The Tail Wags the Dog
International Politics and the Middle East
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- €21.99
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- €21.99
Publisher Description
The Tail Wags the Dog is an intensely controversial book about Middle Eastern politics.
The continuing crisis in Syria has raised a question mark over the common perception of Middle Eastern affairs as an offshoot of global power politics. To western intellectuals, foreign policy experts and politicians, 'empire' and 'imperialism' are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and more recently to the United States of America.
Lacking an internal dynamic of its own, the view of such people is that Middle Eastern history is the product of its unhappy interaction with the West. This is the basis of Obama's much ballyhooed 'new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world'.
Efraim Karsh propounds in these pages a radically different interpretation of Middle Eastern experience. He argues that the Western view of Muslims and Arabs as hapless victims is absurd. On the contrary modern Middle Eastern history has been the culmination of long existing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behaviour. Great power influences, however potent, have played a secondary role constituting neither the primary force behind the region's political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility.
Notwithstanding the Obama administration's abysmal failure to address the momentous Middle Eastern events of recent years, Karsh argues it is only when Middle Eastern people disown their victimization mentality and take responsibility for their actions and their western champions drop their condescending approach to Arabs and Muslims, that the region can at long last look forward to a real 'spring'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Popular consensus about conflict in the Middle East since the end of WWI puts much of the blame on interference by the West, especially the U.S. and the U.K. Middle East Quarterly editor Karsh vehemently disagrees, particularly in light of the Arab Spring (which he sees as having disappointing results) and the rise of ISIS. In this illuminating new history, he implicates the nations of the Middle East themselves, claiming they proved perfectly capable of blocking and manipulating seemingly more powerful countries during the Cold War and into the present. As two examples of this, he offers the toppling of the Shah of Iran in 1979, which blindsided the Carter administration; and the Soviet Union's failure to prevent its allies Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in October 1973. Moreover, during Western interventions into Iraq in the early 2000s and in Libya more recently, superior military might could not prevent mission creep, "greater savagery, higher death toll, and pervasive anarchy." The tendency of Middle Eastern nations to get the better of the West, Karsh argues, has reached its zenith with the muddled and delusional foreign policy of the Obama administration. This contrarian take on modern geopolitics will be enthralling and eye-opening for foreign policy devotees.
