The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East

by Efraim Karsh

The continuing crisis in Syria has raised questions over the common perception of Middle Eastern affairs as an offshoot of global power politics. To Western intellectuals, foreign policy experts, and politicians, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply exclusively to Europe and more recently to the United States of America. As they see it, Middle Eastern history is the product of its unhappy interaction with these powers. Forming the basis of President Obama's much ballyhooed "new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," this outlook is continuing to shape crucial foreign policy among Western governments, but in these pages, Efraim Karsh propounds a radically different interpretation of Middle Eastern experience. He argues that the Western view of Muslims and Arabs as hapless victims is absurd. On the contrary, modern Middle Eastern history has been the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends. Great power influences, however potent, have played a secondary role constituting neither the primary force behind the region's political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility.

Karsh argues it is only when Middle Eastern people disown their victimization mentality and take responsibility for their actions and their Western champions drop their condescending approach to Arabs and Muslims, that the region can at long last look forward to a real "spring."

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Middle East, Politics, Islam

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2015

About the author

Efraim Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, and Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London.

Born and raised in Israel, Mr. Karsh earned his undergraduate degree in Arabic language and literature and modern Middle Eastern history from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his graduate and doctoral degrees in international relations from Tel Aviv University. After acquiring his first academic degree, he served for seven years as an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where he attained the rank of major.

Prior to coming to King's in 1989, Mr. Karsh held various academic posts at Columbia University, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, Helsinki University, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington D.C., and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel-Aviv University. In 2003 he was the first Nahshon Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at Harvard.

Mr. Karsh has published extensively on the Middle East, strategic and military affairs, and European neutrality. He is the author of fifteen books, including Palestine Betrayed (Yale); Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale); Empires of the Sand: the Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1798-1923 (Harvard); Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (Routledge); The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991 (Princeton); Saddam Hussein (Free Press); Arafat's War (Grove); and Neutrality and Small States (Routledge).

Mr. Karsh has appeared as a commentator on all the main British and American television networks and has contributed over 100 articles to leading newspapers and magazines, including Commentary, The Daily Telegraph, The International Herald Tribune, The London Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

He has served on many academic and professional boards; has acted as referee for numerous scholarly journals, publishers, and grant awarding organizations; has consulted the British Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as national and international economic companies/organizations; and has briefed several parliamentary committees. A recent CENTCOM directory of Centers of Excellence on the Middle East ranked Mr. Karsh as the fifth highly quoted academic among 20 top published authors on the Middle East, with his articles quoted three times as often as the best of the four non-American scholars on the list.

He is founding editor of the scholarly journal Israel Affairs, now in its sixteenth year, and founding general editor of a Routledge book series on Israeli History, Politics and Society.

(meforum.org)

Reviews

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a very prejudiced, anti Muslim of account of the history of the Middle East written by a very Jewish author. He actually outlines his objectives right at the start of the book and then painstakingly attempts prove his theory that all Muslims inherently love to fight and argue and are very anti-Westeren and anti-democratic. One by one the author pins the blame on Muslim leaders and states starting from before WW1. The dominant Super power US and Britain are repeatedly duped by the wily and politically astute Arabs. Funny thing is that the Arabs have exactly the same view of the Jews.

This book will make great reading for any anti-Muslim readers.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not everyone is going to like this book, but I loved this book.  The author, himself a scholar of international relations with an Israeli background and a deep understanding of the complexities of the Middle East, writes about the troubled twentieth century history of the Middle East with a sustained tone of irony.  Having previously read the author's books on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Iran-Iraq War (reviews forthcoming), I had an idea of what to expect from this book, and I was not disappointed.  I can think of plenty of people who will hate this book, but if you have a clear-eyed and somewhat cynical view towards the policies of the superpowers towards the Middle East, you will probably find the author's blunt honesty and ironic perspective to be a breath of fresh air and a bit of a bracing blast of reason and insight in a place where many people seem to stumble around aimlessly in a fog of self-deception.  It is clear that the author views himself as one of the few people who can see the state of the geopolitics of the Middle East correctly and approaches his task with an almost messianic zeal.

