[Discussion] book review - American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945.

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:45:09 -0700

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*Douglas Little.* /American Orientalism: The United States and the 
Middle East since 1945//. /Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2002. xiv + 407 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 
(cloth), IBSN 0-8078-2737-1; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5539-1.

Reviewed by *Kail Ellis*, Villanova University.
Published by H-Levant <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Elevant/> (March, 2004)

*American Orientalism*

The title of Douglas Little's book evokes the late Edward Said's seminal 
work, Orientalism. For Said, orientalism was the conceptual framework 
that rationalized Western colonialism and its attendant cultural and 
economic imperialism. It viewed the region and its peoples as 
essentially "dehumanized" and thereby justified Western domination. 
Where Said employed the concept to counter pathological stereotypes of 
Arabs and Muslims as violent, backward, and driven by passion and 
religious fanaticism, Little employs it to explain American policy in 
the Middle East since 1945.

Little introduces his study with a cultural overview of eighteenth- and 
nineteenth-century American popular culture that viewed Muslims, Jews, 
and other peoples of the Middle East as backward, decadent, and 
untrustworthy. He argues that this popular view was shaped in the early 
days of the republic when American statesmen employed it after their 
encounter with the Barbary pirates. It was further advanced by 
publications such as the National Geographic magazine with their 
depictions of the "exotic" Arab and Muslim. (Little makes several 
references to National Geographic in his work and it is interesting that 
in the October 2003 issue on Saudi Arabia the magazine's editor 
describes the story as "essential reading for those who won't settle for 
stereotypes.")

Mark Twain, whose travels to the Middle East were recorded in his 
popular and influential memoir, Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, 
added to the American perception of Muslims as "a people by nature and 
training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious" 
(quoted, p. 13). Interestingly, Little also credits Twain as being 
"among the first to interpret the U.S. relationship with the Middle East 
as the byproduct of two contradictory ingredients: an irresistible 
impulse to remake the world in America's image and a profound 
ambivalence about the people to be remade" (p. 3). It is this irony that 
leads Little to his definition of American Orientalism: "a tendency to 
underestimate the people of the region and to overestimate America's 
ability to make a bad situation better."

Having established orientalism as a framework for his study, Little 
examines its influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East through a 
series of eight chapters, each of which is devoted to a single topic 
that leads to the next theme. The first theme Little discusses is the 
role of oil and how the multinational corporations established a 
symbiotic relationship with American policymakers to protect their 
interests in the region. His review of the formation of OPEC in the 
1970s and the effect of the oil crisis on the American public after the 
October 1973 war is an excellent context for understanding the primacy 
of oil in the various Middle East conflicts. It was generally known that 
American oil executives influenced U.S. policy throughout the Middle 
East. But when the extent of their influence was exposed after the oil 
crisis hit the United States, and they were characterized as greedy 
corporate holders in collusion with Arab Sheiks, they responded by 
blaming America's energy woes on U.S. support for Israel. In the 
process, they precipitated a clash between domestic politics, lobbying 
groups, and international business.

Little expands on this discussion with a review of the role of special 
interest groups in the United States. It is Israel's development of 
nuclear weapons and its success in presenting itself as the United 
States's strategic asset and only reliable ally in the Middle East that 
is most significant from a policy standpoint. This, in turn, leads to a 
discussion of the next theme, the Cold War and the American response to 
Soviet expansionism in the Middle East.

Little begins this discussion by reviewing Great Britain's withdrawal 
from the Middle East after World War II, which coincided with the 
beginning of the Cold War. The expansion of the Soviet Union into the 
heart of Europe, along with Soviet aid to the Communist rebellion in 
Greece and the Soviet attempt to get Turkey to cede its two northwest 
provinces (Kars and Ardahan) and share control of the Straits, propelled 
the United States to exclude the Soviet Union as a player in the Middle 
East. Little examines this policy from the historical perspective of the 
four eponymous doctrines: Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter. His 
analysis of these doctrines and their effectiveness is an excellent 
recounting of U.S. diplomatic history in the region since the end of 
World War II. The author does not discuss the Reagan Doctrine in the 
context of the Middle East, since it pertained to destabilizing the 
Soviet Union by making its involvement in Afghanistan costly both in 
military and economic terms, yet Little does mention it in the global 
context of U.S. policy. There is a certain irony in the lessons of the 
conflict and the deteriorating situation in which the United States 
finds itself in Afghanistan today.

