Perhaps you are aware of the fact that there is an oddly popular trivia game floating around that a group of clever (and likely bored) college...
Continue »
Making peace in the long-troubled Middle East is likely to be one of the top priorities of the next American president. He will need to take account of the important lessons from past attempts, which are described and analyzed here in a gripping book by a renowned expert who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as Middle East adviser to President Clinton.
Martin Indyk draws on his many years of intense involvement in the region to provide the inside story of the last time the United States employed sustained diplomacy to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and change the behavior of rogue regimes in Iraq and Iran.
Innocent Abroad is an insightful history and a poignant memoir. Indyk provides a fascinating examination of the ironic consequences when American naïveté meets Middle Eastern cynicism in the region's political bazaars. He dissects the very different strategies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to explain why they both faced such difficulties remaking the Middle East in their images of a more peaceful or democratic place. He provides new details of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, of the CIA's failure to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and of Clinton's attempts to negotiate with Iran's president.
Indyk takes us inside the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the palaces of Arab potentates, and the offices of Israeli prime ministers. He draws intimate portraits of the American, Israeli, and Arab leaders he worked with, including Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon; the PLO's Yasser Arafat; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak; and Syria's Hafez al-Asad. He describes in vivid detail high-level meetings, demonstrating how difficult it is for American presidents to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how easy it is for them to miss those rare moments when these leaders are willing to act in ways that can produce breakthroughs to peace.
Innocent Abroad is an extraordinarily candid and enthralling account, crucially important in grasping the obstacles that have confounded the efforts of recent presidents. As a new administration takes power, this experienced diplomat distills the lessons of past failures to chart a new way forward that will be required reading.
Review:
The scene: Camp David, July 2000. As President Clinton's attempt to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians collapses, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is gamely trying to persuade the two sides to press on. An angry Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak storms out after one meeting, muttering to Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel: "I'm fed up with this improvisation!" ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) By the time we reach this moment, three-quarters of the way through Indyk's candid but depressing memoir of his years as a U.S. diplomat and negotiator, we appreciate mightily Barak's frustration. "Innocent Abroad" is Indyk's unflinching examination of the Clinton administration's bridge-too-far diplomacy in the Middle East: its failure to reach comprehensive peace deals between Israel and Syria and between Israel and the Palestinians; its missteps in engaging Iran and containing Iraq; and its role in "shaping the environment" for the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, a success that Indyk acknowledges had "limited implications for the broader balance of power in the region." This is a lessons-learned book, complete with sober, uninspiring advice for the next administration: lowered sights, more realism, less naivete. Appearing at a time when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are promising renewed engagement in the Middle East, Indyk's book is revealing as a sometimes unwitting testament to the blinders and biases of U.S. officials who seek to broker peace. Indyk is a leading defender of the proposition that "American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." Time and again, he displays a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of Israel's leaders and their political predicaments, but his knowledge of the people on the other side of the Arab-Israeli conflict is much less evident. He is very nearly dismissive in rendering their views: "Arabs, particularly Palestinians, often argue that the Middle East conflict is caused by Israeli occupation of their land, that if only Israel would agree to withdraw fully from the territory occupied in the June 1967 war, there would be peace and security for all." He later maintains that "whenever Israel and an Arab state have engaged in peace negotiations, Israel's leaders have been prepared to offer or agree to full withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines," citing past talks with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In fact, Lebanon and Israel remain in disagreement over a border territory known as Shebaa Farms, and Syria was not offered the complete withdrawal upon which its late President Hafez al-Assad had insisted. During Clinton's unsuccessful attempt to broker an Israeli-Syrian accord, as Indyk himself writes, Barak sought to preserve control over a narrow band of territory so Israel would not have to cede any of the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Indyk quotes former National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger equating Syrian insistence on full withdrawal with the Palestinians' determination to have their capital in Jerusalem: "We thought it was a matter of meters but for them it turned out to be a matter of principle." It bears noting that the Palestinians have never been offered full withdrawal to the 1967 lines, even though it is as much a matter of principle for them as it has been for other Arabs. Like many other insider accounts of the failure to achieve a peace deal at Camp David in 2000, "Innocent Abroad" faults Yasser Arafat for lacking the requisite courage and vision. The book begins with Clinton on his final day in office warning Colin Powell, the future secretary of state, not to "ever trust that son of a bitch," meaning Arafat. "He lied to me and he'll lie to you," Indyk quotes Clinton as saying. "Don't let Arafat sucker punch you like he did me." Indyk notes that Arafat's defenders say he balked at Camp David because he was "preoccupied with avoiding any dilution of the U.N. resolutions that formed the terms of reference for the solution of the Palestinian problem." But the "real explanation," Indyk writes, "is more straightforward. Arafat had been seeking an escape route from the moment he arrived at Camp David." Indyk's dismissal of Arafat's position betrays an inadequate recognition of the importance of principle — as rightly identified by Berger — to Palestinians, Syrians and others. Those U.N. resolutions (one of which calls for Israel's "withdrawal from territories occupied" in 1967 and the end of belligerency as the bases for peace) have indeed become undilutable for Arabs, in part because they undergirded Israel's accord with Egypt. Indyk repeatedly uses words such as ignorance, arrogance and innocence to explain U.S. mistakes. But he himself might be considered ignorant (at least) in stating that Palestinians refer to May 15 as the Naqba, or disaster, "because it commemorates the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948." It would be more accurate to say that Palestinians use the term to mark the experience of hundreds of thousands of their forebears, who fled or were forced to flee their homes in what is now Israel. Indyk appears not to have visited the Gaza Strip, lately the scene of yet more terrible violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Perhaps he should tour the Jabalya refugee camp, where some of those 1948 refugees and many of their descendants live. They could tell him why May 15 is called the Naqba, and why principle matters to them. Cameron W. Barr, a Washington Post deputy foreign editor, was a 2003 Pulitzer finalist for his coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reviewed by Cameron W. Barr, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Martin Indyk is the Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution. Born in England and educated in Australia, he migrated to the United States in 1982. As President Bill Clinton's Middle East advisor on the National Security Council, as Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs in the State Department, and as one of America's leading diplomats, he has helped develop Middle East policy in Washington's highest offices, as well as implement it on the region's front lines. In March 1995, Clinton dispatched Indyk to Israel as U.S. amabassador to work with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the peace process. He returned to Israel as ambassador in March 2000 to work with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat on a renewed effort to achieve comprehensive peace. He also served there for the first six months of George W. Bush's presidency.
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
Don't Miss
