With uncommon skill, Shlaim has managed-in the confines of a very small volume with very large margins-to pack misjudgments, arrogance, and lack of sense into 1994's worst book on the Middle East.
Example #1 (micro level): Each house of Congress formed a commission of inquiry into the charges forwarded by Gary Sick that Candidate Reagan had made a deal with the Khomeini regime in 1980 to keep American hostages locked up in Tehran. Each of them found Sick's hypothesis to be flat wrong. Shlaim ignores these investigations and suggests that fear of Iranian blackmail accounted for much of Reagan's Middle East policy.
Example #2 (macro level): Shlaim sees Middle Eastern history of the twentieth century coming full circle. The region began under the Ottoman thumb, spent seventy years struggling against foreign domination, in the end only to find itself under the American thumb. "The leading actors changed but the old order survived," he writes. In this man's imagination, in other words, Washington today rules the Middle East just as Istanbul did eighty years ago. And on this false basis, he writes "a critique of American policy."
As these examples suggest, Shlaim's extreme-left outlook inspires an anti-American and anti-Israel animus of rare vintage. Let's just hope that despite the attractive packaging by Whittle Books and the extensive advertising campaign, War and Peace in the Middle East finds the obscurity it so richly deserves.
