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| Volume XII, Spring 2005, Number 1 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, by Dennis Ross. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. 840 pages, with appendix, notes and index. $35.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
Professor of international relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University
For complete review, click here.
The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, by Clayton E. Swisher. New York: Nation Books, 2004. $10.17, paperback.
Charles D. Smith
University of Arizona
For complete review, click here.
The 9/11 Report. Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Authorized Edition.New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 567 pages. $10.00, soft bound.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Associate, German Orient Institute, Hamburg
For complete review, click here.
Turkey-Iran Relations, 1979-2004: Revolution, Ideology, War, Coups and Geopolitics, by Robert Olson. Mazda Publishers, 2004. 284 pages, with bibliography and index. $35.00, paperback.
Lawrence Davidson
Professor of history, West Chester University
It all seems simple when you follow the official script. Indeed, if you are dependent on the U.S. media, this is the only script. But readers of Middle East Policy are not confined to the official script. Some of them may be bound to the government line for the sake of their jobs, because they are emotionally tied to the Jewish state, or because they patriotically believe that what America represents is better than what the opposition represents. An equal number of readers may have serious doubts about the very premises of all these positions. Whatever the case may be, all these readers know that reality is much more complicated than what is playing on Fox News. It is for these readers that I strongly recommend Robert Olson's Turkey-Iran Relations, 1979-2004.
In the complex and deadly world of the Middle East, the dominant players may be the United States and its energetic proxy Israel, but they are not alone in the field. Among the others are two regional powers, Turkey and Iran, whose decisions and strategies will have an effect on how the present struggle plays out. Olson allows us to come to an understanding of this regional situation through a detailed, clearly written essay that gives us the view from Ankara and Tehran.
Olson's primary stage of action is actually northern Iraq, home of the Iraqi Kurds. Here, at least in the recent past, the Turks and Iranians pursued a seemingly endless game of advance and retreat using their respective Kurdish proxies. This made northern Iraq a kind of buffer zone that allowed the two powers to safely contest to the point of both stalemate and stability. In the process, Turkish and Iranian representatives would hasten back and forth to each other's capitals establishing lines of communication that allowed for the peaceful resolution of frequent disagreements. The one thing that often came between them was religion, particularly the suspicions of secular Turkish leaders that Iran was encouraging the revival of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey. The one thing that tended to hold them together was their mutual opposition to the creation of any independent Kurdish state in the area. They feared that such a state would only encourage independence movements amongst their own minorities (Kurds and Azerbaijanis).
A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, by Matthew Connelly. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xviii + 400 pages. $26.00, paperback.
Arun Kapil
Professor of political science, Institut Catholique de Paris
[A different version of this article was published in the March 27, 2004, issue of The Beirut Review.
The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian war was commemorated this past November. It generated much commentary in France and Algeria as to the lasting significance of the war and what it meant at the time. The Algerian War was indeed a revolutionary event -- on a number of levels. One of these was the impact it had on the conduct of international relations, impressively documented in Matthew Connelly's A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Connelly, a historian at Columbia University, makes extensive use of primary documentation from public and private archives -- many recently opened -- in several countries (particularly the United States, France and Great Britain), plus an exhaustive treatment of the primary and secondary literature, to argue that the Algerian war heralded, as the book's title suggests, a diplomatic revolution that forever changed the way in which transnational conflicts were waged and concluded.
The Algerian war involved, as Connelly states at the outset, a "supreme paradox," due to the inverse relationship between France's military strength and its bargaining position vis-à-vis the FLN. Militarily speaking, the FLN had all but lost the war by 1962. The size of FLN guerrilla forces inside Algeria and their level of activity, which peaked 1956-57 while the Battle of Algiers was underway, declined precipitously from 1958 onward. By the final year of the war, the French army had the run of the terrain. But the ultimate losers were the French; the FLN, though militarily weak and with no liberated territory to speak of inside Algeria, emerged victorious. In the negotiations that led to Algeria's independence, moreover, the skillful negotiators of the FLN's provisional government, the GPRA, extracted one concession after another from the more experienced French negotiating team. President de Gaulle had not envisioned independence for Algeria upon his return to power in 1958. When his views on the matter began to evolve, he was nonetheless determined to maintain a French presence there and keep control of the Sahara, with its hydrocarbon resources and nuclear testing grounds. But De Gaulle, who was at the peak of his authority in France, ultimately gave in across the board to the men of the GPRA, who not only were not backed up by a significant military force but had never exercised state power and were, for the most part, barely half his age.
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