The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

What Went Wrong The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace Aaron David Miller, Bantam Books, 2008, $26.00, hardcover, 408 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVID T. J ONES We’ve all heard the saying that suc- cess has a thousand fathers while fail- ure is an orphan. When it comes to U.S. Middle East policy, however, fail- ure has a thousand explainers, ratio- nalizers and apologists. The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace is one such account, reflecting Aaron David Miller’s 20 years of total immersion in U.S. Middle East policy. Trained as a historian, with a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies and expert- ise in Hebrew and Arabic, Miller en- joyed extensive access to U.S. policy- makers and their Israeli, Palestinian and Syrian counterparts. He offers rich anecdotal accounts of U.S. and foreign leaders, often including earthy quotations that leave no doubt of their familiarity with four-letter words. In the process, he makes it clear that, with few exceptions, these individuals nei- ther liked nor trusted one another. With painstaking, albeit retrospec- tive, honesty, Miller details the many errors and miscalculations of the suc- cessive administrations he served in their efforts to bring the sides together, as well as comparable mistakes by for- eign interlocutors. Not everyone will agree with his conclusion that the cur- rent administration had few opportu- nities to make progress in this arena, though he makes a compelling case that the post-9/11 focus on Afghanistan and Iraq largely precluded making Arab-Israeli issues a top priority. But Miller does concede that President George W. Bush made the least of what openings were available. Miller also correctly anticipated early on that nothing would come of the November 2007 Annapolis conference. Interestingly, Miller dismisses the effect of the “Jewish lobby” on U.S. policy, both because Israeli interests are already embedded in U.S. politi- cal/bureaucratic DNA and because the Israeli prime minister is invariably an effective interlocutor with a U.S. pres- ident. Miller lays out a somewhat artificial but useful “five Ts” of effective Middle East diplomacy: making it a top prior- ity; being tough with negotiating part- ners; being tenacious in the effort; engendering trust; and having a sense of timing for the possible. He cites Henry Kissinger (for his deviousness), Jimmy Carter (obsessive focus) and James Baker (unsentimental tough- ness) as effective negotiators, while Bill Clinton, despite immense effort and empathy, was “not the son-of-a-bitch that he needed to be” with either Arabs or Israelis. Although the book offers much, it lacks any maps — a glaring omission in a region where boundaries are the essence of the conflict. Likewise, there is no chronology to put Miller’s hop- skip-and-jumpwriting style into context. Thus, the volume is best in providing perspective for a reader already thor- oughly grounded in the issues and diplomatic history of the period. Moreover, while there is copious documentation for the author’s nu- merous high-level interviews (over 150 listed and dated), this compilation does not include several obvious potential sources with whom Miller worked closely or was personally familiar, specifically President Clinton and Is- raeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Barak and Benyamin Netanyahu. J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 67 Miller makes clear that, with few exceptions, the leaders involved in the Mideast peace process neither liked nor trusted one another. B OOKS