Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East
April 6, 2009
Ross (The Missing Peace
) and Makovsky (Making Peace with the PLO
) contend that if the U.S. wants to broker peace in the Middle East, it must cease operating from ideological assumptions and “see the world as it is.” Ross, now an adviser to Hillary Clinton, was chief negotiator for the Clinton administration, and Makovsky is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; their call comes with real bona fides. “Context matters,” they write—but they, too, fail to consider the entire context in question: Israel is all but denied agency, as the authors fail to address the impact of its occupation of Palestinian lands. What may be the crux of the book is found in a mention of This Much Too Promised Land
by Ross’s former deputy, Aaron David Miller, which examines American negotiating mistakes, including the efforts of his and Ross’s team. Ross and Makovsky’s open antagonism to Miller suggest they may be less interested in learning from errors than in explaining why everyone else is wrong.
April 15, 2009
Bush I and Clinton peace negotiator Ross (Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World, 2007, etc.) and journalist Makovsky (Making Peace With the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accord, 1995) seek to correct some fallacies about the Middle East.
No Arab government, the authors write, protested when, in 2007, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor that Syria was building. That, they explain, is because"most Arab governments want Israel to be strong when it comes to Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas, and Syria," and because most of those governments mistrust Iran as a potential threat with designs on, among other things, Arab oil. Setting aside the tedious construct that all official American thought vis-à-vis matters Middle Eastern has been marred by myths and illusions—the corollary being that only this book is correct on such things, much too daring a claim—Ross and Makovsky venture some Machiavellian divide-and-conquer strategies that have the potential to solve multiple problems at once. Everyone wants peace between Israel and Palestine, for instance, except for a certain percentage of radicals on both sides. Peace would have the further benefit of depriving the radical fringe in the Arab world—at whose extreme stands al-Qaeda, as well as Iran—from having a unifying cause to complain about. Forget the old orthodoxies about linkage, the authors write. When it comes to outflanking Iran, purity of procedure is less important than effective action. Hybrid approaches, they write, are more realistically situated than the triumphalist claims of the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq War. On that note, they write,"the Bush years have left a woeful legacy: the forces that reject peace are far stronger than they have been…[and] the forces favoring coexistence are far weaker." Yet the authors express hope that a new administration might make headway in securing America's interests in the region.
Though mostly addressed to the inside-the-Beltway crowd, Ross and Makovsky's book merits wider attention—and is sure to tick off certain readers in Tehran, Damascus and perhaps Tel Aviv.
(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
July 1, 2009
American presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush have been vexed and frequently puzzled by the movements and antagonisms of the Middle East. For some, pan-Arab nationalism was an obstacle. For others, Soviet penetration seemed threatening. Currently, the danger of Islamic radicalism is undeniable. Of course, the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a festering sore. Ross was the chief peace negotiator under both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Makovsky is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They have utilized their extensive knowledge of the region to illustrate both the errors of current policies and to suggest new approaches for the future. They criticize the disengagement of the last administration, but they are equally harsh on the so-called realists who so ardently attacked Bush policies. They assert that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not necessarily fundamental to regional stability, and they deny the emerging wisdom that the U.S. must negotiate with Hamas and Hizbollah. This is a serious and provocative workthat is likely to engender extensive debate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)