (Middle East Paradigm) to suggest that it should
be reassessed and propose a new MEP based on the notion of
American
disengagement from the Middle East, he or she is treated at best
as a political Cassandra, or at worst as a political extremist, as an
"isolationist," the term that members of Washington's
foreign
policy establishment usually use to bash those who disagree with
them. </pre> <p>The author gives an unusual but
generally fair accounting of how Presidents Bush and Clinton essentially
protected the status quo and were often successful in managing the
increasingly conflicting tenets of the Middle East paradigm as it had
been passed down to them, then sent off "fire brigades" of
diplomats to deal with occasional outbreaks of violence and juggled the
seemingly incompatible U.S. commitments to Israel and America's
Arab allies. But there was baggage that came with spreading U.S.
hegemony in the region as our influence strengthened in areas of Russian
retreat in Central Asia and elsewhere. We contributed to the conditions
that strengthened Osama bin Ladin and his terrorist network by
"continuing the alliance with the Mujaheddin guerrillas in
Afghanistan, tolerating Pakistani and Saudi support for the Taliban,
maintaining a military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf,
imposing sanctions on Iraq, and helping Israel preserve the status quo
in Palestine."
Hadar envisions a much larger role for the Europeans in stabilizing
the Middle East than the United States has allowed Europe to play.
Clearly, he believes a more influential Europe would have helped the
region and helped us. He suggests, for example, that Washington could
have declared victory in the Cold War and consequently reduced American
military and diplomatic commitments in the region, creating incentives
for local players to reform their bankrupt political and economic
systems and to manage their own security concerns. A lowered U.S.
profile in the region would have pushed Europeans to protect their own
interests. Under these conditions, the Europeans might have spent more
time and international capital trying to mediate the Arab-Israeli
conflict, even if the United States lacked the political will to end the
dispute for which it has taken full mediation responsibility.
Because the American public did not object to the cost of American
involvement up through the 1990s, the formula and the paradigm--out of
date though it was--seemed to be holding. The author argues that the
most serious challenge arrived with the second intifada and 9/11 at the
beginning of the new millennium, when the American role went seemingly
overnight from a fairly priced pax Americana to the huge expense of
full-blown empire.
Now, most foreign-policy analysts see the neoconservative pilots of
U.S. foreign policy under the current Bush administration as dramatic
departures from the norms of the foreign-policy establishment. Not so
Leon Hadar. He believes they are the extreme but natural extension of
the protectors of the Middle East paradigm. They took the gloves off to
protect the paradigm--literally and figuratively. They were anxious to
go to war with Saddam Hussein, to establish U.S. hegemony in Iraq with
an attendant impact on the entire region and to make no apologies for
this imperial project. To return to the tenets of the paradigm--the
containment of the Soviet Union (or any other incompatible power), the
provision of access to energy resources for the United States and its
allies, and the protection of a democratic and Jewish state in
Israel--this dramatically more muscular stewardship has in the
author's view inflated our posture in key respects:
* Access to the region's energy resources now no longer
depends on earning the goodwill of those who possess those resources but
rather subjects them to American military power.
* Balancing America's commitment to Israel and to its Arab
partners has become transfigured into unapologetic, total support of
Israel, thus subordinating Middle East peace negotiations to a
nationalist Israeli agenda.
* Unilateral American military presence in the region has finally
relegated Europe to observer status in the determination of the future
of the Middle East.
This last point is clearly of major concern to Hadar.</p>
<pre>
... Neoconservatives based their strategy of unilateral American
military presence in the Middle East on the assumption that the
European allies should not play any role in determining the
future of the Middle East. In fact, Europe was seen as a global rival
that should be expelled from the region. As the neoconservative
narrative describes it, an American-Israeli alliance in the Middle
East would now be able to stand up to the global threat posed by a
Euro-Arab axis in the region. </pre> <p>Indeed, much of the
discussion focuses on the issue of Europe and its role in the region and
its relationship to the United States in the context of the Middle East.
Hadar believes the U.S. war in Iraq and the neoconservative project
in the region have created a diplomatic rift between the traditional
transatlantic security partners and fed pervasive anti-American
sentiment throughout Europe, producing the most serious challenge to the
Western alliance in the last half century. The author spends a good deal
of time looking at the tattered relationship from a variety of
perspectives, taking on such sensitive subjects as antisemitism, the
culture of Jewish victimhood, fears of a German-French alliance, and the
optic through which neoconservatives view these phenomena.
Because Hadar's European scholarship is as strong as his
knowledge of the Middle East, the reader is able to review many of the
underlying issues in the current strains between Washington and Europe
and the perspectives of European scholars and journalists. Throughout
this tour d'horizon, Hadar sticks to his major thesis that despite
the crisis with Europe precipitated by Bush neoconservatives, the Middle
East paradigm pursued by Bush and his predecessors is the real problem.
The neoconservatives have come and will go, but what needs to change is
the fundamental trajectory of the U.S. drive for dominance in the Middle
East.
Hadar believes the United States can free itself from the
conventional wisdom: that the American economy is dependent on the
energy resources of the Middle East, and Washington must do something to
resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The author argues that the United
States is not dependent on Middle East oil, gets over 70 percent of its
energy resources from elsewhere, and in reality is more dependent on
Latin America than the Middle East. Similarly, he pans the notion that
Washington is uniquely positioned to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute,
which threatens vital U.S. interests. That reality dissipated, he
contends, with the end of the Cold War.
Whether one agrees with the basics of Hadar's viewpoint, he
makes a strong case that Europe's key interests are embedded in the
Middle East and that Europeans may not be able to continue in their
secondary role. Europe's unarguable reliance on Middle East oil,
the huge immigration of peoples from the region into Europe, its
proximity to the lethal arsenals developing in the area, and a host of
other reasons put Europe in an entirely different geostrategic position
than the United States vis-a-vis the Middle East.
The author's outline of the costs to the United States of its
drive for Middle East hegemony and the dysfunction that drive has
produced is provocative, as is his prescription for a "European
takeover." He sees the Bush I and Clinton administrations as
failing to seize the opportunity of the collapse of the Soviet Union to
re-evaluate seriously U.S. interests in the region and, instead, pursued
the winning and maintaining of predominance in an imperfectly understood
and unruly Middle East. This seemed a low-cost effort for some time, but
both former presidents failed to take into account that a unipolar world
order would likely not last. Hadar also charges these leaders and their
policy elites with a total failure of imagination in foreseeing
longer-term costs and the rise of the nonstate actors, whose terrorist
attacks against the U.S. interests exacted those increasing costs. The
neoconservatives of the Bush II administration are given an even worse
report card:</p>
<pre> These same elites would then unimaginatively pull
from the
script of traditional hegemonic behavior the invasion of first
Afghanistan and then Iraq. Stuck in the Middle East paradigm,
policymakers could not see any alternative. The rising military and
diplomatic commitments ended up igniting the kind of anti-Americanism
that was displayed in 9/11. At the same time, the rising American
commitments to Saudi Arabia and Israel not only increased each
nation's dependency
on Washington but also raised long-term threats to their survival.
</pre> <p>Hadar writes with a flair not often found in
foreign-policy writing, borrowing heavily from pop culture for his
chapter titles and using the perspectives of sociology and the hard
sciences to explain and illuminate his points. This style has the effect
of pushing the reader outside the worn-out language of the Arab-Israel
conflict and the Middle East peace process, and the conventional
terminology of foreign policy. His style complements the boldness of his
suggestions and the strength of his argumentation in achieving his
primary objective: stimulating new thinking about the U.S. role in the
Middle East.
Martha Kessler, analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (ret.)