Review of Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East

Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, 2009.

Faculty profile at Columbia

Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at Columbia, gained nation-wide attention in the fall after Fox news linked the insidious Khalidi to Obama. He is one of the, if not the, leading scholars on the modern Middle East teaching in the US. Sowing Crisis examines the role of the Cold War on the Middle East, which he also addressed in Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004). This work resulted from lectures at Bryn Mawr and a spate of institutions from Alexandria, Egypt to Tufts, and it blends sources from monographs, published primary sources (notably FRUS), and on-line document store-houses, such as the National Security Archive. The book consists of six mixed thematic and chronological chapters examining the roots of the US' policy in the Middle East and the deleterious effects of its Cold War agenda.

If someone asked me to recommend a book for non-specialists on US policy in the region, I would consider this one of the two recommended works. If a person wanted a detailed explanation of how the US acted in the region, Douglas Little's American Orientalism is considered the standard book by an American historian. Little's scholarship, at points, is an accomplished diplomatic history under Edward Said's guiding thought of orientalism. One could argue that outside of a theoretical framework specified in the first chapter, orientalism is loosely applied. Little's prose, base of knowledge, and handle of documentary evidence and scholarship makes the book essential to a student of American policy in the region, and qualifies him as one of the leading diplomatic historians of US policy in the region.

What you get from Khalidi is different. Where Little tends to stand back and let the cards fall where they may, Khalidi judges the nature of policy and assesses how super-power rivalry interfered with regional politics. He offers a generalized view of the US' actions in the region and global events during the Cold War peppered with specific details, which is no surprise considering that each chapter is an adapted lecture. Starting with the importance of Iran and oil, he moves through the 20th century up until the War on Terror, which he considers more of a war on Muslims and the Middle East rather than a true war on terrorism. US policy in the region, the author maintains, stemmed from Cold War justifications and, after 1979, decisions to oppose Iran. He incorporates Odd Arne Westad's conception of the US as an empire of liberty in The Global Cold War, and Khalidi discerns few traces of spreading liberty to the Middle East in American policy. Similarly, viewing the Soviet Union as an empire of justice, he argues that the Soviet presence accomplished little in purveying equality for the working-class or downtrodden fellahin.

Khalidi moves into the post-Cold War era with a predominant focus on GW Bush. As one could guess, Khalidi points to the Bush administration and war as unhinging Iraq and producing regional instability--unrivaled in the US' history of meddling since 1945. He justly criticizes Bush and his team for failing to comprehend not only elemental facts on Iraq, but of regional history. Khalidi's treatment of the period following 1991 centers mostly on the 2003 invasion, and there's a noticeable administration missing. Bill Clinton's continuous punitive measures targeting Iraq (better known as limited or quiet war for nearly all of his presidency) escape notice except for a few oblique references, and Khalidi elides nearly everything after the momentarily successful Madrid peace meeting until 2003.

After skimming the book, I'm left with several other criticisms. Khalidi repeats several items, which isn't a deal breaker considering the book's scope. He also claims, erroneously, that Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency after "Truman's defeat in the 1952 elections" (172). Adlai Stevenson--the Democratic Party's two time loser in the 50s--ran against Ike, not Truman. There are two other interpretive matters that I wish Khalidi would have expanded or addressed. The first relates to oil. The second chapter elucidates the significance of oil for the US and its allies after WWII, but it stops without developing the point further or how petroleum could have influenced US decision making after 1950. After the second chapter, oil disappears as a matter that drove policy. What about Operation Hard Surface and supporting the Saudi state with weapons? Could he have covered the US' interactions with the Shah's Savak? While this wasn't his book, it raises questions on the American century and the black gold that greased the wheels of American hegemony. Specifically, one could ask, could there have been such an expansive American century (abroad and at home) without cheap oil?

Lastly, to borrow a line from the Godfather, American policy in the region wasn't all dollars and cents. Certainly, the Cold War guided the US' actions in the region, but other aspects were at play. Shifting perceptions of Jews following the 1967 war altered US relations; it wasn't simply Cold War politics, as Peter Novick shows in The Holocaust and Collective Memory. The elephant in the room, orientalism, a topic which Khalidi is no stranger to, appears a handful of times. There are two potential explanations. One, that intellectual terrain is a mine field, and he was wise to avoid it at all costs. By doing so, he steers clear of attacks of being anti-semitic. The second results from his overarching framework. He attributes American foreign policy processes to Cold War reasoning, which is correct, but he misses the cultural motives of policy, such as deep seated enmity of Arabs. My money is on the former--he's too good of an historian to make that mistake.

Those criticisms aside, it's a wonderful book for someone who wants to grasp the motors of American foreign relations in the Middle East and how they influenced the state of the region's politics.

Here's a quote I enjoyed and that I find summarizes much of his analysis for the Cold War:
"While these remarks provoke several reflections about the Middle East since the end of the Cold War--a period that has seen a massive upsurge in US interest in the region keyed to terrorism than communism--one reflection is pertinent to this chapter: how much harm to the internal political development of this region, and in particular to peoples' aspirations for democracy, was done by the two superpowers' obsessive focus on each other, sometimes to the exclusion of all else, and their constant, insidious jockeying for Cold War advantage? The evidence of Iran, or Lebanon and Jordan, and also of Iraq and other countries in the region is that it was grave." (200)