Review: "Storm from the East," by Milton Viorst

The leap from Sykes-Picot's broken promises to Operation Iraqi Freedom isn't a difficult one to make. It's connected by the same thread of assertions on one side and mistrust on the other, beginning with the broken promises of Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Wilson's famous Fourteen Points had made the sovereignty of the various people of the Middle East--Armenians, Kurds, Palestinian Arabs, and so on--a priority. But Wilson allowed Britain and France to outmaneuver him. "America, having abandoned its commitment to self-determination, steadily declined in Arab esteem," Viorst writes, undermining the notion that American esteem began declining only during the Bush administration. Arabs replaced esteem for the West with nationalism.

Viorst describes the decades of "emancipation" between 1940 and 1956, particularly through the rise of the Israeli state (1948) and the accession to power of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser to power (1956). Both events would prove humiliating to Arab nationalism. Arabs proved incapable of unifying against Israel. And Nasser, the firebrand nationalist who briefly inspired the Arab world, only enmesh it in Nasser's delusions of pan-Arab nationalism and hubris. Nasser was never interested in uniting the Arab world as he was in tyrannizing over it, as he did over Egypt. Nasserism discredited Arab nationalism--and precipitated another supreme Arab humiliation: the defeat of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel.

With Arab nationalism in tatters, what was to replace it? Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tried a hybrid version of nationalism with a human face, making peace with Israel in 1978 and banking on American aid both to preserve his authority and mitigate Egypt's static poverty. It wasn't enough to prevent the rise of the Middle East latest, and most current, movement: Islamic fundamentalism and its most extreme variant--terrorism.

"Sadat's murder in 1981 was a milestone in the rise of radical Islamic nationalism," Viorst writes. "One can question whether Islamic radicalism would have emerged at all had Nasser not so thoroughly discredited Pan-Arabism. At the least, Nasser's failures created an ideological void into which Islamic radicalism poured. For more than a decade after the 1967 debacle, religious radicalism rose incrementally among Arabs, but then huge Islamic waves broke in distant Iran and Afghanistan. Sadat's assassinations signaled that the waters had reached the Arab world and that the Islamic flood was beginning to inundate the Middle East."

Viorst can be quick on the trigger of neat, all-encompassing sum-ups that present a clear picture of a complex situation, with every piece finally in its place. That's the appeal of the book. It's also its built-in weakness: surveys don't answer every question so much as synthesize the basic outline of the hardest questions. It's worth remembering, for instance, that Islamic fundamentalism isn't exclusively the result of nationalism's failure in the Arab world, but of a worldwide backlash against modernism. The backlash includes Europe and the United States, where Christian fundamentalism is making inroads.

And as Reza Aslan (to name one author) pointed out in No God but God: The Origin, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Random House, 2005), it's also worth noting that the Middle East is as much in the grips of a fundamentalist revival as in the grips of an identity crisis that cuts to the heart of its belief systems and its place in the world.

That's not a criticism of Storm from the East, but something to keep in mind as readers seek to fill in the many holes in the West's understanding of the Middle East. For that's the unspoken conclusion of Viorst's book: What the West thinks it knows about the Middle East, and what the Middle East is (and has been) really like, are two vastly different stories. The clash is between those two interpretations. If the West were to attempt a greater understanding of Middle Eastern history, perhaps clashes would be fewer, and the discovery of common ground less of a pipe dream.