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A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East | 
 enlarge | Author: Kenneth Pollack
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
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Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
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Pages: 592
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Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.5
ISBN: 1400065488
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.73056
EAN: 9781400065486
ASIN: 1400065488
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Product Description
“A persuasive but painful solution for dealing with the mess in the Middle East.” –Kirkus
The greatest danger to America’s peace and prosperity, notes leading Middle East policy analyst Kenneth M. Pollack, lies in the political repression, economic stagnation, and cultural conflict running rampant in Arab and Muslim nations. By inflaming political unrest and empowering terrorists, these forces pose a direct threat to America’s economy and national security. The impulse for America might be to turn its back on the Middle East in frustration over the George W. Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq War and other engagements with Arab and Muslim countries. But such a move, Pollack asserts, will only exacerbate problems. He counters with the idea that we must continue to make the Middle East a priority in our policy, but in a humbler, more humane, more realistic, and more cohesive way.
Pollack argues that Washington’s greatest sin in its relations with the Middle East has been its persistent unwillingness to make the sustained and patient effort needed to help the people of the Middle East overcome the crippling societal problems facing their governments and societies. As a result, the United States has never had a workable comprehensive policy in the region, just a skein of half-measures intended either to avoid entanglement or to contain the influence of the Soviet Union.
Beyond identifying the stagnation of civic life in Arab and Muslim states and the cumulative effect of our misguided policies, Pollack offers a long-term strategy to ameliorate the political, economic, and social problems that underlie the region’s many crises. Through his suggested policies, America can engage directly with the governments of the Middle East and indirectly with its people by means of cultural exchange, commerce, and other “soft” approaches. He carefully examines each of the region’s most contested areas, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and explains how the United States can address each through mutually reinforcing policies.
At a time when the nation will be facing critical decisions about our continued presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, A Path Out of the Desert is guaranteed to stimulate debate about America’s humanitarian, diplomatic, and military involvement in the Middle East.
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 A Path Out of the Desert August 8, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Middle East will continue to dominate American security concerns regardless of who next occupies the Oval Office. Record oil prices, terrorism, Israel's security, Iraqi stability, and Iran's nuclear ambitions will top the new president's foreign policy agenda, whatever his ideological outlook. With A Path Out of the Desert (Random House, 592 pages, $30), Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Clinton-era National Security Council staffer, has penned a thoughtful rejoinder to those who, frustrated by President Bush's failures, might throw up their hands in frustration and walk away from the region.
Mr. Pollack is a good writer and his narrative is clear. He begins by outlining America's interests in the Middle East, dedicating separate chapters to oil, Israel, America's Arab allies, and nonproliferation. His acknowledgment of Israel's safety and security as a fundamental American interest is refreshing, given statements made by his colleagues at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, where Mr. Pollack is director of research, and given an increasingly large bloc within the Democratic Party that now argues the opposite. He does not include terrorism, political Islam, and instability in countries such as Iraq as American interests per se, but rather as threats that emanate from other problems, a semantic construction that allows Mr. Pollack to argue that American policy should better address the root causes of the Middle East's troubles.
These he outlines in chapters examining socioeconomic problems and the crisis in Middle East politics. Mr. Pollack's omission of the treatment of women as a major social issue may surprise half the region's population, but his emphasis on the Middle East's "crippling educational method" is long overdue, as anyone who has ever sat through a university class in Egypt, Iraq, or Iran can attest. To his credit, Mr. Pollack condemns the tendency to mix education and politics--unfortunately an import now plaguing Middle Eastern studies in America--but the issue is worth more than the two pages he gives it here. A discussion of press incitement to violence, unfortunately missing in Mr. Pollack's analysis of the region, would also have been worthwhile. Arab broadcasting of hatred and agitation to murder has undermined peace efforts under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, yet too many diplomats happily ignore it.
In his policy proposals, Mr. Pollack bends similarly to the political winds; the position he stakes out in A Path Out of the Desert reflects a tendency to allow the mistakes of the Bush administration to crowd out the experience of his predecessors. This is especially apparent in his discussion of the root causes of terror and instability: He underplays the importance of Islamist ideology as a cause, in favor of an overemphasis on political and economic factors.
