The Foreign Service Journal, September 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2020 85 Witness to the Descent From Sadat to Saddam: The Decline of American Diplomacy in the Middle East David J. Dunford, Potomac Books, 2019, $29.95/hardcover, $29.95/e-book, 248 pages. Reviewed by Harry Kopp There is no shortage of material on the decline of American diplomacy—Bill Burns’ memoir The Back Channel and Ronan Farrow’s War on Peace come to mind—but David Dunford’s bottom-up perspective is unique. “I want to give the reader a sense of what the decline in diplomatic performance looked like to a practitioner,” he writes in the intro- duction to From Sadat to Saddam . His memoir covers 25 years of service in the Middle East, during which the United States spent heavily in blood and trea- sure, only to end up strategically weaker, with fewer allies and less influence. Dunford’s career was one to which any Foreign Service officer might aspire. He started at the bottom and rose in 14 years to the senior ranks, where this memoir begins. He had challenging assignments in fascinating places with exceptional colleagues, and he retired as a chief of mission. Not quite a superstar and never a dissenter, he persevered and performed with excellence, but also with rising levels of frustration and dismay. Every story of decline must look back to a better time, before the rot set in. In Dunford’s telling, the “golden age of professionalism in the State Depart- ment” was 1984 to 1986, when he was director of the Office of Egyptian Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time, career Foreign Service officers with deep experience in the region held all the key positions in the bureau. Assistant Secretary Richard Murphy had been chief of mission in Syria and Saudi Arabia. His principal deputy, Arnie Raphel, had served in Tehran and Islam- abad. Dunford’s immediate boss, Deputy Assistant Secretary Bob Pelletreau, had been chief of mission in Bahrain and deputy chief of mission in Damascus. Diplomats, for all their skill and sub- tlety, are often at the mercy of events, and even this all-star team struggled to shape U.S.-Egypt relations. The good news was that on their watch nothing bad hap- pened: Egyptian politics stabilized under President Hosni Mubarak, and the peace treaty with Israel, signed by Mubarak’s predecessor, the assassinated president Anwar Sadat, remained in place. “There wasn’t much else the Reagan administra- tion could brag about,” Dunford writes. Despite enormous financial leverage, the United States failed to induce Mubarak to adopt the economic reforms the country desperately needed. These years were the high point. The long decline in Dunford’s account begins with a surprising protagonist: James A. Baker, Secretary of State from 1989 to 1992, in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Dunford faults Baker for operating with a small, closed circle of aides, largely cutting out or ignoring the State Department’s bureaus and embassies; for failing to provide guidance for the protection of American civilians during the 1990-1991 war with Iraq; and for pursuing, against embassy advice, financial demands that provoked resent- ment in Saudi Arabia and fueled the rise of al-Qaida. “Baker thought that regional bureaus showed too much initiative,” he writes, “and was particularly concerned about NEA’s reputation as having too many Arabists and being insufficiently sup- portive of Israel.” Baker replaced the entire NEA front office, and “in my opinion, the bureau never really recovered.” Washington hands say that where you stand is where you sit. During Baker’s term as Secretary, Dunford sat in the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, as deputy to the whip-smart and exuberantly opinionated Ambassador Charles (Chas) Freeman Jr. They believed, in Dunford’s telling, that unless Israel was directly involved, Washington was indifferent to events in the Middle East. Even as Iraq massed troops along the Kuwait border in July 1990, U.S. policy remained on autopilot. The embassy in Riyadh, like Ambassador April Glaspie’s embassy in Baghdad, was without instructions. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (August 1990 to February 1991), the U.S.-led military campaign that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Dunford’s main concern was protec- tion of American civilians in the region. He sought guidance from Washington but received none. “The lack of use- ful guidance reflected disagreement in Washington about the nature of the threat and indifference to the issue by Baker’s inner circle, along with a refusal to delegate the response to a now tooth- less NEA Bureau.” The embassy, with support from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), managed on its own. Ambassador Freeman urged Wash- ington to clarify American war aims: What outcome were we looking for? His own ideas were not welcomed. Because we were never clear about BOOKS