The book, less than 200 pages of material, begins with a decided negative perspective of the Obama administration's Middle East policies before turning its attention to the making of the modern Middle East in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (1).  After this, the author discusses the British mandate and the general folly of the anti-Jewish old hands in the British foreign service who sought to appease Muslims to the same degree of success and honor as appeasing Hitler in the interwar period (2).  The author then turns his satirical eye on the naivete of American foreign policy in the period after World War II (3) as well as the lack of insight possessed by American policy experts about the state of Iran in the late 70's (4).  The author then looks at the cautious Soviet policies to the states in its region (5) as well as the limits of American power even when it was the victor of the Cold War (6).  The limits of power in general take up the next chapter (7) before the author talks about the cluelessness of Obama's administration in dealing with the Arabs (8) as well as the failure of the supposed Arab Spring (9).

The book has a great deal of insight for those who are willing to pay attention to it.  For one, the author paints a lot of people in a very bad light.  Whether one is looking at the corrupt and incompetent Muslim leaders who sought to build their own empires and presented nonexistent views of various Arab nations while being unable to deal justly with others, or one is looking at the bumbling incompetence of Western diplomats and imperialists trying to appease the Arab on the street while lacking insight into the reality of the situation on the ground, or one is looking at the concerns of the Soviet Union about its own restive Central Asian Muslim population leading to imperial overreach in Afghanistan, the book is full of telling insights and striking perspectives that seek to jar loose the hold of conventional fictions on the mind of the reader.  This is not a book that will be read with pleasure by those who seek to follow the usual party line about diplomacy in the Middle East but it is a book that will at least jar loose the mind to think and act in a way that is free from cant and folly, and that is no small task given the difficulty and importance of maintaining a sound view of the Middle East and its troubles.

[Cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating overview of Middle Eastern politics, particularly at how the internal politics of the region has affected it. Karsh's basic thesis is that internal politics of the Middle East have done far more to shape it than external influence, something that is never admitted by most in the Middle East and often seems to be accepted as a matter of course by many in America. He makes a very strong case for this fact. I was particularly fascinated at the dealings of tribal and regional leaders after world war 1, which I was mostly unaware of and obviously has a great deal of influence on what has happened since.

He also makes a strong case that outside forces, to the degree they have attempted to control the Middle East, have largely failed. This made me realize an odd contradiction in conventional wisdom: the Middle East is screwed up because of outside influence (i.e. partition, favoring Israel over Arabs, etc.), but don't get involved in the Middle East because you can't win. This is a simplistic, of course, but its broadly speaking conventional wisdom and squaring the circle would be difficult, to put it mildly.

You don't have to buy every piece of Karsh's argument, I'm skeptical of his conclusion that the Russians were more concerned with legitimate security needs in Afghanistan rather than conquest and the preservation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, to realize he has a very valid and under-considered way of looking at the region. I'd strongly recommend this book for people trying to make sense of all of the goings on in the Middle East.

[Ridzwan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Muslim world has a history of blaming everyone else but themselves for their problems, posits Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. He illustrates this point by looking at crises from the Great War that saw the collapse of the Ottoman empire, to the conquests of the Islamic State, which swept across Iraq and Syria in 2014. In each of these examples, Muslims have blamed a variety of actors for these calamities including the usual suspects, the British, the Americans, and the Jews. Going through the events in chronological order and using documentary evidence from the archives, Karsh examines major Middle Eastern events in the past century - from the Sykes-Picot Agreement, to the Iran-Iraq War, and more recent events like the Palestinian Intifadas, to show that more often than not, Arab tribalism, sectarianism, and plain bad foreign policy are to be blamed for current problems facing the Middle East.

[Phoenix · Rating 5 out of 5]

And Reality Bites Back

In this well argued compilation of essays on the modern Middle East, Karsh upends the conventional orientalist themes of Western colonialism and imperialism. Western nations, propelled by their own expectations, have been well played by their purported clients.

