Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

The transformation of the Middle East is an issue that will absorb-and challenge-the world for generations to come; Dreams and Shadows is the book to read to understand the sweeping political and cultural changes that have occurred in recent decades. Drawing on thirty-five years of reporting in two dozen countries-through wars, revolutions, and uprisings as well as the birth of new democracy movements and a new generation of activists-award-winning journalist and Middle East expert Robin Wright has created a masterpiece of the reporter's art and a work of profound and enduring insight into one of the most confounding areas of the world.

Robin Wright, a foreign policy reporter for the Washington Post, offers an overview of the politics, tensions, civil society, democratization, and conflicts that have checkered the history of the Middle East over the last half century. This is in some ways a summary of hundreds of articles that the author has written during her nearly four decades of reporting on the Middle East. The author colors the articles with her own observations and commentaries on the major events that have shaped the Middle East in modern times, including the rise of radical terrorism and signs of democratization and the birth of civil society. A great primer on the Middle East, this book is a tapestry filled with rich details on the Middle East, but it seems to lack a central thesis.

A thoughtful, in-depth and insightful overview of various countries in the Middle East and the events and conflicts that have shaped them as they are today, including Iraq, Iran, Egypt, the Palestinians, and others. Wright, as a journalist, has been living and working in the Middle East for some three decades and thus has a great insider's view and knowledge, particularly of what nationals of each country actually think about the presiding situation, the extremist groups, democracy, and America and the West's involvement with the MIddle East.

Each chapter covers a specific country or group and discusses at length the political structures of each country, a brief history of how they got to that point, and offers opinions from various leaders and/or hard-working citizens as to the precarious future of their nation in the Middle East. Though this book may not go extensively in-depth (particularly about history), it covers far more than most news articles and as such offers knowledge to Westerners about a region so dynamic and conflict-ridden, yet integral to globalization. Highly recommended.

If you are looking for a book to help explain the politics of the Middle East then pick up any book by robin wright. This one is just another great book in what is currently happening in the Middle East.

Robin Wright has always been my favorite reporter on Middle East affairs. The stories and accounts she has written in The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker have consistently been impressive in quality and effortlessly impartial. Robin has a unique ability to leverage her vast network of resources to tap into the most intimate thoughts and feelings of that region and relay them uncensored to her audience. So needless to say, I was pretty excited to read this book to learn from her what future my people have and how they might get a shot at it.

I was very impressed, and now like the author, hopeful.

Robin takes on the most volatile players in the Middle East (Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Morocco and Iraq to be exact) and paints with words the most descriptive portrait for each. Having grown up in the region, I know how revealing those portraits are for those who dare peruse them. Her intimate knowledge of Egyptian politics, culture, modern history and collective psyche is astounding. It's evident that her superb soft skills have allowed her to penetrate these cultures and gain the trust of the people who told their story and to whom she listened.

The book is written for a Western audience, who might find the information provided in it completely conflicting with what they thought they knew about the Middle East. The accounts and stories presented in the book aren't clouded with opinions, agendas or spins. The facts are stated and the quotes are relayed. It's pure and simple journalism.

I also believe that another audience might benefit greatly from reading this book--the very people this book is about. Middle Easterners will find in this book a candid reflection of their current affairs. It's imperative for people to know how they are perceived in order to complete their perception of who they really are. We give this feedback to friends and family daily, but nations and cultures don't do that with each other frequently. Here is a chance that I hope doesn't get wasted.

The book in general voices optimism in the future of the Middle East, despite the war in Iraq and despite the rise in Islamic fundamentalism. Painful stories from across the region about fledgling dreams trying to make it and desperate youth fighting to dream are recounted so vividly by the author, who uses her magic to point out the silver lining in each of these stories and in turn keeping our hopes alive for a better tomorrow in the region.

It was definitely an entertaining, informative and thought-provoking read. I highly recommend it.

Robin Wright has been reporting on the Middle East for over 35 years, interviewing a wide-spectrum of the political players of the area. She did get off the "beaten path," finding ascendant political figures on her own, and even going to Iran so that she could walk into "Kurdistan" prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. One of the best portraits is of the charismatic leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Nasrallah, whom she concludes is not only a local leader but also a regional "Che Guevera." Two other enlightening interviews, which are generally conducted over a period of time, are of politically active women in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi, and Latifa Jbabdi, whom the author "brought to life", certainly for this reader. In Egypt, Wright highlighted the work of Ghada Shahbender and the organization she helped found, "We're watching you"; an organization, as its name implies, that monitors and reports on the activities of the powerful, certainly including efforts to monitor electoral fraud. And in Syria she presents portraits on true "profiles in courage," or sheer obduracy, in the persons of Riad al Turk, Yassin Haj Saleh, Samara al Khalil, all of whom spent numerous years in prison, in a country with one of the most repressive governments of the region. I found the background on the Assad assassination attempt, as well as the background and origins of both Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani in Iran particularly illuminating, and certainly relevant today. The focus of her reportage are interviews of the individuals promoting change, barely inside, or completely outside the political establishment; rarely is there an interview with the actual leader of the country, who might articulate their own interests in change.