Mr. Pollack argues that political Islam "is not necessarily a threat to the United States," though he acknowledges that "neither is it unrelated to the threats we face from the Muslim Middle East." Later, he declares that "Islam is not the reason for the rise of Islamist movements, nor is it the cause of the terrorist threat that the United States faces." True, many Muslims may not accept the radical scriptural interpretations offered by fundamentalists, but it is wrong to argue that religious motivation, no matter how twisted the exegesis, isn't a chief motivating concern of Islamists.
In his effort to understand Islamism, Mr. Pollack has drawn on the work of a Sarah Lawrence College professor, Fawaz Gerges, whose work, if not quite apologetic for political Islam, is nevertheless superficial. Economic, political, and social grievance is only half the Islamist story: After all, most suicide bombers are not poor and dispossessed, but middle-class and educated. Perhaps Mr. Pollack is correct that suicide terrorists are not sociopaths, but what did mold them psychologically? Anger and despair are not explanation enough: Sub-Saharan Africa does not breed global suicide bombers like the Arab world. Nor do radical interpretations rise from grass roots; often Saudi funding for radical mosques plays an essential role.
Mr. Pollack is also too trusting of adversaries. He believes the former Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, was sincere in his Dialogue of Civilizations, but the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate exposed the program as a cover for an accelerating covert nuclear weapons program.
With 20/20 hindsight, Mr. Pollack takes issue not with the Bush policy of pre-emption, but rather with the assessment of threats that brought about the war in Iraq. Nor does he oppose transformative diplomacy, just the incompetent way in which it was undertaken. He parts ways with liberals who ironically insist that democracy cannot take root in the Middle East's infertile ground. Former fellow travelers will be disappointed in his argument that economic liberalization--including, presumably, foreign direct investment--must come to the Arab world's socialized economies.
When he looks forward, Mr. Pollack's prescription--legal and educational reforms--should provoke little argument, and he is correct that the next administration must repackage its approach because of the stigma left behind by the Bush administration's whiplash reversals and poor policy implementation.
In an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of democracy promotion, Mr. Pollack traces its history to Clinton hands such as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross, and "reasonable and moderate" Bush administration officials such as Richard Haass. This is hogwash. Bush administration implementation was both sloppy and spastic, but little in the historical record suggests the Clinton administration grasped transformative diplomacy as anything more than window dressing for their belief that autocracy equals stability.
Ultimately, there is very little new in the "grand strategy" Mr. Pollack suggests should replace the failed policies of the past. Indeed, while he describes himself as a liberal internationalist, A Path out of the Desert is little more than a neoconservative manifesto uncorrupted by the bluntness of Richard Perle or the arrogance of Douglas Feith.
His strategy consists, essentially, of implementing the George W. Bush doctrine as it was articulated during his first term: actively aiding reform in the region on the principle that short-term stability and long-term security are very different things.
Mr. Pollack might have contributed more had he also addressed how to reform the bloated and ineffective State Department and international organization bureaucracy, which impeded the implementation the first time around. Foggy Bottom is inept at international development, and the World Bank spends far more on its own administration than it does on micro-loans. Some proposals beg more realism. Creating regional security architecture sounds great in principle, but expecting Arab dictators to abandon their antipathy of Israel in order to solve regional problems is tilting at windmills. It is hard to judge, from this vantage, the merits of the Bush doctrine, since it was never implemented properly or competently, but as a vision of change in the Middle East it remains a compelling project. If Mr. Pollack's grand strategy gives the Bush doctrine a second wind, both the Middle East and long-term American national security will be better for it.
