[Bilimsel Haber] Book Review: Salt, Jeremy, _The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands_

[Gonul Pultar]

*Jeremy Salt.* /The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western 
Disorder in Arab Lands./ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520255518> Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 2008. 468 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25551-7.

*Reviewed by* Jacqueline Swansinger (SUNY Fredonia)
*Published on* H-Diplo (October, 2009)
*Commissioned by* Christopher L. Ball

*Vignettes for a Post-Orientalist World*

This book, in the author's words, was written "most urgently for the 
general reader who feels the need to know more about the Middle East 
than the mainstream media are able or willing to tell" (p. 1).  His 
ambition, however, is to change the fables and morals we tell about the 
Middle East, and in this he makes partial progress.  /The Unmaking of 
the Middle East/ provides a series of provocative vignettes describing 
Western imperialism.  The book promotes the idea of a central, unifying, 
and recurring paradigm used in the Middle East by different European 
nations, a sense of cultural affinity and ideology as the building 
blocks of European Orientalism.

Jeremy Salt posits that European national interests in the Middle East 
are empathetically predicated on shared cultural icons--Enlightenment 
ideas, a historic awareness of Judeo-Christian culture, and Western 
science.  Although the book opens with the first modern encounter in 
1799 between France and Egypt, the twentieth century is the period of 
emphasis.  The main theme is the continuity of Europe's application of a 
Western perspective, regardless of nationality, in its attempts to bring 
civilization to the region.  Although Salt recognizes differing national 
and cultural flavors as the ideological focus shifts from civilizing 
mission to freedom and later to democracy, the cultural glue of the 
Western civilizing mission is the transference of Western ideas and 
science to receptive Middle Eastern regions, which will transform 
barbarism into civility.

Salt dismisses the oft-repeated anecdote about Winston Churchill and a 
few specialists creating the modern nations of the region at a 
conference in Cairo, countering a one-time decisive action with a 
long-term occupation and dissemination of Western cultural ideas.  His 
insight is that the degradation of these models by the greed of 
imperialism and ideology transforms aspirations into evil gifts.  In 
turn, these mutant archetypes become the cast from which nations were 
born and developed--the true unmaking of the modern Middle East.

Salt presents his perspective in four sections. The first is a short 
essay on culture, science, and the Western civilizational ethos. The 
second is a description of the unintended consequences of European 
civilizing efforts in the Mandates, which introduces the cultural ties 
that will bind the United States to Western goals.  The third focuses on 
the American dilemma of needing friends and allies for the Cold War: it 
was leery of Israel's policies, yet lacking solid alternatives to 
supporting the new nation.  The last section is a quick overview of 
events in the Persian Gulf since 1988.  The book is not a monograph, but 
rather a series of episodic illustrations of his thesis.

The most illuminating portions of the book are sections 2 and 3, where 
Salt addresses well-known episodes and creates a fresh, robust 
reconsideration by using regional and local sources and biographies.  
One example is his depiction of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.  
It is not described through the players and actors of World War I 
protagonists, but rather begins with the Balkan Wars of 1812-13 and does 
not end until 1923 with the revisions of the Treaty of Sevres at 
Lausanne.  In this context, he places the Western-named Armenian 
genocide within a context of an extensive series of Turko-Armenian 
massacres.  This will certainly be a cause for contention, but it is 
thought provoking and should lead to wider research focusing on more 
sources and documents.  The sources used for this chapter also rely on 
Salt's earlier work /Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 
1878-1896 /(1993).

Each chapter in section 2 offers attractive possibilities for rethinking 
events in the region outside of the orthodox description suggested by 
textbooks of the modern Middle East.  Repeatedly the sources are a mix 
of international, biographical, contemporary, and social documents, 
moving away from policy papers or personal letters and diaries of 
officials appointed to the region.  The departure from a foreign policy 
perspective permits a shift from a Eurocentric analysis to one focused 
on the regional identity and national definition, as indicated by the 
leaders of the countries under discussion.  In this view, Rashid Ali al 
Gailani is an Iraqi patriot, not a saboteur of the British war effort, 
nor a petty, greedy, power-hungry colonel.  The transformation offers a 
more Iraqi-centered history of the nation's past.

Section 2 concludes by introducing the United States to the issues 
through the United Nations' decision to recognize Israel and Palestine 
as two separate regions, one as a nation-state, the other in tutelage to 
become one.  The final chapter highlights the well-known conflict 
between foreign service professionals and President Harry Truman's 
people to recognize Israel, but Salt presses the acceptance of Israel as 
a continuation of the Western Judeo-Christian cultural heritage rather 
than the beginning of a policy meant to fulfill American postwar aims.  
Salt's pursuit of a continuous civilizational mission from 1799 to the 
present dismisses other possibilities.  The American promise to support 
Israel in 1947 may have been predicated on a cultural sympathy for the 
Jewish people and state, but the evidence in the American archives is 
more multicausal than indicated by this chapter.  It could also have 
been the first strategic move in a policy to further democracy in the 
Middle East, deny the Mediterranean to the Soviets, and encourage 
economic growth in the area.