Little goes into more detail on the early history of U.S. involvement in 
the Middle East in the section dealing with the history of lost 
opportunities to obtain peace. These failed efforts begin with the 
unfortunate manner in which the emergence of the Arab nationalist 
movement under Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was regarded as well as how 
Nasser's attempt to rid Egypt of British colonialism was interpreted and 
seen as inviting the Soviet Union into the region.

As a case study of lost opportunities, Nasser's Egypt is well chosen. 
The revolutionary officers who took power in Egypt in 1952 were 
interested in ending British colonialism, not in engaging in the 
Arab-Israeli conflict. What changed this, according to Nasser, was the 
Israeli raid on Gaza in February 1955 which proved to be the turning 
point of Egypt's conflict with Israel. Prior to the Israeli incursion, 
the border had been relatively quiet. According to Nasser, Egypt had 
done nothing to provoke such action and, in his words, it was "revenge 
for nothing." The raid served as a wake up call for Nasser and propelled 
him to seek arms from whatever source he could, including the Soviet 
bloc. This, however, carried with it an implicit invitation to the 
Soviets to enter the Middle East which, when coupled with his 
anti-British colonialism and his attempts to maintain "positive" 
neutrality in the east-west conflict, brought Nasser on to a collision 
course with the United States. In the world of John Foster Dulles, where 
neutralism in the Cold War was not acceptable, Nasser's policies came to 
be identified with the objectives of Soviet Communism, particularly 
after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Little's analysis of Dulles's "no 
neutralism" policy is a useful reminder of the antecedents of President 
George W. Bush's declaration to the world in a joint session of Congress 
after the September 11 attacks: "either you are with us or you are with 
the terrorists."

One of the weapons used to counter Soviet influence in the Middle East 
was the Eisenhower Doctrine. Declared in 1957, the doctrine specified 
that the United States would use military force and economic aid to 
counter Soviet inroads in the Middle East. After the July 1958 Iraqi 
revolution, which overthrew the pro-Western monarchy and removed Iraq 
from the Western-sponsored Baghdad Pact, the United States invoked the 
doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese civil war which threatened the 
overthrow of the pro-Western Chamoun government. Justifying the 
intervention, President Eisenhower drew a parallel between the civil war 
in Lebanon, the Iraqi revolution and the "pattern of (Soviet) conquest 
with which we became familiar during the period of 1945-1950."[1]

Significantly, according to Little, American intervention in Lebanon was 
designed to give an important message to the Soviet Union. By its 
actions, the United States demonstrated that it would not only frustrate 
the Soviets' bid to become a Middle Eastern power but it would aid its 
allies when necessary. The intent of the Lebanese action was to show 
that the United States had the strategic capability to react swiftly 
with conventional armed forces even in response to small-scale or 
"brushfire" conflicts.

Countering Soviet influence in the Middle East proved to be but one 
stage in the United States's policy in the region. American policymakers 
concluded that modernization was also essential to achieving regional 
stability in the region. Little demonstrates how the United States 
attempted to forestall revolution in three countries (Iraq, Libya, and 
Iran) by initiating democratic and economic reforms. The attempt 
backfired, however, when leaders once deemed friendly to the United 
States were deposed, killed, or sent into exile. The plan failed for two 
basic reasons. First, modernization accelerated the revolution of rising 
expectations that culminated in the overthrow of the reactionary regimes 
they were designed to save. Second, the more the reactionary regimes 
became identified with westernization and economic growth, the more they 
were seen as betraying traditional Islamic values.

