"A persuasive but painful solution for dealing with the mess in the Middle East." --Kirkus

The greatest danger to America's peace and prosperity, notes leading Middle East policy analyst Kenneth M. Pollack, lies in the political repression, economic stagnation, and cultural conflict running rampant in Arab and Muslim nations. By inflaming political unrest and empowering terrorists, these forces pose a direct threat to America's economy and national security. The impulse for America might be to turn its back on the Middle East in frustration over the George W. Bush administration's mishandling of the Iraq War and other engagements with Arab and Muslim countries. But such a move, Pollack asserts, will only exacerbate problems. He counters with the idea that we must continue to make the Middle East a priority in our policy, but in a humbler, more humane, more realistic, and more cohesive way.

Pollack argues that Washington's greatest sin in its relations with the Middle East has been its persistent unwillingness to make the sustained and patient effort needed to help the people of the Middle East overcome the crippling societal problems facing their governments and societies. As a result, the United States has never had a workable comprehensive policy in the region, just a skein of half-measures intended either to avoid entanglement or to contain the influence of the Soviet Union.

Beyond identifying the stagnation of civic life in Arab and Muslim states and the cumulative effect of our misguided policies, Pollack offers a long-term strategy to ameliorate the political, economic, and social problems that underlie the region's many crises. Through his suggested policies, America can engage directly with the governments of the Middle East and indirectly with its people by means of cultural exchange, commerce, and other "soft" approaches. He carefully examines each of the region's most contested areas, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and explains how the United States can address each through mutually reinforcing policies.

At a time when the nation will be facing critical decisions about our continued presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, A Path Out of the Desert is guaranteed to stimulate debate about America's humanitarian, diplomatic, and military involvement in the Middle East.

From the Hardcover edition.

America's Interests in the Middle East

Many americans have only a vague sense of their country's interests in the Middle East. Some on all parts of the political spectrum believe our engagement in the region brings only trouble and that we should disengage as much as possible. Many who do support American engagement in the region do so without ever having thought through why. Still others overstate American interests, assuming that nothing that happens in the Middle East is unrelated to the well-being of the United States. In arguing for a new, activist grand strategy toward the Middle East (albeit one not quite so activist as the second Bush administration's), it is incumbent upon me to demonstrate why it is important that we should do so, and that means explaining specifically why and in what ways the region matters to the United States.

Along the same lines, it is impossible to devise a clear strategy without an equally clear understanding of that strategy's purpose. As the old expression has it, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Its converse is also true: picking the right road requires you to know where you are going. Indeed, in the past, America's approach toward the Middle East and other countries or parts of the world has gone astray precisely because we did not have a clear sense of our own interests. In every instance where that was the case, the result was a bad one--ranging from mere missed opportunities to outright disasters. Thus it is important to articulate America's interests in the Middle East to have a clear sense of what we should be hoping to achieve, what we should care about, and what we should fear; but it is equally important to understand those interests to discern what it is that we should not fear, what should not concern us, and what is unnecessary for us to achieve.

This last point matters because one of the traps Washington has fallen into in the past is "goal displacement," in which our true interests become superseded by something else that seems to be consistent with them but really is not. For instance, many American interests in the Middle East are best served by the preservation of stability in the region, but that does not mean that stability itself is our interest. Change is often necessary, especially when the status quo becomes untenable, as is the case in the Middle East today. Unfortunately, for much of the last thirty years American administrations have failed to make that distinction and have often favored stability and opposed change at all costs. The result has been a series of American policies designed to preserve the status quo that have ended in disaster, from the Iranian Revolution to 9/11. Mistakenly substituting stability for our true interests in the Middle East is a dangerous example of goal displacement that we should avoid whenever possible. The best way to avoid it is to have a very clear sense of what our true interests entail.1 Consequently, Part I examines America's most important interests in the region, starting with oil but also including some interests that apply all over the world but should not be lost amid our specific interests in the Middle East.

chapter 1

Oil

Let's not kid ourselves: america's first and most important interest in the Middle East is the region's oil exports. However, this interest has nothing to do with how much oil we import from the Middle East. Instead, oil is our number one interest in the Middle East because our economic well-being relies generally on plentiful oil. That is true both because of the direct importance of oil to our own economy and, indirectly, because of its importance to the...

 

"Once again, Ken Pollack has plunged into the most complex and controversial issues of our time, offering cogent analysis, clear thinking, and very constructive proposals."

 

"Thoughtful and informative . . . a powerful argument for continued, and perhaps even greater, American involvement in the Middle East."

 

"One of the most lively and accessible accounts of the modern Middle East and the policies that are needed to turn the region around."

 

"Authoritative . . . spells out the full range of threats the United States faces in the region and offers prudent advice on how to defuse them."

 

Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, he served as director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, where he was the principal working-level official responsible for implementation of U.S. policy toward Iraq, Iran, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula. Prior to his time in the Clinton administration, he spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst. He is the author of The Threatening Storm, The Persian Puzzle, Arabs at War, and Things Fall Apart. He lives in Washington, D.C.


From the Hardcover edition.

 

A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack
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