Patrick Tyler is a veteran foreign and Washington correspondent who more recently has applied his formidable reporting skills and narrative gifts to diplomatic history. His latest effort, "A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East -- From the Cold War to the War on Terror," couldn't be more timely.
President Obama already has appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who was instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, as his special Middle East representative and, Monday, gave his first formal White House interview to an Arab-language television network. Clearly, the new chief executive plans to add the Middle East to his daunting, ambitious agenda, particularly the fulcrum question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
Tyler's strikingly readable new history argues that Obama inherits a decidedly mixed, though mainly unhappy, diplomatic legacy. The author's impressive research combines a careful combing of archival sources and memoirs in multiple languages as well as wide-ranging original research. In Tyler's view, it adds up to a history of miscalculation, inattention, stuttering and almost inadvertent progress undone by contradictory aims, exhaustion and distraction. His choice of opening anecdote -- and this is a writer with a novelist's eye -- leaves no doubt that Tyler intends this book to be urgently instructive.
His prologue begins: "Night had long since fallen over central Saudi Arabia in early 2004 when George Tenet came trudging out of his bedroom in Prince Bandar bin Sultan's palace and asked for scotch whiskey." Tenet, then CIA director, had just gotten off one of his secure phones after learning from aids that the White House essentially planned to blame him and the agency for the faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Unable to sleep, though he'd taken a pill, Tenet emerged from his room clad only in boxer shorts and T-shirt, surprising Bandar and an aide, who were watching television.
After downing most of a bottle of Scotch, Tyler writes, and raging against "the Jews" (read, neoconservatives) in the Bush administration, Tenet decided to go for a swim in his underwear while continuing to ramble angrily, smoke a cigar and drink more liquor. Bandar and his aide, worried the CIA director would drown under the influence of medication and alcohol, hovered nearby at a poolside bar.