Karsh begins, naturally enough, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Portrayed as the "sick man of Europe", Karsh shows that rather than being Europe's victim, the other Great Powers were more concerned with keeping their southern neighbour alive as part of their own interests in maintaining a balance of power. The common force that destroyed all of them in quick succession was nationalism, and through Paris 1919 and the Wilson doctrine embraced and accelerated the process, the ideal of empires as a regional solution continued to resurface, either as pan-Arabism, pan-Turanism or pan-Islamism.

As a particular example, Karsh contends that the British were scammed by the Emir Hussein and his son Faisal, Hashemite sheikhs propped up by the efforts of T. E. Lawrence, Hubert Young and others, whom they hoped would be the figureheads of a new Arabized Ottoman Empire. He dismisses the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, often seized upon as if it were a treaty, as an incomplete and somewhat vague in process negotiation. Keeping his options open, Faisal also negotiated with Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of War, for similar powers and didn't join the Allies until the winter of 1917, "the vast majority of the 8-10 million Arabic speaking Ottoman subjects remained loyal to their suzerain to the bitter end and between 100,000 and 300,000 even fought in the Ottoman army" (pp14) In retrospect the idea that Hussein or his sons deserved vast territories as a result of their meagre service of a few thousand men to the war effort seems foolish. Faisal proved unable to hold on to his position in Syria and was moved to a newly constituted Iraq cobbled together from the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Basra and Baghdad. Hussein's other son Abdullah proved to be more capable.

Particularly interesting was Karsh's assessment of Russia which is very different from the usual American view of an aggressive hegemon. The Russians saw the Middle East as the bordering nations of Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan (glossing over the 'stans as constructs of the Russian/Soviet empire) that the they saw as buffer states with the west, particularly India and Pakistan which were first in the British then American spheres. Reluctantly and with grave misgivings they were dragged into propping up the Afghan communist regime and viewed with alarm what they saw as an American attempt to create a "new Great Ottoman Empire" that would include the Islamic Soviet 'stans. (pp100). Other than the desire for warm water ports, they were slow to develop any Arab policy at all and counter to American fears,, their prevailing POV was that the peoples of the ME were not yet near the historical stage of development where Marxist-Leninist theory would warrant such a transition.

Karsh, also skewers the Arabists of the British Foreign Office and the US State Department as WASPish upper class elitists prone to group think and consistently at odds with public opinion and the policy of their elected officials, and nowhere is this clearer than WRT to Zionism and Israel. Some, such as Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing who in Dec 1917 said he opposed "turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ" (pp53), were at least partly motivated by anti-Semitism. Karsh describes the political intrigues of 1947-49 in some detail Some ascribed Truman's support for a Jewish State was based on pandering to the Jewish vote.. The main arguments of the State Department were that the Jewish State would be a Soviet bridgehead and that nothing should be done to push the Arab countries into an alliance with the Soviet Union as the West needed Arab oil in order to fuel the post war European recovery. None of these turned out to be true. Truman lost New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, the 3 states with the largest Jewish population. The Soviets voted for Partition as a strategic vote against the British Empire, and had no plans for the Arab ME. Further, the Arabs needed to sell and develop their oil fields and needed western markets and expertise too badly for this to be a credible threat. Cosying up to Arab leadership leadership may have seemed important, but as Karsh notes that within 3 years most of the Arab principals had left the stage - president of Syria was overthrown in a coup, King Farouk followed in 1952, Jordan's King Abdullah was assassinated as were the prime ministers of Egypt and Lebanon.

