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Z Magazine
June 2003 Volume 16 Number 6
Book Reviews
Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, by Stephen Zunes, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2003. 278 pp.
Review by Stephen Shalom
I
t might seem that a book focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East written before the recent war in Iraq would be dated, especially a book that makes various predictions about the war, some of which have not come to pass. But Stephen Zunes's Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism is a remarkably useful work that helps us make sense of the past and think clearly about the future.The historical record that Zunes examines is unambiguous and depressing: the United States has hindered democracy in the Middle East, helped to militarize the region, fueled war and misery in the Gulf, blocked efforts towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace, and encouraged -- intentionally and unintentionally -- the rise of extremist Islamic movements. U.S. policy has served the interests of the few, but has been a disaster for the people of the region. It has been disastrous too for the American people, making them less secure, rather than more so, making anti-U.S. terrorism more likely rather than less so.
Tinderbox has two special virtues. First, it treats U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as an integrated whole. All too often, critical discussions of U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine are totally disconnected from the broader dynamics of U.S. foreign policy. We read that the Israeli government has committed some atrocity against Palestinians and the United States has supported Israel -- with arms, economic assistance, or diplomatic backing. But what explains this U.S. support? Detached from the larger context of U.S. policy, analyses frequently offer no explanation at all for Washington's actions or else latch on to the Israel lobby as the driving force behind U.S. support. To be sure, AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations are not irrelevant -- and it is by no means anti-Semitic to point to and criticize their influence way out of proportion to their numbers. Nevertheless, to attribute U.S. policy primarily to the pro-Israel lobby is to miss the underlying consistency of U.S. foreign policy.
So, yes, the United States has turned a blind eye to Israeli violations of human rights, but, as Zunes amply documents, the same indifference to human rights and democracy is evident in many countries where U.S. strategic or economic interests are at stake: in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Turkey, among others. For example, Turkey's horrendous attacks against its Kurdish minority took place with U.S. arms ("the largest use of American weapons by non-U.S. forces since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon"), and with U.S. diplomatic cover (as when Paul Wolfowitz declared in July 2002, "one of the things that impresses me about Turkish history [is] the way Turkey treats its minorities"). Yes, Washington has provided all sorts of backing to Israel's occupation of Palestine, but also, as Zunes shows, it has supported the Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara and Turkey's occupation of Cyprus, despite the lack of any appreciable Moroccan or Turkish lobbies in Washington.
Huge amounts of U.S. arms have been provided to Israel. The pro-Israel lobby obviously does all it can to encourage this weapons flow, but here again the lobby is not likely to be the decisive factor. Zunes notes that U.S. arms sales and military aid are immense worldwide, but especially in the Middle East. While the Israel lobby pushes for arms to the Jewish state, the arms lobby -- which outspends the Israel lobby by more than two to one -- pushes for arms transfers everywhere. Happily for the weapons manufacturers, "every major arms transfer to Israel creates a new demand by Arab states…for additional American weapons to respond to Israel." These arms have nothing to do with the actual security needs of the people of the region. The more peace treaties that have been signed (Israel-Egypt, Israel-PLO, Israel-Jordan), the higher the level of U.S. arms transfers. The more arms transferred, the greater the ability of the region's governments to repress recalcitrant populations. Arms sales also take away from economic growth and social welfare spending in the Middle East, which in turn allows pundits like the New York Times' Thomas Friedman to urge U.S. wars as a way to make regimes more responsive to their people.
Backing Israel furthers Washington's interests. As Zunes explains, to U.S. policymakers radical nationalism is the main threat in a region of great economic and strategic value. Israel has served as a powerful force for combating and checking this nationalism, not just in Palestine, but in Lebanon, Jordan, and beyond. Some have tried to explain the Iraq war as driven by "dual loyalists" in the U.S. government -- Zionists pursuing Israeli rather than U.S. interests. The term "dual loyalist" is nothing the Left should use, implying as it does that loyalty to one's own nation-state should trump loyalty to internationalism and social justice. But in any event, while Israel may have welcomed the U.S. war on Iraq, there is no reason to doubt that the warmongers in Washington favor -- independent of Israeli interests -- using U.S. military advantage to intimidate and subdue any obstacles to their domination of so crucial a region as the Middle East.
The second great strength of Zunes's book is that it seriously addresses real concerns that people have and gives compelling answers. Americans have been understandably anxious about terrorism in the aftermath of 9-11, says Zunes, but there are both moral and pragmatic reasons why the U.S. "war on terrorism" is not the appropriate response. Zunes reviews the long record of U.S. support for terrorism, the incredible hypocrisy and double standards of U.S. policy, and the way the Bush administration has been using the war on terrorism to promote its political agenda. Zunes also shows how the only effective response to the sort of terrorism represented by Osama bin Laden -- that is, terrorism that draws for its recruits upon the genuine grievances of millions of people -- is a different U.S. foreign policy: one that promotes democracy and human rights, rather than military bases and arms sales, that recognizes the right of self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians, that ceases to try to force neo-liberal economic policies on the world's people. Military approaches to dealing with terrorism, Zunes argues convincingly, are likely to make things worse. Occasionally as Zunes navigates between moral and pragmatic criticisms of U.S. policy, his language gets a little wishy-washy. Air strikes and other unilateral U.S. military actions that kill civilians, he says, are "certain to be portrayed by the extremists as a manifestation of American imperialism." True enough, but it's not just extremists who see things this way and Zunes should make his position clear, as he does elsewhere.
One other problem with Tinderbox is that, although the volume is generally very well documented, there are occasionally places where an additional footnote would have made the book even more useful. For example, sources would have been helpful when Zunes tells us that in February 1991, after four weeks of bombing, but before the U.S.-led ground assault, the Iraqi government accepted a Soviet peace proposal in full and agreed to withdraw from Kuwait, only to be snubbed by Washington; that investigations made clear that the September 2002 demonstrations that began the second Intifada were not pre-planned by Arafat; or that the U.S. clandestinely supported the Phalangist militia in Lebanon. Not that these statements are inaccurate, but citations would have assisted readers in debating with U.S. government apologists.
But these faults aside, Tinderbox is a wonderful survey of U.S. policy in the Middle East, with a wealth of facts and arguments to challenge that policy, and with valuable advice as to how that policy should be changed. Only a change in that policy can give us a world with justice and security.