Review: The Mess they Made
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300228 |
| Author | Hakan Tunç |
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Spring 2008 | 519 |
| Reviews |
THE MESS THEY MADE
The Middle East After Iraq
Gwynne Dyer
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. 267pp, $21.99 paper (ISBN
0771029802)
Gwynne Dyer, a journalist and columnist, attempts to analyze all the promi-
nent issues and actors in the current state of affairs in the Middle East and
makes future predictions about the region (Iraq in particular).More than half
of Dyer’s book is dedicated to an analysis of Iraq in one way or another. The
reasons that the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq, the political
and security situation in Iraq, the future of Iraq, and the impact of the Iraq
war on Iran’s policy are discussed in separate chapters that are short but free
of repetition. The remaining chapters address other major issues in the Mid-
dle East, including radical Islamist terrorism, Iran’s nuclear policy, the Is-
raeli-Palestinian conflict, and post-Taliban Afghanistan. These latter chapters
are more informative than the former ones, although experts on the Middle
East will find little original analysis and many debatable points.
The basic premise of the book on Iraq is that the Bush administration
(“they”) has created a “mess” in the country and lost the war. The surge (“a
pathetic escalation”) is not working and is unlikely to work (87). As a result,
the author predicts that the United States will leave Iraq immediately after the
end of Bush’s term because of “the implosion” of public opposition to the war.
In the author’s view, a US withdrawal from Iraq will be largely a positive de-
velopment for Iraq—in the long term at least—because the presence of
America is the root cause of postwar difficulties in the country.
What this implies for the larger Middle East is not clear in the book. Dyer
argues that the declining US influence in the Middle East following its antic-
ipated withdrawal from Iraq coupled with “the forces unleashed by the de-
struction of Iraq”will upset the status quo in the region (2). Nowhere in the
book, however, are “the forces unleashed”by the Iraq war specified. It is not
the “Shi’ite revival”because the author argues that such a revival is largely
exaggerated. It is not Islamist extremism and the terrorism it breeds because
they are not immediate consequences of the Iraq war but “responses to a cen-
tury of foreign domination and manipulation of the region”(3). It is certainly
not the “democratic forces”in Arab countries which are either weak or vir-
tually absent.
Equally problematic is the fact that the author does not substantiate his
alarmist description of the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq. He
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