Innocent Abroad: an intimate account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East.

• Author: Jones, David T.
• Position: Book review

Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009, 497 pp, $30.00 (maps and selected documents included), hardback

With the release of Innocent Abroad, Martin Indyk completes the sequence of personal recounts by the triumvirate of primary practitioners in U.S. Middle East peace policy during the Clinton administration.

Preceded in print by Dennis Ross's massive The Missing Peace and Aaron Miller's anecdotal The Much Too Promised Land, Indyk's Innocent has considerable insight to offer. Long in preparation, it avoids Ross's exhaustion factor labyrinth of detail while moving beyond the lively memoir style of Miller's text, which lacked both timelines and maps. Indyk as an observer/practitioner of U.S. Middle East diplomacy has a unique optic, having been sequentially the principal National Security Council Middle East expert, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and then again U.S. ambassador to Israel--and not even a U.S. citizen until 1993. Consequently, he casts a wider net of policy analysis and critique/criticism (including Iran and Iraq), and as both the first Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel and the first Jewish Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, he provides some unparalleled perspectives.

Still Innocent has errors and biases of its own. Indeed, after an introductory epistle belaboring the various failures of the Bush administration (a theme relentlessly cudgeled throughout the book), it opens with the egregious error of stating that "On January 23, 2001, Bill Clinton was in his final hours as president ..." Of course, Clinton had ceased to be president at noon on January 20-though one can be sure that he would have preferred otherwise.

Happily, Innocent improves substantively from that low point. Indyk divides his text into three major components: "The Ascent," in which he explains the development of the Oslo Accords, an initial effort at an Israel-Syria agreement, and the successful Israel-Jordan agreement; "The Other Branch" examining Clinton Administration struggles with Iran and Iraq; and "The Second Chance" which recounts the extended labyrinthine search for agreements with Asad's Syria and Yasser Arafat's Palestinians, the latter of which lasted until virtually the final hours of the Clinton administration. A summing up segment, "The Lantern on the Stern," designed to draw lessons...