Scripting Middle East Leaders

Reviews / Votes

This is really a marvelous project - timely, important, and with absolutely first-rate authors. Students, professionals in the field, and members of the interested public will find it fascinating and instructive. Freedman and Michaels have assembled a powerful set of contributors in support of their model of how the US and UK have naively scripted Middle East leaders as players in Western dramas, often casting the same leader at different times in roles as needed reformer, ally of convenience, villain, diabolical enemy, outlaw or irrelevance. This collection of essays should be read by any who reach for arguments from the past for action (or to justify inaction) using slogans such as Munich, Pearl Harbour, Suez, Vietnam, and most recently Afghanistan. This is a substantial contribution to our understanding of the unconscious influences on Western policies towards the Middle East: those who conceived the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have benefited especially from the analytic essay on strategic scripts by Professor Freedman that opens this book. This collection of well-researched essays describes the images that American and British policy-makers have formed of their ten major Middle East adversaries over recent years - from Abdul Nasser through Arafat and Saddam Hussein to Bashar al-Asad and Ahmadinejad - and how these images have influenced their policies. The portraits are revealing and intriguing, even entertaining. Academics who cannot indulge in entertainment should still find the time to read the valuable introductory chapters, illuminating, with reference to recent advances in cognitive science, the processes by which policy-makers, inevitably swayed by complex emotions, try to make sense of the information coming to them, and devise "strategic scripts" as a basis for action. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections. * CHOICE *