Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America’s Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833–1992 by Michael A. Palmer (review)

220 Canadian Review of American Studies Michael A. Palmer. Guardiaris of the Gulf: A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833-1992. New York: The Free Press, 1992.Pp. 249, notes, maps, bibliography and index. For history to be good, it should do at feast one of three things: give us new information on an important subject, offer us a fresh interpretation that alters our point of view,or tell us a compelling story in an engaging way. Historians who do all three are rare indeed. Michael Palmer, for much of this book, does not do any of those things. Palmer promises his readers a sweeping tour of the United States' role in the Persian Gulf. Unfortunately he uses a rather small broom. Just one third of the way through the book we have the 1970s,with Nixon and Carter and the formulation of the doctrines associated with them. For Nixon, that meant regional peace keepers like the Shah of Iran; for Carter, U.S. defense of the Gulf through a rapid deployment force. To cover so much ground so quickly forces Palmer to breeze across history at least until he reaches the 1980s.Still, he does not offer the sweep of events and engaging personalities that make a book like Daniel Yergin's The Prize such a pleasure to read. Nor does the scholarship match what we might find with Roger Louis or does the interpretation provide a grand synthesislike Albert Hourani. What Palmer does giveus instead is a reasonable military history of the Persian Gulf War. Indeed, if he had presented the book in that way, the reader would not be so disappointed with the survey that places Desert Shield/Storm in context. That is not to say that the survey is flawed. The problem is Palmer's narrow perspective. He focuses largely on the Washington decision makers without ever givingus a picture of the people, history, and geography of the Gulf region. When the United States first opens commerce in the Gulf, Palmer fails to tell us what Americans are sellingor how important those goods are to the American economy. Palmer also senses that the Iran crisisof 1945-46 and the Mossadeq crisisof 1953played an important role in defining postwar American policy towards the Gulf. In evaluating the significanceof those events, however, he is too inclined to accept the officialjustification for the American response. To accept the view of American Consul in Tabriz Robert Rossow that the "cold war began" when Soviet troops manoeuvred towards Teheran on 4 March 1946or that "American concerns for the security of the Middle East" stemmed from the episode, or to imply that Winston Churchill's Fulton, Missourispeech on 5 March was a response to that event (31-32) distorts the record. Rossow is a thin reed on which to hang such a large claim. Most historians, and most recently Louis Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946, see the Soviet goals as limited and the American response as exaggerated by cold war fears. Similarly, they would reject the Eisenhower claim, BookReviews 221 endorsed by Palmer (69), that Mossadeq was moving into the Soviet orbit. Thus, we sense,that as a historian, Palmer has no intention of writing a critical history of America's role in the Persian Gulf. He seems satisfied that the United States had important interests in the region and, having them, needed to defend them. Palmer treats the acquisition of those interests as somehow inevitable and justified by the nature of things. The United States began to trade with the region, the region was unstable, the British kept it stable, the United States came to value the region's resources, the United States had to guarantee peace and security. That brings us to the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein, and finally Desert Storm.Having hopscotched across a century and a half of history, Palmer suddenly becomesdetailed and analytical. Here, we realize, are the stories he enjoys telling, notso much about the fall of the Shah or American efforts to find a framework for peace,but about the military operations during the "Tanker War'' when the United Statesprotected Kuwait's oil...