Although Henry Kissinger, Walt Rostow, and, later, Zbigniew Brzezinski 
grappled with the paradoxes of modernization, Little notes that it was 
Kissinger who finally admitted the limitations of the experiment. In his 
memoirs, Kissinger acknowledged that the American experience, based as 
it was on liberal political traditions, a mature industrial economy, and 
a strong middle class, was "not entirely relevant" for the Third World 
societies. In words reminiscent of the current imbroglio in Iraq, 
Kissinger stated that "nation-building depended crucially on the ability 
to establish political authority."

It is unfortunate that Little's analysis of modernization could not have 
included President Bush's November 7, 2003, address to the National 
Endowment for Democracy which called for the expansion of democracy in 
the Islamic world. Responding to the increasingly difficult situation in 
the Middle East and the criticisms of U.S. policies in Iraq, Bush 
asserted that "the prosperity, and social vitality and technological 
progress of a people are directly determined by the extent of their 
liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity--and creativity 
determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan 
of Heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here on Earth."

Given the President's stated desire to promote democracy in the region, 
it is ironic that during the first few months of his administration, he 
distanced himself from the Middle East conflict because he saw no hope 
of resolving it in the near future. After the terrorist attacks of 
September 11, however, his administration is in the thick of 
nation-building in Afghanistan and establishing democracy in Iraq and 
through it, in the other Arab and Muslim countries of the Middle East. 
All this is happening at a time when hope for a resolution of the Middle 
East conflict is at its lowest.

Little's analysis demonstrates that there are no facile solutions to the 
Middle East's problems. The Bush administration claimed that the 
overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime would provide a leaven for 
democratic change throughout the Middle East, including a resolution of 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For others, however, this assertion 
was backward. The Arab-Israeli conflict, they point out, remains the 
prism through which most Arabs see the United States. Indeed, it would 
be puzzling if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were not central in the 
minds of the Arab public. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, five 
major Arab-Israeli wars, each of which was devastating to the Arabs, 
have shaped the collective psychology of several generations. Indeed, 
the argument is the reverse: the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict, rather than the occupation and democratization of Iraq, would 
help democratization in the region.

Little's discussion of the objectives of the first Gulf war is also 
instructive. He demonstrates that the objectives of that war were not 
only to overturn Saddam's occupation of Kuwait but, more significantly, 
to break the "'Vietnam syndrome' that had curtailed armed U.S. 
intervention in regional conflicts for nearly two decades." To provide 
context for this goal, Little provides an overview of the involvement of 
U.S. presidents in the Middle East from Roosevelt to the first President 
Bush. He shows that the rejoicing that ensued after the first Gulf War 
was due primarily to its short duration (a hundred hours).

For the first Bush Administration, the successful conclusion of the war 
finally broke the "Vietnam Syndrome," which inhibited American 
intervention in world crises. The optimism proved to be premature. Even 
after the first Gulf war, few Americans were interested in sending U.S. 
troops to foreign countries, whether to nearby Haiti to counter civil 
unrest and promote stability, to prevent genocide in faraway Africa 
(Rwanda) or Europe (the former Yugoslavia), or to relieve starvation and 
engage in nation-building in Somalia. Little notes that the Clinton 
administration was divided on how best to thwart the alleged weapons of 
mass destruction harbored by Iraq. When Al-Qaeda operatives bombed the 
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, Clinton's response 
was to launch cruise missiles against bases in Afghanistan, not armed 
intervention. It was not until after September 11 and the Bush 
administration's successful attempt to link terrorism, Osama bin Laden, 
and Saddam Hussein that Americans began to wholeheartedly support 
military intervention abroad.

The success of the first Gulf War was not without its short-term 
benefits. Significantly, as Little shows, it helped to pave the way for 
Israeli-Palestinian negotations and the Oslo Accord in 1993. Little 
examines the hopes generated by the Oslo negotiations. The U.S. 
prescription of land for peace was the foundation for the agreement but, 
tragically, this foundation gave way to frustration and stalemate with 
the failure of Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and its 
increased settlement activity in the Occupied Territories.