In addition to the above Karsh takes a good look at the relationship between America and the Shah, President Carter's mistaken notions that nearly derailed the Sadat-Begin peace talks and in the last two chapters the failure of the Arab Spring. While not a home run, Karsh delivers a solid triple, a valuable contribution the study of political cause and effect in the Middle East.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East by Efraim Karsh is a history of the Arab world since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Karash is founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he serves as professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University (where he is also a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies). Furthermore, he is a principal research fellow (and former director) of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is regarded as a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the conventional history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Karsh opens with an interesting premise that would have made the world, or at least the Middle East, a different place entirely. No doubt the Ottoman Empire was, as Nicholas I described, the sick old man of Europe but its role was pivotal in the modern Middle East. The Ottoman Empire was under no pressure to join in World War I. France and England both made promises to the empire that they would not attack. The Ottoman Empire like France and England were all leaders of empires. This created a bond between the three. The Ottomans, however, chose to join the Germans which lead to its defeat and loss of its empire. German and Ottoman lands were put under mandate and divided up between England and France. The competition for power in the region lead to various Arab leaders and internal rivalries. Had the Ottomans stayed out of the war granted, some regional autonomy, things may have been very different. There was no Arab sense of nationalism region, that idea was created by the mandate system.

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East history up until recent events including the rise of the IS and the failure of the Arab Spring. He does make note of the United States’ pride Israel being the achievement of a liberal democracy in the Middle East and likewise notes that it was the US that installed the Shah’s totalitarian regime. Soviet intervention into the region is discussed in the form of aid and influence to the invasion of Afghanistan to create a buffer from radical Islam. Although the world powers played a role, Karsh claims the driving force was and is the Arabs themselves.

The Middle East Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt is examined. Seen as a great event by the US it happened only months before the fall of the Shah and just over a year before the attack and hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The idea of peace was quickly overshadowed. The most telling event of the peace process was the exclusion of any Palestinian representation in the Camp David Summit. The US did not directly deal with the Palestinians until the Clinton presidency. Perhaps that is the key point to understanding the Middle East is that it is not about national identity. The problems in the Middle East are usually not between nations and national identities, with Iraq being the modern exception. It is contained in the Arab identity. Egypt wanted to unite the Arab world under the United Arab Republic and failed. IS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others are Pan-Arab are movements do not recognize international borders. Their aim is to unite all Arabs and Islam. Again even entering into the present with the concept of Western nationalism is not a factor.

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East provides a history by a controversial author and historian. The writing is well documented and appears to use a great deal of source material. The history is very detailed and reads much like a graduate level textbook. There is certainly new information or at least new thinking of the complex history of the Middle East. I would be surprised if Karsh does not receive some criticism from the established academia. His work does appear to be factual, but like all histories there will be an interpretation of actions and motives. Personally, I gathered a great deal of information on the subject and perhaps new thinking on some subjects. History needs to be examined and reexamined to keep it honest. Controversy keeps history alive and intentionally or not this is what Karsh is facilitating.

[Bill Tyroler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title pretty well sums up Efraim Karsh's iconoclastic take on the relation of foreign powers to the modern Middle East. Think that colonial authorities have worked their will on the locals? It's the other way around, says Karsh: "It is a commonplace to view the modern Middle East as an artificial creation of the West. ... While there is no denying the thesis's widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is not only demonstrably wrong but the inverse of the truth[.]"

Karsh begins with Sykes-Picot, which is today fashionably regarded as the Original Sin of Western imperialist meddling in the region. Instead, he argues, the Hashemites (today ensconced as rulers of Jordan, and once of Iraq) manipulated the Brits, not the other way around; and, S-P catalyzed Arab unification rather than divide-and-conquer. He then canvasses the British defeat -- there is no other term -- in Palestine. Outmaneuvered first by Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin and later by Jewish nationalists, Britain was for years scarred, Karsh says, by "the humiliation attending its ignominious departure from Palestine[.]" America has fared no better (e.g., Iran: "Washington was reacting to events that were not of its own making and over which it had but limited control"). And, of course, there is Russia, and what Karsh calls its "Afghan misadventure" -- sucked inexorably into near-disaster against its better judgment. If Karsh is caustic about Bush ("democratic delusions"), he is almost venomous with regard to Obama, whose "depiction of Muslims as hapless victims of the aggressive encroachments of others, too dim to be accountable for their own fate, is not only completely unfounded by the inverse if the truth. ... It is the failure to recognize this state of affairs that accounts for the total breakdown of Obama's Middle Eastern policies." Thus, Obama: lost favor among Arab countries, was taken to the cleaners by Iran and the nuclear "deal"; lost influence over an increasingly Islamicized Turkey; upended Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; ruptured our alliance with Egypt; seemingly greenlighted Assad's Syrian bloodbath; foolishly reduced Libya to chaos.