Michael Rubin
New York Sun
July 22, 2008
Steering the Right Course July 28, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
The formulation of any strategy is dependent on knowing the goals which the strategy is to achieve. In this excellent book, Pollack identifies two goals that he sees as the purpose of his so-called Grand Strategy for the Middle East. The first goal is to ensure the flow of oil from the Middle Eastern and to protect its petroleum reserves. The second goal is to ensure the national security of the State of Israel. The first goal is based on the fact that the U.S. (and world) economy currently is dependent on petroleum. The second goal is based on the fact that the very value system of the U.S. demands that the nation support the Israeli State. Of the two the second is the most important since it is directly related to what the U.S. means as a nation-state.
Pollock then identifies how he believes the U.S. can achieve these goals. In his thinking, if peace, prosperity and the rule of law can be implanted among the Islamic states of the Middle East some form of democracy and regional stability will follow. Ironically peace, prosperity, and rule of law are also what the Islamic fundamentalist (including the Salafi extremists) wish to achieve although they appear to wish a theocracy rather than a democracy. Also Pollock understands prosperity to be a direct function of a free market economy and a secular, but functioning legal system. He therefore advocates a sensible implementation of a long term strategy involving diplomatic, economic and social operations designed to move the Middle East in this direction. And he realistically sees this implementation as running over years if not decades.
He addresses the issue of terrorism with equal good sense. He implies, but does not state that the U.S. will never be entirely safe from terrorist attacks simply because of the nature of terrorism as a function of the disaffected. But he maintains that Islamic forms of terrorism are less probable in a prosperous and just society. In the same manner a prosperous and just Middle East will not solve the problems of Israel and the Palestinian question, but it may make them easier to resolve for all concerned.
Now this all should sound pretty familiar since this is more or less the strategy that the George W. Bush administration espoused as the main reason for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pollock supported this action, (see The Threatening Storm, 2002), but believes that the Bush administration so mismanaged post-war Iraq and demonstrated such monumental incompetence as to give this strategy a permanent black eye. Pollock sees this as a tragic consequence and argues that with intelligent and thoughtful implementation this strategy is truly the way to bring the Middle East as a whole into the fellowship of prosperous and just societies. He may be right.
 The Economist's Review July 25, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Here is The Economist's Review of Path Out of the Desert.
The Economist
Books and Arts
America and the Middle East
How they got in, how to get out
Jul 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Foresight and hindsight in the world's bad places
A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East
By Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House; 539 pages; $30
A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
By Lawrence Freedman
PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $29.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 20
HOW did America get into its current mess in the Middle East? And how can it get out again? Kenneth Pollack's book is all about the second question but he starts by making a confession relevant to the first. He was a champion of the invasion of Iraq. In 2002, in an influential book entitled "The Threatening Storm", he argued the strategic and moral case for removing Saddam Hussein. Mr Pollack admits now that the intervention a year later was a fiasco, and that after such a disaster the inclination of most Americans is to turn away from the region completely and focus on problems at home. But that is not his view. His latest book is a powerful argument for continued, and perhaps even greater, American involvement in the Middle East.
As befits a former CIA analyst and member of the National Security Council, Mr Pollack builds his case on a hard-headed examination of America's interests in the region. Of these, the most important is oil. If a big percentage of it were suddenly to be removed from the market, the shock of higher prices could on some estimates spark a global recession akin to the Great Depression. American policy, he concludes, should therefore be designed principally to prevent "catastrophic oil disruptions". This means guarding against possibilities such as a revolution in Saudi Arabia or a massive terrorist attack on the oil-supply network.
You might expect a book that starts this way to dwell mainly on how America can maintain military forces in the region. Mr Pollack, however, wants nothing less than "an integrated grand strategy" to secure American interests for the long run. Such a strategy, he admits, may take "many decades", just as it took nearly half a century for America to help Europe and East Asia repair themselves after the second world war. For this grand strategy to work, he says, America will first have to harmonise its separate policies towards Iraq, Iran and Israel. It must also transform the region's politics and economics. That is to say--let no one accuse the chastened Mr Pollack of imperial hubris--America must help along the efforts of the locals, since outsiders "cannot possibly know how to change the society of another people".
