The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955-1967.

This objective and meticulously researched volume exploits recently declassified sources in the West and newlyavailable Arabic language materials to reassess the turbulent years from Israel's Gaza raid in February of 1995 through the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and its immediate aftermath. Fawaz Gerges focuses on how intensification of the Cold War led to increased superpower intervention in the Middle East, and especially on how superpower competition enabled local powers to manipulate their great-power patrons to advance their own regional ambitions. Indeed, the bargaining position of regional powers increased, Gerges argues, in "direct proportion to the growing hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union" (p. 245). Both the US and the USSR felt obliged to compete fiercely for local clients, thereby enabling major Arab states and Israel to "manipulate the polarized international system to gain political, economic, and military concessions" (p. 245). In fact, the superpowers were frequently unable decisively to influence developments in the Middle East, Gerges maintains, and consistently failed to convert overwhelming military strength into direct political influence. Nevertheless, importing the Cold War into the Middle East exacerbated local conflicts arid made their resolution more difficult, he observes, and had "devastating repercussions for the security. and stability of the whole area" (p. 246). Those repercussions are clearly very much with us yet, however cloaked they may now be in new political language and novel geo-strategic antitheses.

In Gerges' opinion, both the Untied States and the Soviet Union welcomed the weakening of Egypt's regional influence as a result of the dissolution of the UAR in 1961. After 1961 Egypt could no longer mobilize Arab states against foreign intrusion, he observes, and the Middle East soon relapsed into an internecine conflict which facilitated renewed manipulation by the superpowers. Moscow's deepening involvement with Egypt and Syria in the early 1960, and America's greatly enhanced relationship with Israel, especially under the Johnson administration, served to impose the polarities of the Cold War more firmly than ever on Arabs and Israelis alike. Indeed, 1961 rather than 1967, Gerges suggests, marked the real demise of Arab nationalism and the genesis of the very different Middle East that we know today.

Usefully, the author points out how relatively unimportant the issue of israel was in the Arab World during most of the 1950s, the single exception being during the Suez war. Throughout that decade, the "dominant issue in Arab politics was the foreign policy orientation of the Arab states" (p. 122), pushed to the Left as most Arab nations were by Egypt and to the Right by Iraq. According to Gerges, Israel began to emerge as a major factor in both regional politics and Arab-superpower relations only in the early 1960s, precisely at the moment when conflicts among the Arab states began to deepen. Currently, one cannot but suspect that during the 1990s, the subject of Israel, on both the regional and international level, may revert to the more modest importance which it held during the 1950s rather than retain the status which it possessed during the three decades between 1960 and 1990.

Gerges emphasizes the opposition of the Eisenhower administration to the invasion of Egypt in 1956 by England, France and Israel, and reports Eisenhower's specific warning to Israel that the US would "handle our affairs as though we [do] not have a Jew in America," the "welfare and best interests of our country" being the "sole criteria" of US policy (p. 66). Only US threats of comprehensive sanctions and expulsion of Israel from the UN, the author notes, persuaded Israel to withdraw from Sinai after the Suez war. One result, he observes, was that the late 1950s through the early 1960s witnessed a golden age in Arab-American relations. During that period the US normalized relations with Egypt and formally recognized the anti-Communist character of Arab nationalism. Given the sometimes bloody history of opposition to Communism by nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, one might wonder why American recognition that Arab nationalism was "fundamentally incompatible" (p. 131) with Communism was so long in coming, and why in the end it proved so fragile.

Detailed attention is also given to the on-going debate between Americans based in Washington and US diplomats in the Middle East. This debate has been consistently won by the geo-strategists, Gerges emphasizes, a result which helped to occasion such major US policy missteps as the refusal to supply Nasser with arms in 1954 and the cancellation of aid for construction of the Aswan dam two years later. "The irony [is] that US behavior contributed to the expansion rather than to the contraction of Soviet influence in the area," Gerges writes (p. 89). He points out that the debate between geo-strategists and regionalists re-erupted during the two or three years prior to the 1967 war, with US policy toward Egypt specifically at issue. With the Cold War at its height and hot war raging in Vietnam, the Johnson administration gave short shrift to the advice it received from the US Embassy in Cairo to moderate its antipathy to Nasser. Nineteen-Sixty-Seven saw the Arab-Israeli conflict finally emerge as the "single most important foreign policy issue in the external relations of the Arab states" (p. 236). The result, Gerges makes clear, was that the "main forces of regional instability and conflict shifted from inter-Arab politics to Arab-Israeli interactions" (p. 236). Egypt and Syria aligned themselves more closely with the USSR, and Nasser welcomed the Soviet fleet in Alexandria. Nevertheless, Gerges emphasizes that at Khartoum in the autumn of 1967, Egypt joined Saudi Arabia and the Sudan to endorse a political rather than a military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. "This fact should not be confused," he observes, "with the summit's three [official] declarations on Israel: `no peace, no negotiations, no recognition'" (p. 234). Gerges notes that the Sudanese prime minister explained that such rejectionist resolutions were adopted as an "instrumental response to the uncompromising stand of the PLO" (p. 234).

This book is an outstanding example of the attempt by a new generation of Arab scholars to explain what Paul Salem has called, in his book of the same name, the "Bitter Legacy" of the modem Arab World. Symbolically, it may represent one more example of a sober coming to terms with that legacy, and thereby constitute a possible building block for the construction of a better tomorrow. Certainly, this is diplomatic history at its best, and is a volume which should be considered required reading by anyone seriously interested in the 20th Century Middle East.