With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, violence on both sides 
escalated. The terror campaign against Israeli civilians by radical 
Palestinian groups alienated world opinion and hardened the resolve of 
the Israelis not to negotiate under threat of violence. For its part, 
Israel engaged in "targeted" assassinations of the leaders of the 
radical Palestinian groups and inflicted severe damage on the 
Palestinian civilians through its bombing of refugee camps and 
Palestinian cities, and the blockade and closures of the territories 
which prevented Palestinians from earning their livelihoods. Palestinian 
hopelessness and despair increased at the same time Israelis began to 
despair of their own security. As a result, this chapter remains 
unfinished.

Little's diplomatic history is an excellent resource for students of the 
Middle East. Although much of the material covered will be familiar to 
those who are acquainted with the literature of the field, the study 
nevertheless presents a context from which to evaluate the fast pace of 
events that daily greet us from the region. In reading it, one finds 
oneself constantly contextualizing and making comparisons to events that 
have occurred after the book was written. This is the particular gift of 
this book and it will benefit students and specialists alike.

Little's writing style is lucid and the quotes which introduce his 
chapters beautifully complement his themes. The use of primary sources, 
oral histories and interviews, and government documents inform his 
careful analyses of the contradictions of U.S. policy. Moreover, he 
succeeds in maintaining the overall theme of orientalism throughout the 
book. Nowhere is this more evident that in his description of the 
current state of the U.S. psyche regarding the Middle East:

    Although there is greater appreciation for the complexities of the
    Muslim world than a generation ago, most Americans still view
    radical Islam as a cause for instant alarm. Having been fed a steady
    diet of books, films, and news reports depicting Arabs as demonic
    anti-Western others and Israelis as heroic pro-Western partners and
    having watched in horror the events of 11 September 2001, the
    American public understandably fears Osama bin Laden and cheers Aladdin.

Little's book goes far to help rectify that perception.

Note

[1]. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (New York: Doubleday, 
1965), p. 177.

*Library of Congress call number:* DS63.2.U5 L58 2002
*Subjects:*

    * Orientalism--United States.
    * Nationalism--Middle East.
    * Arab-Israeli conflict.
    * Middle East--Relations--United States.
    * United States--Relations--Middle East.

*Citation:* Kail Ellis. "Review of Douglas Little, /American 
Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945/," 
H-Levant, H-Net Reviews, March, 2004. URL: 
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=266521082027002.

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Douglas Little. American Orientalism: The
United States and the Middle East since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv +
407 pp.
Map, notes, bibliography, index.
$34.95 (cloth), IBSN 0-8078-2737-1; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5539-1.

Reviewed by Kail Ellis, Villanova University. 
Published by <a href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Elevant/">
H-Levant</a> (March, 2004)

 

