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The Unmaking of the Middle East, A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands

The term “global war on terror” is no longer fashionable. Lip service is now paid to the idea that diplomacy and development are essential components of the effort to counter Islamic extremism, and the realization is growing that making armed force the “default option” for dealing with terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam is probably strengthening the hand of the terrorists.

 

The term “global war on terror” is no longer fashionable. Lip service is now paid to the idea that diplomacy and development are essential components of the effort to counter Islamic extremism, and the realization is growing that making armed force the “default option” for dealing with terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam is probably strengthening the hand of the terrorists. Meanwhile, on the other side of Samuel Huntington’s “civilizational divide” there is an appreciation that, however brutal and mindless the U.S.-led war on terror and attendant nation-building efforts have been, and however incompetent, corrupt and repressive governments in much of the Muslim world have become, the replacement of such regimes by the leaders of those who now slaughter Westerners and Muslims in the name of Islam would make matters worse than they are at present. A serious effort on both sides to act on these realizations and to find common ground across the divide would seem to be in order.
“The Unmaking of the Middle East,” Jeremy Salt’s extensively and generally well documented, solidly analytical and deeply outraged account of Western domination of the region from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the middle of the present decade, details many, if not all, the problems that make it unlikely a serious search for common ground will be undertaken, let alone succeed. Professor Salt teaches in the political science department at Bilkent University, Ankara and has been involved with the Middle East since arriving in Beirut as a young journalist in 1965. Halfway through the book’s introduction, he refers to “the similarities across the centuries” of the ways in which Western intervention in the Middle East has been justified as well as the existence of “a certain pathology” involving who “we” and “they” are, what “we are entitled to do, and how “ they” must respond if they are to avoid punishment.” This “cultural substructure” is the bedrock on which the four parts of Professor Salt’s book rest. 
Professor Salt uses the two chapters that make up the first part of the book to “set the scene” for his denunciation in the remaining three parts of the Western policies that in his well-founded view have unmade the Middle East. He takes Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, who first spoke of a clash between Western and Muslim civilizations, to task for making plain their view that the responsibility for the creation of what Huntington called Islam’s “bloody borders” rests with the Muslim world. He goes on to point out that, for a century and a half at least, most of the blood shed in the Middle East was Muslim and was shed by Westerners. Descriptions of the brutality of the French occupation of Algeria begun in 1830, the devastating British naval bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and the slaughter of the Sudanese Khalifa’s army at Omdurman in 1898 drive home this point. Salt notes that the terms “West” and “Middle East” are of recent vintage and agrees with the great British scholar H.A.R. Gibb that the two so-called “worlds” have been closely related both before and after the rise of Islam. The transformation wrought by the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution in Europe were translated by European governments into imperial policies that benefited those governments at great political, economic and above all human cost to the people of the Middle East. 
The five chapters of the book’s second part cover the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing domination of the Middle East by Britain and France through the “civil war along the Potomac’ that preceded the U.S. decision to recognize the State of Israel. Salt describes the dismemberment of the Empire, both directly by various members of the Concert of Europe and via the secession of Ottoman provinces in the Balkans and beyond with encouragement and material support from European governments. Events such as the massacre of 18,000 Armenians in Adana in 1909 are briefly mentioned, but Salt is intent on telling the other story – that of the great suffering of Muslims in the Great War, which lasted for the Turks from 1912 to 1923. A chapter describes the unsuccessful British project in Iraq, first as the League of Nation’s Mandatory power and then as supporter of the unpopular Hashemite monarchy and its most prominent politician, Nuri al Said. 
Professor Salt devotes nearly half his book to Palestine and Israel, and his critique of British and later American policy there is withering. Sir Arthur Balfour described British commitments in Palestine as “incompatible with facts,” and a major “incompatibility” is his 1917 Declaration, as Foreign Secretary, that “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” but that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities” there. The British allowed enough Jewish immigration into Palestine to reduce substantially the initially overwhelming majority of the “existing non-Jewish communities,” dealt harshly with those communities when they began armed resistance to “double colonization” by the British and the Zionists, and then beat a retreat as their Jewish protégés turned against them. 
Most of the rest of the book traces the development of American policy in various Middle Eastern “hotspots,” primarily in Israel and Palestine but also in Lebanon, Iraq and the Iran-Iraq war. Israel’s rise from its dramatic beginnings in 1948 to its present position of regional military supremacy and economic power and its status as the United States’ closest ally in the region and leading recipient of American aid are chronicled, as are the ruthlessness of its attacks on its neighbors and periodic duplicity in its dealings with the U.S. government. United States policy in the region, from failure to restrain Israel from attacking Egypt in June 1967 to its own invasion and occupation of Iraq 26 years later are condemned in bitter and generally well- documented detail. 
At the end of the book, Professor Salt asks the reader to judge whether 9/11 will one day be seen “as the tocsin that sounded the end of the new American century” and whether this would be “good for all of us.” In presenting its case, the book is not objective; unlike those of the Israel and the West and its friends in the region, which are discussed (and occasionally distorted) in detail, the atrocities, depredations and duplicities of Arab governments and groups receive little or no attention. That said, Salt’s questions are legitimate. His book should be pondered by those in a position to act in a way that may someday make the answers to his questions something other than “yes.”


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