Good Succint Intro to International Relations of Middle East | War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise...

More--or less--than you bargained for | War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History, Revised and Updated | Avi Shlaim

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	• War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History, Revised and Updated Avi Shlaim Penguin (Non-Classics), 1995 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Unmissable classic - please bring out a new edition!

When this first came out I nearly missed it because it appeared too short to be anything but a simplistic popularised summary. Thank goodness I did start browsing, because not only did the style have me hooked, the argument's balance and lucidity, and (whatever Likudnik propagandists may say) the thoroughly scholarly grounding of the account, made me realise that here at last I had the perfect introductory text for the intelligent student entering upon a study of modern Middle Eastern history and politics. It has been a top recommendation in my final-year university course on Middle East politics ever since. The only frustration has been that, since it went out of print in the UK, my students have had to rey on the few library copies and my own. I shall now be directing them to Amazon to get their own copy - and order some more for the library.

The book somehow manages to synthesise a mass of historical detail and controversy into a straightforward but finely judged account, bringing out all the key themes and dynamics: this is not only a list of facts and events, but a compelling analysis. He brings to life especially well the interplay of external actors (especially Britain, France and the US) and regional factors (the calculations of regional elites, balancing between dynastic/regime ambitions and the constraints of the international environment; and in places the outbursts of popular anger against both regimes and outsiders - including against the influx of Jewish settlers and eventually the establishment of Israel).

The book wears its scholarship and erudition lightly - but it is perhaps only someone as thoroughly grounded in the disciplines of International Relations and History as is professor Shlaim, that could perform this feat with such apparent ease and elegance.

Serious scholars of the region, while perhaps willing to quibble with small details, will (and indeed do) agree about the author's mastery of the material and the soundness of his judgement. That he ties a number of observations to the historical analysis that have a political flavour about current events (e.g. about US foreign policy), does not make the historical analysis itself any less rewarding. Nor indeed can the conclusions regarding the current shape of the Palestine problem be dismissed (as happens in one or two of the other reviews on this site) except by those with the sorts of preconceived convictions (and political agendas?) that brook no challenge.

This is a little gem of a book, and one of those few that serve the wider public as well as the novice student of Middle Eastern affairs. Buy it and help persuade the publishers (and the author!) to bring out an updated edition for the mid-2000s!

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Good Succint Intro to International Relations of Middle East

This book is a nice introduction to the great powers' influence on international relations of Middle Eastern countries. Surely, it offers a partial picture which is mostly about the role of great powers in shaping international relations in the Middle East. But it does a good job in doing what it does. Some of the stories and argumensts are so important for understanding contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. Here are some excerps from the books:

"The Ottoman Empire had provided a far from perfect political system, but it worked. During WWI Britain and it allies destroyed the old order in the Arabic-speaking Middle East without considering the long-term consequences."

"Nixon and Kissenger also aided the shah in his compaign to destabilize the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad. In 1972 they agreed to covert American-Israeli-Iranian action in support of the Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq."

"[regarding Iran-Iraq war] Kissinger summed up the general preference when he indicated that the best outcome would be for both sides to lose."

"[The Iran-Iraq war] started as a result of rivalries inside rather than outside, but Reagan's intervention prolonged it unnecessarily."

"On July 31 [1990], three days before Iraqi troops charged into Kuwait John Kelly [the US assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian Affairs] testified on Capitol Hill that America had no treaty and no commitement obliging it to send forces should Kuwait be overrun."

"[The Gulf War] also demontrated that Americans are better at short, sharp burst of military intervention designed to restore the status quo than at sustained political engagement to resolve the undrlying origins of instability in the Middle East."

"Most of the American mistakes in the last half century can be traced to the combination of globalism and the Israel-first approach."

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More--or less--than you bargained for

This is a brief work which bills itself as "A Concise History." Concise it is, and at fewer than 150 pages its pace is of a necessity very efficient, except at points where the author pauses to vent toxic fumes that rise from his belly while digesting certain of the more combustible materials of Middle Eastern history. Schlaim is an avowed revisionist--which is not to say propagandist--and is not delicate when recounting events in Israel's past at uncomfortable odds with history as taught in Tel Aviv elementary schools.

Nor is he inhibited--when incomplete historical records require extrapolation in order to connect dots otherwise forever separated--in offering his own sometimes byzantine, usually cynical, always overweight conjecture. If he succeeds in nothing else, it's in noting the inherent weakness of national folklores in which fragments of credible history are mortared into cohesion using generous spadefuls of agreeable, pleasant myth. Iron walls they are not. A true enough assertion, and perhaps of greater ultimate value to the reader than a dry listing of names, dates and events--even if it could be argued that the latter was the implied good or service, the thing you bargained for when picking up the book.

Having said that, I'll also say that I couldn't find, nor have since discovered any error in any fact Schlaim presented as such. There are times when a "revisionist" would be more aptly titled a "correctionist."

If I have a serious critique, it's that he at times overstepped the boundaries of both historian and social commentator in order to satisfy personal disdain he felt for some of the characters in the drama. Such as Ronald Reagan, for instance, whom he accused not only of "...intellectual mediocrity and lax leadership," but of spending "...sleepless afternoons in the White House worrying about the Soviet threat."

Get it? (wink, nod). Poor Ronnie was so afflicted with old age and infirmity that pressures of the job cut into his afternoon naps. Not the best nor worst old joke I heard spoken during Reagan's presidency, but Schlaim chose the wrong venue for it. With a scant 150 pages to wedge both a history and bloated personal perspective of the Middle East into, malicious humor would have been better held for Volume II, if only to preserve the dignity of Volume I.

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Shrewd, witty, and highly readable, this concise, accessible analysis by a professor of International Relations at Oxford surveys the volatile politics of the Middle East--and the role the United States and other great powers are playing in the region.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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