<center>American Orientalism</center>

The title of Douglas Little's book evokes the late
Edward Said's seminal work, <cite>Orientalism</cite>.
For Said, orientalism was the conceptual framework that rationalized
Western colonialism and its attendant cultural and economic
imperialism. It viewed the region and its peoples as essentially
"dehumanized" and thereby justified Western domination. Where Said
employed the concept to counter pathological stereotypes of Arabs and
Muslims as violent, backward, and driven by passion and religious
fanaticism, Little employs it to explain American policy in the Middle
East since 1945. 
 Little introduces his
study with a cultural overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
American popular culture that viewed Muslims, Jews, and other peoples
of the Middle East as backward, decadent, and untrustworthy. He argues
that this popular view was shaped in the early days of the republic
when American statesmen employed it after their encounter with the
Barbary pirates. It was further advanced by publications such as the <cite>National
Geographic</cite> magazine with their depictions of the "exotic" Arab
and Muslim. (Little makes several references to <cite>National
Geographic</cite>
in his work and it is interesting that in the October 2003 issue on
Saudi Arabia the magazine's editor describes the story as "essential
reading for those who won't settle for stereotypes.") 
 Mark Twain, whose travels to the Middle East were
recorded in his popular and influential memoir, <cite>Innocents Abroad</cite>,
published in 1869, added to the American perception of Muslims as "a
people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive
[and] superstitious" (quoted, p. 13). Interestingly, Little also
credits Twain as being "among the first to interpret the U.S.
relationship with the Middle East as the byproduct of two contradictory
ingredients: an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America's
image and a profound ambivalence about the people to be remade" (p. 3).
It is this irony that leads Little to his definition of American
Orientalism: "a tendency to underestimate the people of the region and
to overestimate America's ability to make a bad situation better." 
Having established orientalism as a framework for
his study, Little
examines its influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East through a
series of eight chapters, each of which is devoted to a single topic
that leads to the next theme. The first theme Little discusses is the
role of oil and how the multinational corporations established a
symbiotic relationship with American policymakers to protect their
interests in the region. His review of the formation of OPEC in the
1970s and the effect of the oil crisis on the American public after the
October 1973 war is an excellent context for understanding the primacy
of oil in the various Middle East conflicts. It was generally known
that American oil executives influenced U.S. policy throughout the
Middle East. But when the extent of their influence was exposed after
the oil crisis hit the United States, and they were characterized as
greedy corporate holders in collusion with Arab Sheiks, they responded
by blaming America's energy woes on U.S. support for Israel. In the
process, they precipitated a clash between domestic politics, lobbying
groups, and international business. 
Little expands on this discussion with a review of
the role of special
interest groups in the United States. It is Israel's development of
nuclear weapons and its success in presenting itself as the United
States's strategic asset and only reliable ally in the Middle East that
is most significant from a policy standpoint. This, in turn, leads to a
discussion of the next theme, the Cold War and the American response to
Soviet expansionism in the Middle East. 
Little begins this discussion by reviewing Great
Britain's withdrawal
from the Middle East after World War II, which coincided with the
beginning of the Cold War. The expansion of the Soviet Union into the
heart of Europe, along with Soviet aid to the Communist rebellion in
Greece and the Soviet attempt to get Turkey to cede its two northwest
provinces (Kars and Ardahan) and share control of the Straits,
propelled the United States to exclude the Soviet Union as a player in
the Middle East. Little examines this policy from the historical
perspective of the four eponymous doctrines: Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon,
and Carter. His analysis of these doctrines and their effectiveness is
an excellent recounting of U.S. diplomatic history in the region since
the end of World War II. The author does not discuss the Reagan
Doctrine in the context of the Middle East, since it pertained to
destabilizing the Soviet Union by making its involvement in Afghanistan
costly both in military and economic terms, yet Little does mention it
in the global context of U.S. policy. There is a certain irony in the
lessons of the conflict and the deteriorating situation in which the
United States finds itself in Afghanistan today. 
Little goes into more detail on the early history of
U.S. involvement
in the Middle East in the section dealing with the history of lost
opportunities to obtain peace. These failed efforts begin with the
unfortunate manner in which the emergence of the Arab nationalist
movement under Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was regarded as well as how
Nasser's attempt to rid Egypt of British colonialism was interpreted
and seen as inviting the Soviet Union into the region. 
As a case study of lost opportunities, Nasser's
Egypt is well chosen.
The revolutionary officers who took power in Egypt in 1952 were
interested in ending British colonialism, not in engaging in the
Arab-Israeli conflict. What changed this, according to Nasser, was the
