Lynch, a specialist in international affairs, writes sharply of what he calls America\u2019s \u201cmorally and strategically catastrophic policy\u201d in the Middle East, premised on support for autocrats in a region whose burgeoning and mostly young population is \u201cbursting with frustrated talent and boundless potential that neither needs nor wants America to provide order.\u201d Those people are, of course, the ones whom the autocratic regimes labor to suppress, and American policy, Lynch says, assists those regimes in the clampdown. The worst turn, by the author\u2019s account, was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a \u201cperformative war\u201d\u2014in the words of political scientist Ahsan Butt\u2014that had every possibility of furthering democratization in the region but instead shored up a policy marked by a long tradition of bullying. Lynch quotes pundit Jonah Goldberg: \u201cEvery ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.\u201d Iran, our current b\u00eate noire, offers greater challenges. Lynch observes that most of America\u2019s good works in the Middle East\u2014food aid, peace negotiations\u2014are responses to its own bad acts, from uncritical support of Israel to the penchant for propping up \u201cfriendly dictators.\u201d Surprisingly, the author suggests that one step toward rebalancing the political order in the Middle East would be to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons; such proliferation would spread to Saudi Arabia and other powers and have \u201cone key effect: it would reduce or eliminate the dependence of the Gulf states on the United States for security and survival.\u201d While that suggestion is eminently debatable, Lynch\u2019s evenhanded argument for remaking American policy in the Middle East is well taken. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lynch, a specialist in international affairs, writes sharply of what he calls America\u2019s \u201cmorally and strategically catastrophic policy\u201d in the Middle East, premised on support for autocrats in a region whose burgeoning and mostly young population is \u201cbursting with frustrated talent and boundless potential that neither needs nor wants America to provide order.\u201d Those people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}