Fawaz A. GergesReviews

Very informative book. I admit being very confused about the past and current conflicts in the Middle East. The author did a good job presenting the data in a succinct manner, and I appreciate his objective inferences about the significance of certain events. I honestly will read this book again to better grasp the information.

News doesn't always let us see things from different angles. The author provides this new perspective and still leaves you room to think. Well researched and plenty of references for any further questions.

I visited my 89-year old father last month. He told me that he keeps his TV tuned to Fox News because "he wants to see what kind of people we're dealing with."

My Dad. An engineer. A thinking person.

I wanted to be able to tell him that, if he was looking for honest, objective reporting, he needed to look elsewhere and not latch onto Fox because it fed his old-guy rage that things weren't the way they used to be, but I lacked the courage.

All of which is pretty much to say that I wish my father would read Fawaz Gerges' book. It is written with passion AND clarity, which -- when you think about it -- is a fairly uncommon combination. Gerges lays out with stunning precision how the Middle East got to be the restive place it is, what the role of the US was in this, how our leadless fearers seem inevitably bound to see EVERYTHING through a Cold War lens, how numbingly worse the George W. Bush 'cowboy Crusade' approach made things, and so on ...

... finishing, as the book's title promises, with the topic of Obama: how Obama's soaring rhetoric promised sweeping change with regard to the United States' relationship with the Middle East -- how this President started out with strong intentions but was dragged under both by his own cautious nature and the stuck-in-peanut-butter-and-concrete status quo in DC.

The book is superbly organized and laid out. For the most part Gerges' writing is superb, although there is an occasional bizarre word choice that lets you know that English -- although he is better with it than 98% of Americans -- is not his first language.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in modern politics, the Middle East, I especially recommend it to people who are living under the delusion that "they hate us for our freedoms." They don't. They hate us, if they hate us at all, because we have acted like playground bullies for decades, and seem incapable of stopping.½

Just finished the book, I won through the early reviewers. Very good book, did not go into alot of the sins of exploitation by the west on the middle east, but enough to realize that the rhteroic of " they hate our freedoms" is a bunch of lies. The deep seated hatred the middle east has for the west goes way deeper than the shallow musings of the American conservative media. Mr. Gerges does a very good job of laying out his arguement of why America has missed it's moment of reconciliation in the middle east, but says not all is lost and that America has made strides to right some of the wrongs of the west. The author does realize that the arab, israeli conflict is very thorny and will not be resolved in two terms of any president. I recommend it as a good starting place to understand the current relationship between the east and west.

If you want to know what Fawaz A. Gerges thinks about President Obama and the Middle East, reading just the concluding chapter supplies most of the information. There is more focus on the subject as suggested by the title. Basically, America’s influence in the region is waning because Obama hasn’t acted to build closer relationships.

That chapter devotes less time to President Bush’s policies than the rest of the book but says that Obama is continuing them. As throughout the book, it blames Israel for lots of things and in a quote, declares, "the plight of the Palestinians was a root cause of the unrest in the region, and a pretext for tyranny on behalf of the dictatorial regimes..." and it's resolution will determine the future of the area. While many countries in the region give vocal support to the Palestinians, the Palestinians are not a major issue when it comes to the people determining what happens in their own countries nor do they give financial help to the Palestinians.

Later on he writes, "Benjamin Netanyahu exerted increasing pressure on Obama to lay the trip wire for military action against Iran, though the US president deflected the attempt. Neighboring states in the Persian Gulf also added their voices to Israel's." No where in the book does he give credit to Israel for anything nor does he put any responsibility on the Palestinians or other Arab countries regarding Israel.

There is much that I don’t like about Israeli politics. However, Gerges seems to have found nothing positive to say about Israelis: All the problems are caused by the Israelis, particularly the building of settlements. Credit is not given to Israel for totally withdrawing from Gaza. Instead, he ignores the results of that withdrawal and criticizes Israel for reentering the strip to curtail the terrorist activities originating there. He doesn’t mention that many of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank will likely be part of Israel as part of the land swap necessary for the two-state solution.

Conversely, he does not note anything negative about the Palestinians. He ignores the corruption of the Palestinian leadership which has not helped its people preferring to maintain their feeling of being perpetual innocent, helpless victims..

He quotes President Obama as saying, “Palestinians must make peace with Israel before gaining statehood themselves.” He doesn’t mention how Palestinian schools, camps, and mosques teach their children to seek Israel’s destruction instead of living in peace.

He states that Obama was clueless about what was happening, especially regarding the Arab Spring, but tried to pick the winning, hopefully democratic side. “He offered no grand vision or concrete initiatives to translate words into action.”

At least one quarter of the book talks about President George W. Bush and his policies. Granted, those were largely responsible for the situation President Obama inherited, but I think most readers would be familiar with the history, which could have been summed up in a few key sentences.

