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A GIFT FOR OBAMA

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By GEORGE WALDEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 11, 2009

"A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East - From the Cold War to the War on Terror," by Patrick Tyler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30)

As Barack Obama prepares to move in to the White House, expectations are rising that bouquets rather than shoes will be lobbed at him in the Mideast.

Patrick Tyler's new book on the region, "A World of Trouble," would make a good addition to the presidential briefing. Given recent events in Gaza, Obama needs all the context he can get.

From President Dwight D. Eisenhower's idealistic view of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt to George W. Bush's adventure in Iraq, U.S. policy in the Mideast can be seen as one continuous and tragic failure. Few journalists know this as well as Tyler, who has reported from the region for both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

We don't expect Tyler to be soft on President Richard Nixon; his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger; or either of the Bushes. And he's not. For one thing, he gets April Glaspie, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, to confirm the well-reported bungle that led President George H.W. Bush to accept Saddam Hussein's reassurances about Kuwait in July 1990, just before he snatched it in an invasion.

Yet the U.S. leader who really gets it in the neck in this book is Bill Clinton. When it came to Iraq, Clinton was oblivious, uninformed and diverted, Tyler says. As for Clinton's abortive attempt to seal an Arab-Israeli deal, it suffered from the president's prodigious capacity for empathy: a sensibility that mired him in sentimentalism and undermined the resolute pressure that is the hallmark of leadership, the author writes.

Most culpably in Tyler's eyes (and my own) was how Clinton failed to understand the menace of al-Qaida and squandered opportunities to attack Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan. The thought of Clinton whispering in his wife's ear after she becomes secretary of state leaves me, for one, unhappy.

Tyler takes a predictably hard line on Israel's dogmatism and how the nation in his view manipulates U.S. power to its own advantage. Most hair-raisingly, he describes how Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol ordered two hastily readied atomic bombs - inelegant contraptions with appendages sticking out - put on trucks during the 1967 Mideast war so they could race to Egypt's border in case Arab forces overwhelmed Israeli defenses.

Yet Tyler's factual account of the origins of the war, including the provocations of Soviet-backed Syria and Egyptian President Nasser's illegal blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba, will help a generation for whom history is an irrelevant bore to understand Israel's obsession with more defensible frontiers.

It's a mistake to discuss foreign policy in isolation from domestic affairs, and Tyler shows how Watergate snarled the geopolitical strategies of Nixon and Kissinger. He also counts the foreign-policy cost of Clinton's distraction with his in-house Cleopatra.

Unfortunately, Tyler limits his discussion of such fallibilities to the U.S. side. There's little here to suggest that the social, political and religious atavism that characterize most Mideast regimes will continue to thwart attempts to secure a stable peace, in the future as in the past.

Tyler seems to have a thing about presidential responsibility; one of his previous books was titled "A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China." Nothing wrong with that, except that the emphasis reflects Tyler's conviction that the White House and Israel are jointly responsible for pretty much everything. Israeli intransigence is fair game, but so, too, for example are Moscow's machinations in Egypt and Syria, which in this book appear almost benign by contrast.

Grabbing all the blame for yourself is imperialism inverted: We own the world and, therefore, all its faults. I don't think Tyler believes that. He should have stressed that the intractability of the Mideast has something to do with the history and culture of the region before the United States even existed.

As the book stands, it will bolster the illusion that all we need to break the Mideast deadlock is somebody new and well-meaning in the White House. Tyler's own remarks on Clinton surely demonstrate the fatuity of that.

George Walden is a former United Kingdom diplomat and member of Parliament and a critic for Bloomberg News.

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