Review: "The Much Too Promised Land," by Aaron David Miller

Bush gave two speeches, one on April 4, 2002 , and one on June 24, 20002 . They came to be known as the Bush “Road Map” for peace. But as Miller notes, they were never intended to be more than words. The administration didn’t even believe in its own words. The Arabs didn’t take the administration seriously. The Israelis laughed it off. “No one I talked to believed that the president had any real sense of what he was endorsing,” Miller writes. It was the first of many ‘If I do this on the peace process, don’t bother me again’ moments.”

Predictably, toward the end of the Bush administration, the road map had gone nowhere , and a further attempt to replace substance with theater — the Annapolis peace conference of December 2007 looked equally doomed to failure. Failure, in fact, sums up the state of American policy in the Middle East by the end of the Bush years, not just between Palestinians and Israelis, but throughout the region.

Miller’s story-telling is breezy and immediate. He was a witness to history, however unseemly the history. But his writing is atrocious. He cannot write a page without a cliché, and usually many more than that. His sports analogies, his penchant for quoting high officials’ obscenities, his sometimes stunningly sophomoric conclusions (“What stands in the way of a solution is the absence of political will and leadership on both sides to understand what’s necessary to meet the other side’s needs and to take the political decisions to move forward”) undermine the seriousness of the book.

Then again, those very deficiencies unwittingly speak of the very weaknesses in American policy that Miller diagnoses so well: the principal reason for the failure of American policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict is American officials’ insistence on seeing it all exclusively from the American and Israeli perspective, through the prism of American analogies, simplicities and history. Miller himself admits repeatedly to his biases. He once wrote a book about the PLO “with almost no contacts with actual Palestinians.” You’d think he’d learned a lesson. He hasn’t. Aside from his affinity for Arafat’s slippers and kindnesses, along with a couple of interesting negotiators and translators, Palestinians are absent from Miller’s book, just as they seem to be from American negotiators’ perspectives.

The book is nevertheless valuable for its summation of a history from that particularly American, and, by Miller’s own admission, glaringly deficient, perspective. Miller includes extended analytical portraits of Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and James Baker, leaving no doubt as to where his own feelings are (fawning over Kissinger’s skills as a strategist, derisive of Carter’s righteousness, admiring of Baker’s toughness). He devotes a chapter to the Israel lobby in the United States, documenting well enough the reach and limits of the lobby and demolishing a few assumptions along the way (yes, there absolutely is a lobby: “No ethnic group… has the power and focus of the American-Jewish community”; no, it doesn’t always drive policy, but does so, by driving perceptions, more often than Miller concedes by limiting his diagnosis to actual policies).

If you can struggle through the writing and the dispiriting, if accurate, conclusions, the history is worth it. If nothing changes either in the way the Department of State outsources Middle East policy or in the general American perspective of the Middle East as an intractable place that isn’t vital to peace in the region, the prospects for improvements there are dim to none.