He states that Jewish and Israeli pressure is what has forced President Obama’s policy.
He often calls for a balanced approach but what he really wants is total support for his side. He would be more credible if he had presented a balanced perspective instead of his vicious, virulent attacks on Israel.

The book was written before the 2012 election so some of his statement have since been proven false. For example, he talks about the success of the election in Egypt and how the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence forty years ago. The attacks by them on Egyptian Christian Copts and the ouster of President Morsi occurred this year.

He writes of the war on terror, stating that Al Qaeda has limited support but then assumes that people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Newt Gingrich represent American opinion. He states that Obama surrounds himself with like-minded people (I agree with that), but includes Hillary Clinton in that group. Kim Ghattas discusses the differences between them in her excellent book, THE SECRETARY.

I think Fawaz A. Gerges has thrown fire rather than light on the situation. There are other, better books about how America’s influence in the Middle East is waning (e.g., THE DISPENSABLE NATION: AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN RETREAT by Vali Nasr) that discuss the factors that contribute to the decline but are not hung up on bashing Israel or regurgitating the Bush administration.
I received this Early Reviewer copy from LibraryThing.

The week I read this book, President Barack Obama and several of his administration's top officials announced their intention to launch some sort of military action against the Syrian government. Following the use of chemical weapons in the country's years-long civil war, Obama insisted force was the only way for the United States to maintain credibility on the world stage.
Maintaining or restoring credibility in the Middle East in particular emerged as a priority of Obama's foreign policy when he first emerged as a candidate for the presidency. Writing at the end of his administration's first term, Fawaz Gerges offers a sharp analysis of Obama's failure in living up to the grandiose vision he laid out for the future of American diplomacy in the Arab world.
Thankfully, Gerges avoids mere punditry and instead colors his critique with a thorough but swift bit of diplomatic history.
The conclusions are poignant and fresh. The author, however, does not make any particularly revelatory points. In fact, the academic nature of Gerges' writing sometimes relegates Obama to the role of a passive character. That same disconnect seems to contribute to the author's glowing praise for Turkey's embattled president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Take this book as a history — a refreshing perspective on what you see on the front page day after day. Do not, however, look to Gerges for any particular platform to transform American policy in the Middle East.

In Obama and the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment?, Fawaz A. Gerges argues, “The success of the globalists [as opposed to regionalists] and the Israel-first school lies in shaping public opinion in the United States about the Middle East and in restricting the general parameters of the foreign policy debate. Their success has crippled Obama.” Gerges begins his argument by examining the United States’ policy toward the Middle East during the Cold War. He argues this policy has remained relatively the same since the end of the Cold War, much to the United States’ detriment in the region. Progressing past the Cold War, Gerges examines at length the actions of President Bush in the Middle East and how those actions, and the Bush Doctrine that drove them, influenced Arab opinions of the United States in the region. He then examines President Obama’s initial aspirations in the region, primarily fixing the damage resulting from the Bush Doctrine, before explaining how President Obama’s realist practices have had their own detrimental effects. Gerges uses three case studies to expand his argument: the Israel-Palestine conflict, “The Pivotal States: Egypt, Iran, and Turkey,” and the War on Terror. The Israel-Palestine conflict is crucial to his argument, serving to underscore the volatility of the region and how the United States’ actions influence Arab opinions. The other two case studies explain the difference between globalists, who examine the region from a larger, American-dominated perspective, and regionalists, who look at the specific manner in which local politics and other factors influence regional responses. Gerges concludes that, in light of the popular uprisings in the Arab world and the stagnating U.S. perspective, America’s moment of significant influence in the Middle East may be at an end. The book, using a wealth of facts and political examination, successfully presents its argument. My only critique is that, having published the book in 2012, prior to President Obama’s reelection, it lacks the perspective to examine the entire second term and recent events such as the civil war in Syria that may involve the use of chemical weapons. With that in mind, Gerges’ larger conclusions about the region as a whole and, specifically, the Israel-Palestine conflict, are thoroughly researched and handily argued. The book will be useful to anyone seeking to understand current politics and the United States’ interests in the region.

Of the two books on America’s foreign policy in the Middle East I’ve recently read, this is by far the better one. I’m not yet finished with it; time has been at a premium here lately, and this is a book that requires your full attention, so it is taking me longer to finish it than I would prefer. But what I’ve read of it thus far has been impressive.

Author Fawaz A. Gerges explores the failures of the present administration to follow through on campaign promises to change America’s policy in the Middle East, but he does so in an informed and studied way, rather than with the air of one who has an axe to grind. While Gerges does point out the many opportunities that the Obama administration has failed to take advantage of, he acknowledges the positive measures they have taken, and admits that they had tremendous hurdles to overcome from the beginning.

One significant aspect of the book that I have enjoyed tremendously is Gerges’ inclusion of an overview of the history of American involvement in the Middle East. While I was already conversant with some aspects of our history in the region, Gerges covered some territory with which I was not familiar that really helped to shed some light on our relations in the area.