But do the people of the Middle East want what America wants for them? Given the growth of political Islam, and the fact that Mr Pollack deems many Arab countries to be on the point of revolution, perhaps not. Nonetheless, a policy of continuing to prop up repressive regimes is like "playing Russian roulette" with foreign policy, as America discovered when the shah's fall turned Iran from staunch friend to implacable foe. Far better, he says, to encourage the region's governments to address popular grievances by embracing political freedom and social equality.
This will not be easy, not least because of the hated Bush administration's insincere or at least incompetent pursuit of this very policy. But Arabs tell pollsters that they want both democracy and Islam, and Mr Pollack reckons these two are compatible. Quoting an Egyptian activist who says that what her countrymen need is a job and a voice, he thinks America must find its path out of the desert by helping all Arabs get both.
A simple summary of Mr Pollack's main ideas does scant justice to this thoughtful and informative book. None of its prescriptions is especially novel. The patient promotion of reform, careful containment of the spillover from Iraq, a policy of carrots and sticks (but no military pre-emption) for Iran, building the sinews of a Palestinian state: to all except isolationists and the few surviving neocons, this has become a fairly conventional prospectus for America's post-Iraq policy in the Middle East. But Mr Pollack binds the strands together deftly and imparts a good deal of learning and wisdom along the way.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is less interested in how America should proceed after Iraq and more in working out how it tied itself in such knots in the first place. As an historian, he is more tolerant than Mr Pollack of George Bush, noting that after September 11th this president faced a challenge more complex in some ways than the one Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with after Pearl Harbour in 1941. Whereas Roosevelt knew who the enemy was and what America would have to do, Mr Bush had to choose and name an enemy in a new sort of war without obvious rules, aims or front-lines. He did so, moreover, in a region where no power had exercised a consistently sure touch, and where America had long been torn between an underlying dissatisfaction with the state of affairs and the traditional instinct of a great power to protect the status quo from aggressive states or radical movements.
It is instructive to read these books together. Sir Lawrence's aim is not to lay out a policy. He has no grand unifying theory of the Middle East. His aim is only to render the "most credible" account possible of momentous events such as the fall of the shah, the three wars in the Persian Gulf, invasion and jihad in Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter's half-success at peacemaking at Camp David in 1978 and Bill Clinton's failure there two decades later. All these and more formed the treacherous backdrop of American interests and alliances against which Mr Bush had to formulate his response to the attacks on the twin towers. Sir Lawrence's subtle narrative is a marvel of concision, even over more than 500 pages. By the end it cannot but make the reader wonder how realistic it is to advocate, as Mr Pollack does, an "integrated grand strategy" capable of being sustained for decades in such a violent and unpredictable part of the world.
To that Mr Pollack has a simple answer, in the form of a question. What is the alternative? Thanks to its energy needs, America is locked into the region for the foreseeable future, even though the future is so hard to foresee in the unhappy Middle East. Since there are no quick fixes, it had better reconcile itself to the long slog. And although unexpected events will continue to knock it off course, it is more likely to succeed if it can cling to at least some general sense of where it is trying to go.
 More of the Same Ol' Same Ineffective Same Ol' July 22, 2008
16 out of 27 found this review helpful
As Michael Rubin expressed in The Sun, the Middle East will continue to dominate American security concerns regardless of who next occupies the Oval Office. Record oil prices, terrorism, Israel's security, Iraqi stability, and Iran's nuclear ambitions will top the new president's foreign policy agenda, whatever his ideological outlook. Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Clinton-era National Security Council staffer, has penned a thoughtful rejoinder to those who, frustrated by President Bush's failures, might throw up their hands in frustration and walk away from the region.
Mr. Pollack is a good writer and his narrative is clear. He begins by outlining America's interests in the Middle East, dedicating separate chapters to oil, Israel, America's Arab allies, and nonproliferation. His acknowledgment of Israel's safety and security as a fundamental American interest is refreshing, given statements made by his colleagues at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, where Mr. Pollack is director of research, and given an increasingly large bloc within the Democratic Party that now argues the opposite. He does not include terrorism, political Islam, and instability in countries such as Iraq as American interests per se, but rather as threats that emanate from other problems, a semantic construction that allows Mr. Pollack to argue that American policy should better address the root causes of the Middle East's troubles.
