Quicksand - America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East Geoffrey Wawro
Penguin Press; 2010; 610 pgs.
Wawro, currently Professor of Military History at the University of North Texas, has written this very comprehensive and critical history of US relations in the Middle East from WWI through Operation Desert Storm. Unusually for someone who is writing about a given set of local problems he does not lose sight of how the broader world situation impacts and diverts attention of the US foreign policy establishment from the problem at hand. He does not simply construct his analysis or lay blame for today’s problems on “mistakes of the past” but analyzes the decisions made based upon the priorities of the actors and the often conflicting problems that were current at the time, as well domestic political pressures, US election competition bureaucratic infighting, inertia and sloppiness. In other words he takes into account the real world and not some imagined perfect world that many authors imagine.
This is an excellent read for those who wish to know more about the Middle-east and its history with the US.
Some quotes, starting with my favorite:
It is quite extraordinary how people can live with delusions big enough to transform illusions into reality, reality into illusion. Anwar Sadat – in Search of Identity, An Autobiography Pg. 3
Shiites, including millions of Arabs on Iran’s border with Iraq, were not natural adherents of Arab nationalism, which was an ideology based on Sunni notions of Islam and Arabism. Pg. 328
. . . the ideology of Shiism is explicit: ever since Allah’s removal of the messianic Twelfth Imam in the ninth century, no temporal power is considered legitimate. Pg. 331
. . . Americans failed to grasp threat “the concepts of economic development current in the West - where quick material gain is often the only valid criterion – do not necessarily correspond to the true interests of developing nations.” Pg. 359
With their own political problems – an obstreperous clergy, a dissatisfied populace and foreign rivals (Iraq, Iran, and the Soviets) circling hungrily – the Saudis ramped up “petrodollar Islam” after 1973, when oil revenues soared, to bankroll fundamentalist movements like Jamaat-e-Islami. The Saudis wanted to spread Wahhabism, push back against secular, pro-Soviet figures like Yasser Arafat – who had praised the Russian invasion of Afghanistan – and beat back Khomeini’s Shiite challenge. Khomeini in Tehran was establishing something that looked suspiciously like a Shiite “papacy” which aspired to guide and dominate all Muslims - Shiite and Sunni – by harping on the secular themes of Israel, poverty and imperialism. Pg. 392
. . . no fewer than eighteen treaties had been concluded between the Turks and the Persians between 1638 and the withering of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, yet somehow the border between Iran and Iraq had never been precisely drawn. Pg. 398
National Security Decision Directive stated that the US “would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran. Pg. 401
The United States, Regan said could not afford to allow Iraq to lose. Pg. 401
In 1987-88, Washington tilted back towards Iraq. The US Navy began flagging Kuwait tankers in the Persian Gulf – to shield them from Iranian attacks and protect Iraq’s oil revenues – and also began hitting Iranian oil platforms and surface ships. Pg. 403
Senator Gore, weighing his own run for the presidency, agreed to vote for the war only if given the floor for a twenty-minute prime-time television slot (by Republican leader Bob Dole) to advertise his vote. {Didn’t want to seem soft on defense. – GRH} (Vote passed the senate 52-47; House 250-183) Pg. 419
. . . Clinton’s two-week Camp David summit failed because of a divergence in narratives. The Israelis saw themselves as generously giving Palestinians over 90 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza; the Palestinians grumbled that they were being pressed to accept just 22 percent of the Palestine that had been wrested from them in 1948. Pg. 601
Thomas Friedman’s “Pottery Barn Rule” You break it, you own it. Pg. 603
This one gets an A