In terms of books by reporters, Wright largely avoids the `cut and paste' style, with its inevitable redundancies, though her description of Qatar in the early part of the book, twice, would be the exception. She also tends towards annoying "People magazine" style descriptions of people, such as "...wearing a deep-red polo shirt."

Structurally though, I believe the book is profoundly flawed. The book is subtitled "The Future of the Middle East," yet two of the most essential countries of the area are omitted, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, as Wright acknowledges in her introduction, and for reasons that do not seem to be very convincing. Furthermore, relying on the deficiencies in geographic knowledge of many Americans, she places Morocco in "the Middle East."

Wright is very much an "establishment" reporter, as evidenced by her comment on page 409: "In October 2006, I made my fourth postwar trip to Iraq with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice." The question that others, particularly more independent-minded reporters have raised and this book helps answer is: To be invited on the plane, what sort of self-censorship must be practiced, particularly during the days of the Bush administration? In terms of other countries, be it Syria or Morocco, Wright repeatedly covers the fact that political dissidents are tortured in prison, and are all too often held without charge. A point she rightly makes. But Wright manages an entire chapter on "Iraq and the United States" without ever mentioning Abu Ghraib. Likewise, Guantanamo is nowhere in the Index, yet both places have had a profound impact on America's relationship with this region. Another litmus test of self-censorship is the CIA's coup of 1953 in Iran which overthrew their democratically elected government - not because, in any way the country was a threat to the United States; rather it was all about denying the Iranian people a greater benefit from their oil resources. Stephen Kinzer's book, "All the Shah's Men" covers this event well. Wright does mention the coup twice, a paragraph each in two different chapters. In one of those paragraphs she relates Iranian upset to the "radicalism of their youth." This coup is not an end all, but for an understanding of the American-Iranian relationship, as well as the Iranian world outlook, the coup merits more than passing mention, it is the starting point - the comparison with a reverse situation, how Americans would feel if Iran had overthrown Dwight Eisenhower, and installed their own "man" would greatly facilitate American understanding. Although she does not cover Israel, she does have a chapter on the Palestinians, and conforms to the establishment press "style book" that always starts with the Palestinians doing something outrageous, and then the Israelis respond. Only once did she reverse this, inferring that the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 might have been "payback" for the assassination of the predecessor of Nasrallah as head of Hezbollah. She mentions "targeted assassinations" on several occasions, but never explains why it is in quotes, and, of course, never ties it to terrorism.

The most startling error in the book is in the last chapter, the one on Iraq and the United States, where on page 410, she says: "The most ambitious and costly U.S. intervention since the end of World War II felt like it was in free fall." An error at so many different levels, because you don't have to worry about the "lessons" of Vietnam, the ones the first George Bush felt he had overcome in the war of 1991, if you completely "airbrush" Vietnam out of history. The Iraq, Afghanistan, and interventions in other Middle East countries may yet exceed the 58,000 plus dead on the wall in Washington, DC, who died over a 16 year period, and at a cost in economic terms, on an inflation adjusted basis, that still exceeds current war expenditures in the Islamic world, not to mention the social turmoil in the United States--but we are still not there yet. It should be no surprise that Vietnam is not in the index, and certainly not "lesson learned there."

In one of the classic works on Vietnam, Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," the author said of Alden Pyle, the CIA operative who was modeled on Kermit Roosevelt, the real life CIA operative who was responsible for the 1953 Iranian coup: "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance." Greene saw the links between American mistakes in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia. Shouldn't we all?

In her prologue Wright explains that the title to her book was derived from Musafa Kemal Ataturk, the "modernizer" of Turkey, who said: "Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence our policy. Away with dreams and shadows!" Good advice for the United States also, and how we perceive both our interests and the Middle East. Wright used an epigraph from Riad Al Turk, the Syrian dissident who said that: "Democracy cannot be brought on the back of a tank." Indeed, by setting a better example, we could recover the Shahbenders who states, as quoted by Wright at the very end, that: "Most Egyptians now raise their eyebrows and speak quite sarcastically about American democracy." Away with our own dreams and shadows.