These he outlines in chapters examining socioeconomic problems and the crisis in Middle East politics. Mr. Pollack's omission of the treatment of women as a major social issue may surprise half the region's population, but his emphasis on the Middle East's "crippling educational method" is long overdue, as anyone who has ever sat through a university class in Egypt, Iraq, or Iran can attest. To his credit, Mr. Pollack condemns the tendency to mix education and politics -- unfortunately an import now plaguing Middle Eastern studies in America -- but the issue is worth more than the two pages he gives it here. A discussion of press incitement to violence, unfortunately missing in Mr. Pollack's analysis of the region, would also have been worthwhile. Arab broadcasting of hatred and agitation to murder has undermined peace efforts under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, yet too many diplomats happily ignore it.
In his policy proposals, Mr. Pollack bends similarly to the political winds; the position he stakes out in "A Path Out of the Desert" reflects a tendency to allow the mistakes of the Bush administration to crowd out the experience of his predecessors. This is especially apparent in his discussion of the root causes of terror and instability: He underplays the importance of Islamist ideology as a cause, in favor of an overemphasis on political and economic factors.
Mr. Pollack argues that political Islam "is not necessarily a threat to the United States," though he acknowledges that "neither is it unrelated to the threats we face from the Muslim Middle East." Later, he declares that "Islam is not the reason for the rise of Islamist movements, nor is it the cause of the terrorist threat that the United States faces." True, many Muslims may not accept the radical scriptural interpretations offered by fundamentalists, but it is wrong to argue that religious motivation, no matter how twisted the exegesis, isn't a chief motivating concern of Islamists.
In his effort to understand Islamism, Mr. Pollack has drawn on the work of a Sarah Lawrence College professor, Fawaz Gerges, whose work, if not quite apologetic for political Islam, is nevertheless superficial. Economic, political, and social grievance is only half the Islamist story: After all, most suicide bombers are not poor and dispossessed, but middle-class and educated. Perhaps Mr. Pollack is correct that suicide terrorists are not sociopaths, but what did mold them psychologically? Anger and despair are not explanation enough: Sub-Saharan Africa does not breed global suicide bombers like the Arab world. Nor do radical interpretations rise from grass roots; often Saudi funding for radical mosques plays an essential role.
Mr. Pollack is also too trusting of adversaries. He believes the former Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, was sincere in his Dialogue of Civilizations, but the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate exposed the program as a cover for an accelerating covert nuclear weapons program.
With 20/20 hindsight, Mr. Pollack takes issue not with the Bush policy of pre-emption, but rather with the assessment of threats that brought about the war in Iraq. Nor does he oppose transformative diplomacy, just the incompetent way in which it was undertaken. He parts ways with liberals who ironically insist that democracy cannot take root in the Middle East's infertile ground. Former fellow travelers will be disappointed in his argument that economic liberalization -- including, presumably, foreign direct investment -- must come to the Arab world's socialized economies.
When he looks forward, Mr. Pollack's prescription -- legal and educational reforms -- should provoke little argument, and he is correct that the next administration must repackage its approach because of the stigma left behind by the Bush administration's whiplash reversals and poor policy implementation.
In an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of democracy promotion, Mr. Pollack traces its history to Clinton hands such as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross, and "reasonable and moderate" Bush administration officials such as Richard Haass. This is hogwash. Bush administration implementation was both sloppy and spastic, but little in the historical record suggests the Clinton administration grasped transformative diplomacy as anything more than window dressing for their belief that autocracy equals stability.
Ultimately, there is very little new in the "grand strategy" Mr. Pollack suggests should replace the failed policies of the past. Indeed, while he describes himself as a liberal internationalist, "A Path out of the Desert" is little more than a neoconservative manifesto uncorrupted by the bluntness of Richard Perle or the arrogance of Douglas Feith.