Israeli raid on Gaza in February 1955 which proved to be the turning
point of Egypt's conflict with Israel. Prior to the Israeli incursion,
the border had been relatively quiet. According to Nasser, Egypt had
done nothing to provoke such action and, in his words, it was "revenge
for nothing." The raid served as a wake up call for Nasser and
propelled him to seek arms from whatever source he could, including the
Soviet bloc. This, however, carried with it an implicit invitation to
the Soviets to enter the Middle East which, when coupled with his
anti-British colonialism and his attempts to maintain "positive"
neutrality in the east-west conflict, brought Nasser on to a collision
course with the United States. In the world of John Foster Dulles,
where neutralism in the Cold War was not acceptable, Nasser's policies
came to be identified with the objectives of Soviet Communism,
particularly after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Little's analysis of Dulles's
"no neutralism" policy is a useful reminder of the antecedents of
President George W. Bush's declaration to the world in a joint session
of Congress after the September 11 attacks: "either you are with us or
you are with the terrorists." 
 One of
the weapons used to counter Soviet influence in the Middle East was the
Eisenhower Doctrine. Declared in 1957, the doctrine specified that the
United States would use military force and economic aid to counter
Soviet inroads in the Middle East. After the July 1958 Iraqi
revolution, which overthrew the pro-Western monarchy and removed Iraq
from the Western-sponsored Baghdad Pact, the United States invoked the
doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese civil war which threatened the
overthrow of the pro-Western Chamoun government. Justifying the
intervention, President Eisenhower drew a parallel between the civil
war in Lebanon, the Iraqi revolution and the "pattern of (Soviet)
conquest with which we became familiar during the period of
1945-1950."[1] 
 Significantly, according
to Little, American intervention in Lebanon was designed to give an
important message to the Soviet Union. By its actions, the United
States demonstrated that it would not only frustrate the Soviets' bid
to become a Middle Eastern power but it would aid its allies when
necessary. The intent of the Lebanese action was to show that the
United States had the strategic capability to react swiftly with
conventional armed forces even in response to small-scale or
"brushfire" conflicts. 
 Countering
Soviet influence in the Middle East proved to be but one stage in the
United States's policy in the region. American policymakers concluded
that modernization was also essential to achieving regional stability
in the region. Little demonstrates how the United States attempted to
forestall revolution in three countries (Iraq, Libya, and Iran) by
initiating democratic and economic reforms. The attempt backfired,
however, when leaders once deemed friendly to the United States were
deposed, killed, or sent into exile. The plan failed for two basic
reasons. First, modernization accelerated the revolution of rising
expectations that culminated in the overthrow of the reactionary
regimes they were designed to save. Second, the more the reactionary
regimes became identified with westernization and economic growth, the
more they were seen as betraying traditional Islamic values. 
Although Henry Kissinger, Walt Rostow, and, later,
Zbigniew Brzezinski
grappled with the paradoxes of modernization, Little notes that it was
Kissinger who finally admitted the limitations of the experiment. In
his memoirs, Kissinger acknowledged that the American experience, based
as it was on liberal political traditions, a mature industrial economy,
and a strong middle class, was "not entirely relevant" for the Third
World societies. In words reminiscent of the current imbroglio in Iraq,
Kissinger stated that "nation-building depended crucially on the
ability to establish political authority." 
It is unfortunate that Little's analysis of
modernization could not
have included President Bush's November 7, 2003, address to the
National Endowment for Democracy which called for the expansion of
democracy in the Islamic world. Responding to the increasingly
difficult situation in the Middle East and the criticisms of U.S.
policies in Iraq, Bush asserted that "the prosperity, and social
vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined
by the extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human
creativity--and creativity determines the strength and wealth of
nations. Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity and the best
hope for progress here on Earth." 
 Given
the President's stated desire to promote democracy in the region, it is
ironic that during the first few months of his administration, he
distanced himself from the Middle East conflict because he saw no hope
of resolving it in the near future. After the terrorist attacks of
September 11, however, his administration is in the thick of
nation-building in Afghanistan and establishing democracy in Iraq and
through it, in the other Arab and Muslim countries of the Middle East.
All this is happening at a time when hope for a resolution of the
Middle East conflict is at its lowest. 
Little's analysis demonstrates that there are no
facile solutions to
the Middle East's problems. The Bush administration claimed that the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime would provide a leaven for
democratic change throughout the Middle East, including a resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For others, however, this assertion
was backward. The Arab-Israeli conflict, they point out, remains the
prism through which most Arabs see the United States. Indeed, it would
be puzzling if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were not central in the
