Review: "The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage," by David Lamb

But Lamb is just as quick to note that he was the sort of evil the Reagan administration was happy to deal with—as long as Hussein and other Arab nations checked Iran’s ambitions:

Capitalizing on the Arabs’ fear of Khomeinism, the Reagan administration has been able to speed the militarization of Arabia with huge arms sales and at the same time has expanded U.S. military influence in the region. Deals were struck around the Gulf and on the peninsula that gacve the United States access to Arab military facilities in an emergency, and even Saudi Arabia found it advantageous to begin collaborating with U.S. intelligence agencies. The same countries that had caused economic panic in the United States with their oil-price increases a decade earlier now have covertly turned to the United States to protect their oil fields if a worst-case scenario comes true.

Those lines, written before the first Gulf War, could just as well have been written today.

Lamb provides ample portraits of places such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon (during the 1982-83 phase of that country’s long civil war), Oman, the United Arab Emirates, the Sudan, Morocco, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and briefer but discerning observations about Iraq, Iran and other pieces of the Mid-Eastern puzzle. All the while, he fulfills his pledge to “present a fair portrait of the Arab world today and strip away some of the stereotypes that have led to so many misconceptions about its people, its religion, its stunning wealth.”

He manages to do so without biases or fear of offending particular constituencies. It’s the mark of a good reporter, going where his curiosities, rather than his biases, dictate.

One example: In Lamb’s chapter-length treatment of the rise of Arab and Islamic terrorism, he quickly dispels the conventional notion that terrorism is exclusively an Arab or Islamic tactic. “I have in my files,” Lamb writes, “a Photostat of a WANTED poster issued by the British colonial authorities about 1943. It shows the mug shots of ten men hunted as terrorists, pictured in alphabetical order; the first is that of a Polish clerk whose ‘peculiarities’ are listed as ‘wears spectacles, flat footed, bad teeth.’ His name was Menahem Begin, and he and his colleague, Ytzhak Shamir, also a suspected terrorist, were to become future prime ministers of Israel. Begin would also become a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the award in 1978 with [Egyptian] President [Anwar] Sadat. In the Middle East the boundaries of respectability are not clearly defined: today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman.”

By the end of the book Lamb, saying his farewells to Cairo, returns to his anecdote about the broken toilet. By then it is perhaps a too-obvious and slightly tactless metaphor for the Middle East, which he’s spent 325 pages describing and explaining in such a way as to defy any such metaphors. But the fact remains that the Middle East is mostly a mosaic of dysfunctional societies held together by force. The pressure was building 20 years ago. It still is.