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  • The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands
  • Michael M. Gunter (bio)
The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, by Jeremy Salt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 358 pages. Notes to 416. Bibl. to p. 441. Index to p. 468. $29.95.

Jeremy Salt’s “leftist” interpretation of the West’s past two centuries of interaction with the Middle East constitutes a blistering, well-documented philippic that will provide considerable sources for reflection and should be mandatory reading for all Western policymakers, academics, and intelligent laypeople thinking about yet another invasion of any Middle Eastern state. Salt writes: “Born of strategic need and commercial greed, the impact of the West has been felt across the Middle East and North Africa in invasion, bullying and intimidation, economic exploitation, the support of tyrants, and the manipulation of bribed and suborned kings and prime ministers” (p. 357).

The Unmaking of the Middle East is divided into four jargon-free parts, the first of which sets the scene by asking “Why do they hate us?” Here Salt takes to task scholars such as Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Francis Fukuyama, and Fouad Ajami, among others, for their various interpretations blaming the Middle East and its supposed challenges to Western security. The narrative then moves rapidly from the French invasions of Egypt in 1798 and Algeria in 1830 to the British attack upon Egypt in 1882. Next, the narrative turns to the event that Winston Churchill termed the most “signal triumph” (p. 44) ever won by science over barbarians, namely the machine-gun slaughter of some 10,000 Sudanese tribal warriors in the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Part II starts with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, detailing the Balkan War of 1912–1913, when Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece took advantage of the Turks’ weakness and dismembered most of their remaining southeastern European possessions. “Thousands of Muslims fled in panic before the advance of the Balkan armies ... Eastern Trakya (Thrace) was left ‘an unpeopled waste’” (pp. 54–54). These disasters for the Turks continued through World War I and its aftermath, including the Greek invasion of Anatolia, where there was “a systematic plan of destruction of the Turkish villages and extinction of the Moslem population” (p. 76). As for the fate of the Armenians and the extent of Turkish guilt, “subjects of acrimonious debate to this day” (p. 69), Salt argues that “there certainly was a holocaust in the eastern Ottoman lands, but it devoured Muslim Kurds and Turks just as greedily and cruelly as Christian Armenians” (p. 68).

Part III, entitled “The American Ascendancy,” follows the American involvement in the Middle East from the Eisenhower years, to President Jimmy Carter’s “bruising” (p. 242) encounters with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, to the sending of Marines to Lebanon in 1982. Salt analyzes the period when President Lyndon B. Johnson consolidated the US “special relationship” with Israel. Here Salt questionably maintains that “as Israel was at no risk of attack by Egypt or Syria, and the United States knew it, an attack by Israel obviously could not be preemptive, but this was the phrase Johnson and all senior administration figures continued to use” (p. 219) as war broke out in June 1967.

In Part IV, Salt analyzes the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, and concludes with further thoughts on Israel. The author begins this part of the narrative by musing about what revelations might have come out of Saddam Husayn’s trial, but did not, regarding his earlier dealings with the United States. “According to Congressman Sam Gejdenson, ‘virtually every arm’ of the U.S. government, [End Page 157] not just the intelligence agencies but the State, Commerce, Agriculture, and Justice Departments, had cooperated in a program of aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein” (p. 291).

As for the George W. Bush Administration, “the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was preceded by a propaganda campaign monumental in its deceit and dishonesty” (p. 317). The US Neoconservatives are “radical conservatives advocating the aggressive use of military power to change the world in U.S. interests ... through what they called ‘preemptive...

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