The one way in which I’ve so far found the book disappointing is Gerges’ failure to form a cohesive argument on why our foreign policy in the Middle East seems eternally doomed to come up short; in other words, while he infers that we have, indeed, reached the end of America’s “moment” and implies that it is inevitable, he doesn’t explain why that is so. In addition, he has so far spent little time on discussing how money, politics, and the media are intertwined, and the impact that this relationship has on the status quo in the region, or how that influence can be mitigated so that the administration (current or future) can more actively work toward achieving some positive strides.

The subject matter of the book is admittedly complex; America’s relations with the countries of the Middle East is a muddle of religion, politics, and money, and there are no easy answers or solutions. A book attempting to cover every facet of the problem would probably rapidly assume encyclopedic proportions, so perhaps it is unrealistic to hope for such a discussion from Gerges. Still, all in all, I am very much enjoying the book, and would heartily recommend it.

Obama is doing a better job at Middle Eastern foreign policy than his predecessor, George Bush, but he still lacks leadership with the region. That's the thesis of Obama and the Middle East. In order to make this argument, Fawaz Gerges describes U.S. Middle Eastern foreign policy since World War II. Gerges also breaks down Middle Eastern foreign policy by country. While the thesis leaves the impression that Gerges is leaning left, the book is presented in a balanced, non-partisan manner. For example, he spends one chapter railing on the Bush foreign policy and the next chapter is spent railing on Obama's foreign policy. This is a good beginning Middle East book.

I don’t recall ever writing a review before I finish reading a book, but I feel that I must for OBAMA AND THE MIDDLE EAST. I have read only one chapter, the one with which I am most familiar: “Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” I am not going to go into specifics at this time but, if the rest of the book is as biased as this one is, I think Fawaz A. Gerges has thrown fire rather than light on the situation.

There is much that I don’t like about Israeli politics. However, Gerges seems to have found nothing positive to say about Israelis.All the problems are caused by the Israelis, particularly the building of settlements. Credit is not given to the state for totally withdrawing from Gaza. Instead, he ignores the results of that withdrawal and criticizes Israel for reentering the strip to curtail the terrorist activities originating there. He doesn’t mention that many of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank will likely be part of Israel as part of the land swap necessary for the two-state solution.

Conversely, he does not note anything negative about the Palestinians. He ignores the corruption of the Palestinian leadership which has not helped its people preferring to maintain their feeling of being perpetual innocent, helpless victims..

He quotes President Obama as saying, “Palestinians must make peace with Israel before gaining statehood themselves.” He doesn’t mention how Palestinian schools, camps, and mosques teach their children to seek Israel’s destruction instead of living in peace.

I will complete this review when I finish the rest of the book. I hope it is not total propaganda.

I received this Early Reviewer copy from LibraryThing.

In ‘Journey to the Jihadist’, Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, provides extremely valuable insight into the mindset of Islamic jihadist. Or more correctly, make that plural ‘mindsets’ because the central message of Gerges work is that even among jihadists opinions vary widely as to correct principles, strategies, and tactics.

Gerges starts out with some background to the modern jihad movement and its founder Sayyid Qutb who matriculated at Stanford and Colorado State College of Education for two years in the 1940s. Qutb was appalled by the empty materialism and especially the sexual license he perceived. He returned to play an instrumental role in radicalizing the Muslim Brotherhood. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright has a more detailed consideration of Qutb.

Gerges, who was raised as Greek Orthodox in Lebanon, traces the development of the jihad through three generations starting with Kamal el-Said Habib. Kamal played a role in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, but later forswore violence as means to Islamize society for political means. The second generation is represented by Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard Abu-Jandal . Gerges identifies the third generation as uneducated youth being radicalized by the American occupation of Iraq.

Gerges attempts to demonstrate that many if not most jihadists rejected bin Laden’s attack on the West, some for moral reasons, more because they viewed it an ill-advised assault on the world’s superpower. Much of the antipathy toward bin Laden flows, of course from Shiites. Gerges suggests that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were faring very poorly after 9-11 and the US rout of the Taliban, but that the US invasion of Iraq has almost universally enraged Muslims.

While Gerges’ book provides essential context and perspective it suffers from inadequate identification of his sources. His endnotes state that his main sources are interviews he conducted between 1990 and 2005. He also identifies printed interviews and books for each chapter. He chose not, however, to footnote his work so it is usually impossible to identify a source for particular statements. He states that he was unable to interview Abu-Jandal, but still freely quotes him. The book has a bit of a slapdash feel to it, especially in a late chapter discussing the British Muslims and the London bombings. Gerges also accepts exaggerated claims by Arab Afghans of their role in defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Despite these shortcomings, Gerges’ book provides much-needed perspective on the varying shades of even radical Islam and how the American occupation of Iraq is pushing more and more Muslims toward jihad against ‘the far enemy’ – the West in general and the US in particular. Highly recommended.