His strategy consists, essentially, of implementing the George W. Bush doctrine as it was articulated during his first term: actively aiding reform in the region on the principle that short-term stability and long-term security are very different things.
Mr. Pollack might have contributed more had he also addressed how to reform the bloated and ineffective State Department and international organization bureaucracy, which impeded the implementation the first time around. Foggy Bottom is inept at international development, and the World Bank spends far more on its own administration than it does on micro-loans. Some proposals beg more realism. Creating regional security architecture sounds great in principle, but expecting Arab dictators to abandon their antipathy of Israel in order to solve regional problems is tilting at windmills. It is hard to judge, from this vantage, the merits of the Bush doctrine, since it was never implemented properly or competently, but as a vision of change in the Middle East it remains a compelling project. If Mr. Pollack's grand strategy gives the Bush doctrine a second wind, both the Middle East and long-term American national security will be better for it.
 Disappointing! July 21, 2008
6 out of 29 found this review helpful
The Earth does not revolve around the U.S.; Pollock, however, writes as though it does. China is rapidly taking an important (often lead) NON-JUDGMENTAL role in resource-rich nations; meanwhile, Muslims within the Mid-East take an increasingly jaundiced view of the U.S. (involvement in overthrowing Iranian leaders, support for autocrats, flaunting American customs within holy Muslim lands, invading Iraq, prisoner abuse), while others tire of our constant self-interested meddling in their internal affairs while failing to correct our own problems - eg. political domination by vested business interests, an over-extended military, an obvious bias towards Israel, enormous federal and trade deficits, unwillingness to cooperate in solving global warming, a lack of a credible energy policy, and out-of-control health care and education systems.
The principal theme of Pollock's book is that America must take a long-term, internationally-assisted, strategic view of the Middle East aimed at encouraging these countries to pursue gradual political, economic, and social reform from within.
Pollock correctly alleges that autocracy, patronage, bloated bureaucracies, stifling of dissent, inadequate education, unemployment and underemployment all predominate in the region. He also admits that efforts to work with the region's autocrats failed in the 1990s because of public anger at the U.S. vs. Israel. Yet, he still blithely proceeds with the conclusion that the U.S. has a moral debt to support the creation of Israel because of the Holocaust (I thought Nazi Germany was responsible!) and that Israel further deserves support because of their "democratic" nature - unless you're an Arab within Israel, or worse yet, a West Bank Palestinian constantly subject to property expropriation and roadblocks that make earning a living difficult. (Pollock also forgets that democracy in the Mid-East has not worked out well for either the U.S. or Israel - witness the results in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Similarly, elections in Croatia, Rwanda, and Serbia were manipulated by depots who whipped up long-standing ethnic sentiments to launch ethnic cleansings.)
Pollock's recommendations for increased cultural exchanges and commerce between the Mid-East and America make sense - encouraging their acquisition of consumer goods would reduce feelings of hopelessness and futility, and provide a disincentive for violence (eg. towards Israel). However, this will not accomplish nearly as much as desired.
Pollock forgets that China's power and respect is quickly rising due to their rapidly improving economy - standards of living are on track to improve 100X within a human life span. Further, their non-judgmental approach to relationships with other nations, non-attachment to Isreal, and strong currency are likely much more attractive to the Mid-East than our own involvement. As for current U.S. domination of important institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and U.N. Security Council - these are not likely to last after China becomes the world's most powerful economy by 2050; regardless, China has worked its miracle without them. Finally, U.S. credibility as a mentor was severely damaged when we "helped" Russia's initial reform efforts, reducing their GNP 45%, increasing crime, and lowering health levels.
The U.S. obtains only a minority of its oil from the Mid-East, and China represents the greatest opportunity for increased oil demand. So, why should the Mid-East put up with more aggravation from us when the Chinese pose a more attractive alternative?
Bottom Line: Pollock is living in the past. The U.S., preceded by Britain, has made a mess out of the Mid-East. Hopefully, China's future involvement will lead to significant improvement.
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