In A Choice of Enemies, Lawrence Freedman has taken one of the most analysed and controversial subjects in modern politics – US policy towards the Middle East – and set himself two near-impossible tasks. The first is to write a book that will be perceived as scholarly and impartial. The second is to say something new about the subject.Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College, London, succeeds triumphantly in the second task. A Choice of Enemies is both a fast-paced introduction for lay readers and a fresh analysis that will appeal to experts.

The novelty of the book lies mainly in its effort to provide a comprehensive account of American engagement with the broader Middle East, from Afghanistan to Israel since 1979 – a year that saw the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the arrival of Saddam Hussein as president of Iraq.

Taken individually, all of the pieces of Freedman’s story are familiar. But by writing a linked narrative of all the problems confronting the US, his book gives an unrivalled sense of all the pressures and trade-offs facing American presidents.

The book’s title, A Choice of Enemies, captures what Freedman sees as the central dilemma facing US policymakers: there are so many sources of potential trouble in the region that policymakers constantly have to juggle priorities – and choose whom to befriend and whom to confront. Efforts to deal with one problem create another – leading to sudden shifts in policy. So after the debacle of the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan administration sent arms to Iran in an effort to free American hostages in Lebanon, there was a compensatory lurch towards Iraq and “the United States became a virtual ally of Iraq in its naval war with Iran”.

When Saddam became too dangerous, Iraq became enemy number one again. But the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 indirectly empowered Iran in the region. So now Iran must once again be made “the main enemy”.

Freedman’s accounts of the current debates about Iran or Iraq will not surprise an attentive reader of the newspapers. But the accounts of the Carter and Reagan administrations provide valuable reminders of the roots of current dilemmas across the region. Some of the contrasts with the present day are also striking. Carter, for example, got on much better with some Arab leaders than with the Israelis.

Freedman makes a brave stab at being non-partisan. He writes modestly that his aim is “to provide a reasonably thorough account of how successive presidents … engaged with the Middle East”. The Freedman method is determinedly empirical: “To consider the evidence carefully [and] … to provide the most credible account of events.”

It sounds so simple. But, inevitably, with such a highly controversial subject, anything Freedman says will be taken down and used in evidence against him by partisans on both sides. So when discussing the failure of the Camp David peace talks during the Clinton presidency, Freedman suggests that all sides – Israelis, Palestinians and Americans – share some of the blame. To the politically innocent reader, this may sound like the very definition of an even-handed account. But Freedman’s explanation runs counter to the dominant political narrative in Israel and the US, which is that the Palestinians were offered a fantastic deal at Camp David and by turning it down showed that they were uninterested in peace.

Not all Freedman’s judgments mark him out as a dove. His argument that American military withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia encouraged al-Qaeda will have supporters of Senator John McCain nodding in agreement. But in general, A Choice of Enemies, is pretty disdainful of the Middle Eastern policies promoted by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Freedman tends to make his point with a raised eyebrow rather than a shriek. He notes that after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Paul Wolfowitz – the number two at the Pentagon – wanted to attack Iraq more than Afghanistan, partly because it was “a much more manageable enemy”. Freedman notes dryly that “ease of attack was not in itself a good reason to choose an enemy”.

At times, however, he is much more direct in his criticism of the Bush administration. “When a president routinely describes every act of policy as a blow for ‘freedom’ the word gets devalued, just as the word ‘peace’ did when it became a staple of Soviet propaganda,” he writes.

Unlike many critics of the Bush administration, Freedman does not believe the policymakers he is criticising are evil. There are no real villains in his book, with the possible exception of Michael Ledeen – an academic and some-time government adviser who pops up a couple of times giving bad advice to various administrations. But there is little doubt that Freedman has been left aghast by the incompetence and hubris of the Bush administration. He notes with astonishment that, faced with a choice of enemies, the US seems to have ended up in a fight with almost everybody and is “beset by enemies on all sides”.

Freedman’s central conclusion is that the US needs to be less ambitious and more realistic in the aims that it sets itself in the Middle East. The fact that his book starts and ends with the American government facing crises in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and Lebanon suggests that these are not problems with obvious solutions.

In line with the cautious and pragmatic tone of his book, Freedman urges the US to come to terms with “the limits of power”. He writes: “The continuity in many of the problems facing the Middle East suggests that they must be managed or endured; they are too rooted in the institutional structures, power balances and cultures of the region to be solved.”

A Choice of Enemies is a book about American foreign policy; but this is a very un-American conclusion.

June 16, 2008 9:30am in Middle East, US foreign policy | Comment