The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (review)

120 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, by Robert D. Kaplan. New York: The Free Press, 1993. 333 pp. $24.95. This book is aggravating and fascinating in equal measure. Charging out of the neoconservative camp, Mr. Kaplan seems determined to do a number on "the Arabists." "Arabists" to Mr. Kaplan are an ill-defined assemblage of missionaries, educators, and State Department employees who are responsible for a multitude of Middle East policy sins, mainly badmouthing Israel and allowing Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. The old-line Arabists, he argues, were a WASP aristocracy, romantically infatuated with the exotic Arabs and Muslims, imbued with missionary zeal to make these people over in a liberal Western mold (having failed to convert them to Christianity), and almost completely blind to the many flaws of Arab-Islamic societies: backwardness, intolerance, and brutality. Mr. Kaplan's typical Arabists are infected with "localitis," which leads them to lobby on behalf ofArab regimes instead of representing American policy in its totality-from Congress and the White House, not just the State Department-to the Arabs. Fortunately, he concludes, this "elite" has pretty much disappeared from the scene and is being replaced by a new breed sympathetic to Israel, tired of the Palestinians, supportive of ethnic and religious minorities, and alert to the evils of Arab despots, Arab nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism. None of these broadsides is particularly new. Pro-Zionist pundits have been taking potshots at these luckless diplomats ever since the 1940s, when the partisans of aJewish state narrowly defeated its opponents in the Executive branch, thus setting American policy henceforth on a course of firm and generous support for Israel. The curious thing is that they keep recreating (and demolishing) the "Arabist" straw man long after their battle has been won. One gets the impression that Mr. Kaplan conceived his book as another expose in this tradition, only this time with neoconservative patronage supported by certain Orientalist "authorities" known for their reductionist, pejorative treatment of the Arabs and Islam. This is Kaplan the polemicist. Fortunately, however, there is another Kaplan-the journalist. Kaplan the journalist is industrious and shrewd. He is also honest enough (though I won't go so far as to say fair-minded) to report that some "Arabists" do not fit his polemical model and that Israel and its supporters are not entirely blameless. Kaplan the polemicist would have us believe that an Arabist aristocracy exerted significant and wrongheaded influence over American Middle East Book Reviews 121 policy, that this aristocracy had a common mindset characterized in some cases by borderline antisemitism, and that its pervasive "localitis" rendered it ultimately "clueless" in analyzing the endemic nastiness ofArab political behavior. Wielding a stiletto rather than a sledgehammer, he portrays selfrighteous Protestant Ivy League do-gooders, adapting an attitude of Orientalist paternalism toward "their" Arabs, indulging a taste for higher status than they could ever enjoy at home, and taking up the Palestinian cause uncritically, perhaps because overt antisemitism was just not fashionable. Arabists are variously referred to as "bird-watchers" and"gong and trinket men," afflicted with "clientitis" and "localitis." Kaplan earnestly assures us that he is trying to empathize with these strange people even if it is not possible to sympathize with them. The author's occasional innuendos about antisemitism among certain "Arabists" do him no credit. Nor does his unwarranted criticism of the American University of Beirut's allegedly "political" orientation. Nor does his savage attack on Ambassador April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad on the eve of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. He accuses Glaspie of being the architect of U.S. policy toward Iraq, arguingincredibly -that the rest of the U.S. government, including the actual policymakers (Bush, Baker, Ross), was too busy with other things to ride herd on the "clueless" Near East bureau. Especially after the revelations of Irangate, if one believes this then one must also believe in the tooth fairy. Adding insult to injury, he blandly psychologizes that poor Glaspie (being a woman, after all) probably thought she could. flatter Saddam into behaving properly. In hindsight, one can agree that she should...