That's an awfully impressive list of accomplishments. The point isn't so much to bash Obama or, for that matter, the dread neocons who saw their democratization project come to such grief under Bush. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the objects of our attention have their own agenda. Thus, “violence was not imported to the Middle East as a by-product of foreign imperialism but has rather been an integral part of the region’s millenarian political culture.” More controversially, he argues that "Israel excepted, all regional states are legally politically, culturally and socially Islamic .... It is only when the Western chancellories break out of their delusional bubble and acknowledge the Manichaen and irreconcilable nature of the challenge posed by their Islamist adversaries that their policies will stand the slightest chance of success." Karsh, to be sure, doesn't exactly say what those putatively successful "policies" might be. That would likely be a very different, and very depressing, book.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think people can learn a lot from this book about the Israeli perspective on middle eastern affairs.

That being said Karsh begins and ends his book stating that the Islamic religion is intrinsically bent towards violence. It's a clear bias he doesn't hide, but it's a fairly unconvincing argument. Especially since Christian fundamentalism as well as Jewish fundamentalism have all resulted in similar outcomes of violence.

He says Christian terrorism/violence ie the crusades are different from the muslim faith because Christian violence violates the precepts of its teachings. Which-- that's not necessarily true. But he makes mention that violence is intrinsic to Islam-- which that's just Islamophobia.

But! I think it's an important document to understand Israel at this time. I would take what he says with a grain of salt. Good information can be read in between the bias tho.

[Chuckdee · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, this book’s last three chapters are worth the read. An honest look at US presidential behavior with Islamic leaders in this country.

[Patrick Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr. Karsh present a compelling argument for problems that have occurred because of Western interference with the Middle. One might take the message that we in the West do not understand the Middle East. This is is a huge issues that is overlook by many in the West .

Mr. Karsh does not go far enough to discuss the cultural and religious difference. These form the basic problem. The West supports the the Geneva War Convention, which there are several protocols and convention rules. The Middle east follows some, at least in principle. Yet there is a cultural difference that truly effect how these rules are imposed. Example - Saddam Hussien used WMD on his people.

It also misses the Salafi eschatology and the different teachings of clerics and their true importance. The book is not long, however. It cannot cover that much distance. It is important to realize this is a very complex issue. A simple solution to the issues there are just not available. Maybe the West needs to rethink its interactions with the Middle East. The Carter Doctrine for example is a problem.

The book provides a jumping off point, and provide some background. Further research is really needed.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

By a distinguished scholar, it turns much of the conventional wisdom about the Middle East of the last 100 years on its head. Especially striking in view of this week's UN vote, with American support, condemning Israel is the exposition of Obama administration view from the very start in 2009 that there should be "daylight" between the 2 countries. The delusionabe bubble of the US regarding the Arab Spring and "violent extremism" is also illuminated. This could be a textbook for study of the contemporary Middle East and US policy.

[Bruce Reiter · Rating 2 out of 5]

First 140 pages are worth the effort. Last 40, not so much. Author needs to use more footnotes and supply a decent bibliography. The scholarly work falls apart when he tries to explain the historical life of the last five years. Didn't work for me. He becomes an apologist/propagandist in the last section. I truly believe that he expects the US to sell out Israel. He is mistaken.

[Priyam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East by Efraim Karsh is a fascinating overview of Middle Eastern politics...
Karsh's basic thesis is that internal politics of the Middle East have done far more to shape it than external influence, something that is never admitted by most in the Middle East ...