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Book Review: Why the U.S. Cannot Easily Disengage from the Middle East

[Wall Street Journal ] Bret Stephens - Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and member of the Clinton administration's National Security Council, now affiliated with the Brookings Institution, has given us A Path Out of the Desert, billed in its subtitle as a "grand strategy for America in the Middle East." His path requires the U.S. to remain in the desert for decades in order to help sort out the region's myriad problems and set it on a path toward greater democracy, better governance, stronger economic growth, and less cultural insularity. Pollack is particularly good at exposing the myth that close U.S. ties to Israel worsen our relations with other Arab governments or explain popular hostility to America: Our patronage of Arab dictators such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak has more to do with that. Nor has America's "tilting" toward Israel complicated efforts at Mideast peacemaking. On the contrary, as he writes, U.S. support for the Jewish state "helped convince the Arabs that they did not have a military option against Israel."
2008-07-18 01:00:00
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