A First Rate Anti-American Polemicist

"The Bad Old Days"; By James Traub; BR6

James Traub twice encourages President Barack Obama to read Rashid Khalidi's Sowing Crisis in "The Bad Old..." The recommendation, however, does not match up with his review, the better part of which is dedicated to addressing a matter to which Khalidi gives scant attention.

Khalidi censures American foreign policy toward the Middle East, arguing, in Traub's words, that "the Bush administration's interventionist posture...is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign." 

The more interesting question, however, which Traub investigates toward the end of his review, is "whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of [US] behavior." 

Despite the note of praise for Sowing Crisis implicit in recommending the book to President Obama, one can hardly come away from Traub's review with a positive impression of Khalidi. Why the reviewer chose to dissemble his criticism evidences the mistakenly charitable manner with which others deal with Khalidi as a scholar. 

After all, as the review concedes, the scholarship is weak and the style, polemical.

The "Bad Old..." succeeds when it serves as a platform for Traub’s reasonable views on why the Arab world is impoverished. He writes, “the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.” 

President Obama should read the book “to be reminded how very hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long, and practically everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel).” This knowledge, however, will not be gained through this book, for it is Traub’s view, not Khalidi's.

In fact, it seems that Sowing Crisis will emphasize exactly the opposite – that every failure in the Middle East should be blamed on the United States.