The third section begins with the Suez Crisis, and then depicts the slow 
binding of US-Israel policy over the next three decades.  Beginning with 
1948, working through the disillusionment of Suez, and the resurgence of 
confidence brought about by victories in the 1966 Arab-Israeli War, 
Israel became America's partner in the region.  As the years passed, 
democracy and Cold War needs allied together to make Israel the best 
ally for American stability.  Particularly, a globally engaged United 
States worried about larger problems than the emerging national identity 
of the Middle Eastern nations.  Contraposed to this growing confidence 
in the alliance with Israel, Salt discusses the diplomatic concern 
regarding Israel's nuclear development.  Again presidential preference 
contradicts institutional policy by suggesting a political willingness 
to be ignorant of nuclear weapons and their development.  Salt implies 
that this example is well understood by present-day nations who 
willingly swear to use nuclear power solely for peaceful means while 
proceeding with war-making capabilities.

The sources used in both these sections are international.  Salt 
presents a solid mix of British, Turkish, Arabic, and American works. 
 The use of biographies, news articles, public papers, and journal 
articles is where he is most successful in moving the narrative about 
the Middle East to potentially new interpretations.  It also brings the 
issue of historiography to the fore.  Over the last two decades, 
American foreign policy scholars have sought a more international 
perspective, stressing use of two or more archives, doing research in 
other languages, and visiting and studying different cultures.  But 
within our individual national contexts, we remain more familiar with 
American and Anglo-American scholarly work in the region.  Salt forces 
one to engage Turkish and Arabic documents and news articles and 
reconcile them with our British and American sources.  Salt enriches our 
discourse with these added sources, but we now need to become more 
familiar with the historiographies and narratives of these added 
sources.  This could change the way we tell the tale of the Middle East 
and it will certainly widen the conversation.

The final section recounts the Gulf wars and the present-day occupation 
of Iraq.  In this section, the sources are contemporary and 
overwhelmingly journalistic.  The shortage of recent government 
documents to confirm or deny these positions is to a degree 
unavoidable.  But Salt's argument remains clear.  The desire to civilize 
barbarians, the cultural empathy with Judeo-Christian ideas, and the 
sympathy between the West and Israel are policies inherited from a 
Western ideology.  A complaisant acceptance of these ideas has led the 
United States to an ideological impasse.  The implicit question asked is 
will the United States follow in the footsteps of its European 
counterparts, or can it break away from historical precedent and offer 
hope for change?  Can the United States represent the ideal of democracy 
while denying the rights of Palestinians?  Can the fight against Islamic 
terrorists end once Osama bin Laden and Al-Quaeda are caught?  Can the 
United States support Israeli land acquisition while promoting the 
creation of Palestine?  Can the United States afford to pursue all these 
aims and trade petroleum peacefully?  Salt's implication is that policy 
and wars that counter the principles of the Enlightenment, of natural 
rights, of market trade, and of democracy breech the sacred trust that 
Western civilization meant to bring to the region, and poses a pivotal 
identity question for the country built on those principles.  Can the 
United States survive ideologically "as the last best hope of earth" if 
its central truths are self-evident in some lands, but obscure in others?

Salt offers a provocative argument that the misdeeds of the civilizing 
nations have created this morass, which is unmaking the modern Middle 
East.  His book tests the working paradigm of Middle East foreign policy 
by forcing new sources and new stories into the debate.  The 
incorporation of Turkish and Arabic sources shakes up established 
perceptions and permits new starting points for research and assessment, 
most particularly to aid in identifying what may be hegemonic or even 
Orientalist bias.  While his intent is to return agency to the Middle 
East and its people, his reliance on Western ideas and culture as the 
active ingredient for the developmental flaws of the region limits the 
success of his effort.  West-blaming agency as a reaction to 
East-blaming agency may be a necessary stage in moving us toward a more 
analytical, and perhaps less culturally fraught, understanding of the 
meaning of the twentieth century in the Middle East, but it remains an 
incomplete view.  Salt, nonetheless, offers wonderfully critical 
thoughts that can help introduce a whole new series of questions, and 
bring some very serious consideration of the role of culture on policy 
into the interpretation of Western-Middle Eastern relations.   

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*Citation: * Jacqueline Swansinger. Review of Salt, Jeremy, /The 
Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab 
Lands/. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24507