Patrick Costello on repeated errors
America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region by Marc Lynch published by Hurst
As Professor Marc Lynch explicitly states, his book was written at a moment of rage about the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the US insistence on backing that slaughter. But, unusually, at a time when so many are focusing on Trump’s exceptionalism, he uses his rage to argue that this has not been an exceptional moment, but the logical outcome of over three decades of consistent US policy in the region. This outcome stems from the unchanging bipartisan structure of the US-led post-Cold War order in the Middle East, based on hard security and an unchanging group of “friends” (Israel and autocratic Arab leaders) and enemies (Iran, political Islam). Most fundamentally for him, it is the result of a failure to accept that the Middle East’s people are “actually human beings” and that their lives matter as much as American or Israeli lives. It is this that led them to completely misunderstand the Iraq that they invaded in 2003, and it is this that has made them consistently fail to respond adequately to the persistent voices in the region demanding both an end to Israel’s occupation and democracy in the region. The resulting loss of legitimacy has significantly and progressively weakened US power in the Middle East.
Lynch is well qualified to make this case, as head of the Middle East Studies department at George Washington University. His case is also a logical extension of his earlier work: famously, he coined the term “Arab Spring” in 2011 to refer to the uprisings in the region. The thread running through this book is a consistent one: if the US had learned to listen and respond to the aspirations and concerns of the region’s people, it would not have continually made the wrong choices.
The story starts for Lynch with the 1991 Gulf War, when George W Bush was able to muster a broad UN-backed international coalition, including all the Arab States (though not the PLO), to support the removal of Iraq from Kuwait. This put the US centre-stage in the region: the collapse of the USSR meant there was no longer a great power counterweight. Lynch points out that much of the Arab support for the Kuwait operation had been contingent on US backing for an Israeli-Palestinian peace process and that the Oslo Accords were in part the result of that US promise. Through a series of chapters on each of the Presidents from George H W Bush to Trump and Biden (with an afterword on Trump 2), he lays out in compelling detail the way in which, from this position of strength, opportunities were continually missed as the wrong choices were made. The story of Obama’s failure to follow through on his initial support for the Arab Spring uprisings is particularly poignant.
Why, he asks, do clever and fundamentally decent policymakers (many of whom Lynch no doubt knows personally), keep making the same mistakes in the region and then come out the other side saying that they did the best that they could? Perhaps it is the rage that is driving the writing, but he only partly answers the question. He refers to the echo chamber of the Washington think tanks, where policymakers talk to each other and to the representatives of their allies, and how that reinforces a failure to respond to views in the region. There is less here about the way in which domestic politics, geopolitics and economic interests have always structured the US approach. Returning to the Obama case, he doesn’t point out, for example, that the willingness of the US to allow the Gulf States to crush the uprising in Bahrain may have had something to do with the presence there of the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet. The lack of a single mention of Europe’s role is also an important absence. While it may be the case today that Europe can be relied on to follow Washington in the region, that was not always the case during this period, and the distinctive European positions on Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iran have at different moments changed some of the dynamics.
Aside from these quibbles, Lynch’s book is a useful primer on understanding the history of US policies in the region and a helpful corrective to those who, in these dark days, can see only the exceptionalism of the Trump Presidency. Continuity is also a relevant and important part of this story.