minds of the Arab public. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, five
major Arab-Israeli wars, each of which was devastating to the Arabs,
have shaped the collective psychology of several generations. Indeed,
the argument is the reverse: the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, rather than the occupation and democratization of Iraq, would
help democratization in the region. 
Little's discussion of the objectives of the first
Gulf war is also
instructive. He demonstrates that the objectives of that war were not
only to overturn Saddam's occupation of Kuwait but, more significantly,
to break the "'Vietnam syndrome' that had curtailed armed U.S.
intervention in regional conflicts for nearly two decades." To provide
context for this goal, Little provides an overview of the involvement
of U.S. presidents in the Middle East from Roosevelt to the first
President Bush. He shows that the rejoicing that ensued after the first
Gulf War was due primarily to its short duration (a hundred hours). 
For the first Bush Administration, the successful
conclusion of the war
finally broke the "Vietnam Syndrome," which inhibited American
intervention in world crises. The optimism proved to be premature. Even
after the first Gulf war, few Americans were interested in sending U.S.
troops to foreign countries, whether to nearby Haiti to counter civil
unrest and promote stability, to prevent genocide in faraway Africa
(Rwanda) or Europe (the former Yugoslavia), or to relieve starvation
and engage in nation-building in Somalia. Little notes that the Clinton
administration was divided on how best to thwart the alleged weapons of
mass destruction harbored by Iraq. When Al-Qaeda operatives bombed the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, Clinton's response
was to launch cruise missiles against bases in Afghanistan, not armed
intervention. It was not until after September 11 and the Bush
administration's successful attempt to link terrorism, Osama bin Laden,
and Saddam Hussein that Americans began to wholeheartedly support
military intervention abroad. 
 The
success of the first Gulf War was not without its short-term benefits.
Significantly, as Little shows, it helped to pave the way for
Israeli-Palestinian negotations and the Oslo Accord in 1993. Little
examines the hopes generated by the Oslo negotiations. The U.S.
prescription of land for peace was the foundation for the agreement
but, tragically, this foundation gave way to frustration and stalemate
with the failure of Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories
and its increased settlement activity in the Occupied Territories. 
With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, violence
on both sides
escalated. The terror campaign against Israeli civilians by radical
Palestinian groups alienated world opinion and hardened the resolve of
the Israelis not to negotiate under threat of violence. For its part,
Israel engaged in "targeted" assassinations of the leaders of the
radical Palestinian groups and inflicted severe damage on the
Palestinian civilians through its bombing of refugee camps and
Palestinian cities, and the blockade and closures of the territories
which prevented Palestinians from earning their livelihoods.
Palestinian hopelessness and despair increased at the same time
Israelis began to despair of their own security. As a result, this
chapter remains unfinished. 
 Little's
diplomatic history is an excellent resource for students of the Middle
East. Although much of the material covered will be familiar to those
who are acquainted with the literature of the field, the study
nevertheless presents a context from which to evaluate the fast pace of
events that daily greet us from the region. In reading it, one finds
oneself constantly contextualizing and making comparisons to events
that have occurred after the book was written. This is the particular
gift of this book and it will benefit students and specialists alike. 
Little's writing style is lucid and the quotes which
introduce his
chapters beautifully complement his themes. The use of primary sources,
oral histories and interviews, and government documents inform his
careful analyses of the contradictions of U.S. policy. Moreover, he
succeeds in maintaining the overall theme of orientalism throughout the
book. Nowhere is this more evident that in his description of the
current state of the U.S. psyche regarding the Middle East: 
 
<blockquote>Although
there is greater appreciation for the complexities of the Muslim world
than a generation ago, most Americans still view radical Islam as a
cause for instant alarm. Having been fed a steady diet of books, films,
and news reports depicting Arabs as demonic anti-Western <cite>others</cite>
and Israelis as heroic pro-Western partners and having watched in
horror the events of 11 September 2001, the American public
understandably fears Osama bin Laden and cheers Aladdin.</blockquote>
 
 Little's book goes far to help rectify that
perception. 
 Note 
 [1]. Dwight D. Eisenhower, <cite>Waging Peace,
1956-1961</cite> (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 177. 
 

Library of Congress call number: DS63.2.U5
L58 2002 
Subjects:
<ul>
 <li>Orientalism--United States. </li>
 <li>Nationalism--Middle East. </li>
 <li>Arab-Israeli conflict. </li>
 <li>Middle East--Relations--United States. </li>
 <li>United States--Relations--Middle East. </li>
</ul>
Citation:
Kail Ellis. "Review of Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The
United States and the Middle East since 1945," H-Levant, H-Net
Reviews, March, 2004. URL:
<a
 href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=266521082027002"
 class="moz-txt-link-freetext">http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=266521082027002</a>.
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