In Search of the Good News

Other tics in the book are characteristic of American higher journalism, from splashes of borrowed profundity to "get-color-in-your-copy." Chapter epigraphs from "French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre," "Russian playwright Anton Chekhov" and "American artist Andy Warhol" are more portentous than illuminating. And when Eugene Ionesco says that "dreams and anguish bring us together," is it even true?

One person after another gets a thumbnail physical description, such as "a slim woman with an easy demeanor" or "a trim man with short white hair and a short white beard." But would that lady's politics be any different if she were plumper, or the man's importance greater if his hair were still brown? This might be called the school of insignificant detail: "Amin stopped to light another Marlboro." The relevant word is "insignificant" rather than "detail." When A.J.P. Taylor observed that Bismarck, almost uniquely among Prussians of his age and class, was a smoker, it told us something of the man's unconventional or even radical character. Do we really learn anything by knowing that Amin prefers Marlboros to Pall Malls?

All of these are distractions from what is otherwise a compelling narrative -- and a sad story. Many of the people Wright meets are truly admirable, but her book only emphasizes that they are, almost by definition, politically impotent.

This is not just a question of gloom about the present moment. One of the better epigraphs, from the Palestinian political analyst Rami Khouri, tells us, "We're coming out of a bad millennium in the Arab world." It would be nice to think that the next millennium will be better, and Wright believes that violent jihadism is a passing phase. This may be true in the sense that nihilistic rage with no attainable object is quite obviously a dead end. Even so, bear in mind that this new "revolt of Islam" was quite unforeseen 50 years ago. Those were the days when, as a Middle East hand of an older vintage than Wright's said to me dryly not long ago, "We thought that the Baathists were the voice of progress."

There is indeed a related conclusion to be drawn from this stimulating if depressing book: just how often the Middle East has confirmed that grimmest of all laws, the law of unintended consequences. Few Americans foresaw the Iranian revolution and its likely outcome, but then even the Iranians, or many of them, didn't initially take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seriously, Wright says. Some saw him as a mere bumpkin when he banned billboard ads featuring Western celebrities like David Beckham and closed down theaters and converted them into religious centers. They know better now, and so do we.

Likewise, as for Lebanon, Yitzhak Rabin -- Israeli defense minister at the time, once and future prime minister, and to date the only Israeli premier to have been assassinated -- said that of all the surprises, good or more often bad, that came out of the Israeli invasion in 1982, "the most dangerous is that the war let the Shiites out of the bottle. No one predicted it; I couldn't find it in any intelligence report."

All too many people have been saying "no one predicted it" about that other scheme of human betterment, the invasion of Iraq five years ago, and still mutter about what intelligence reports said beforehand. Actually, some of us did predict the current woes, or something like them, and can now say, "I told you so," though it gives no pleasure to say it. Robin Wright's book ought to teach our rulers a thing or two, but they often seem quite unteachable. *

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include "The Controversy of Zion" and "Yo, Blair!" He is writing a book about Winston Churchill.