Marwan Muasher, The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 336 pp., $30.00.

Kenneth M. Pollack, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East (New York: Random House, 2008), 592 pp., $30.00.

Olivier Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, trans. Ros Schwartz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 160 pp., $24.95.

THE TIME is especially ripe for comprehensive rethinking of policy toward the Middle East. The advent of a new U.S. presidency is one obvious reason. Another is the miring of the outgoing administration in the sands of Iraq. The war became a preoccupation that has defined the Bush administration's involvement in the Middle East and devoured attention, resources and bargaining chips that could have been applied to other U.S. interests, in the region and elsewhere. Wherever decisions in Washington and events in Iraq henceforth steer the still-unfinished war, too many other challenges in the Middle East need attention for Iraq to be as much of a preoccupation during the next four years as it has been over the past six.

On top of Iraq, the Bush administration has rattled its sabers and fired its confrontational rhetoric at Syria, and especially Iran, with almost nothing to show for it in terms of changed regime behavior. A tardy and tepid attempt to reactivate negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians is unlikely to result in anything more than a statement of intent to keep negotiating. Even the successes-including increased counterterrorist efforts by Arab states and an agreement with Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi formalizing his turn away from previous misbehavior-are fragile and reversible. Taken together, these glaring and unresolved problems prime the market for new thinking about Middle East policy. The bidding is open for proposals to define U.S. policy in the post-Iraq War era.

The books under review-by an American policy analyst who worked on Middle Eastern issues in the Clinton administration, a leading French scholar specializing in the politics of the Muslim world and a distinguished Jordanian diplomat-all help to clarify the Bush administration's mistakes in dealing with the region and set forth new policy agendas. In charting a new course, the United States faces several challenges, above and beyond merely correctly identifying what was done wrong in the recent past.

One challenge is to avoid discarding any babies along with the dirty bath water left behind by the Bush administration-not all of the initiatives and objectives set out over the past eight years are wrong merely because they are associated with a broader policy that has failed. That said, advocates of policies that continue these themes will have to work hard to persuade both disillusioned Americans and skeptical Middle Easterners that the ultimate objectives remain valid.

The American audience, consumed by an almost inevitable Iraq War syndrome, presents a second challenge. Though probably less severe than popular reactions to the Vietnam War, the memory of Iraq will still put limits on the public's tolerance for major overseas commitments, especially commitments in the Middle East. It is one thing for a foreign-policy elite to recognize the importance of continued involvement in the region; it is quite another for the broader public to do so. Any proposed policies that entail spending a lot of money will be especially tough sells, all the more so as long as an anemic U.S. economy and the cost of financial bailouts remain concerns.

And third, we cannot escape the simple fact that the Middle East is a very complicated place, as are the policy issues associated with it. Even though this seems rather obvious, a chief reason for the Bush administration's failures in the region has been the tendency to oversimplify. One key error was basing strategy on a division of the region into moderates and extremists (meaning guys Washington likes and guys it doesn't) that bears no resemblance to the mental political maps of Middle Easterners.

So proponents of any new strategy need to overcome public disillusionment and the desire for retrenchment-not to mention crafting a strategy that is straightforward enough to be palatable to the American people without being so anodyne as to ignore either present complexities or the complications that are bound to develop.

In the course of grappling with these challenges, three main themes are clearly emerging: U.S. Middle East policy is held back by an inability to move past the Iraq War; there is a need to reform infrastructure and government in the region despite past policy failures; and a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is key to long-term prospects for peace.

KENNETH POLLACK steps boldly up to the plate with proposals for U.S. policy toward the Middle East in A Path Out of the Desert. He bills his offering as a "grand strategy" and conveys three main messages. First, the Middle East is important to U.S. interests ranging from oil, which Pollack unabashedly puts at the top of that list, to nonproliferation of nuclear and other unconventional weapons. He adds a sobering perspective to the copious rhetoric in the United States about reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil producers by decreasing consumption of oil from the region. Pollack points out that lowering oil imports somewhat would still leave the United States highly vulnerable to Middle East supply disruptions. Even if the United States could achieve the unachievable goal of filling all its energy needs domestically, the impact of higher oil prices on trading partners would damage the U.S. economy.

Second, the United States must be involved in the Middle East for the long haul. A major shortcoming of past American involvement in the region has been a sort of national attention-deficit disorder, manifested in episodic policies and lack of follow-through. The United States needs to exercise patience and be prepared for a sustained commitment as it endeavors to help turn the Middle East into a more stable and less threatening place-a process that will take many years.

Third, U.S. strategy toward the Middle East should center on reform-specifically, assisting regimes and liberal-minded elites within the region to restructure stagnant economies, establish more effective educational systems, strengthen the rule of law and revamp political systems in the direction of greater democracy. This is the principal theme from the Bush years that is worth salvaging, but it needs to be applied with greater perseverance; the Bush administration's record on reform in the region, Pollack correctly argues, has largely been one of raising and then dashing hopes.

In stressing reform, Pollack is expressing-albeit more emphatically and thoroughly than many others-a consensus that emerged among American foreign-policy intellectuals after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The consensus called for rethinking the implied bargain the United States had struck earlier with several authoritarian regimes of the Muslim Middle East. Under that bargain, the United States received assured access to petroleum and an entrée that included favors such as port-call rights and more friendship than was given to the Soviets. The regimes in return got arms, an implied security guarantee and the United States turning a blind eye to their backward and oppressive domestic politics. That turned out to be a bad bargain for the United States. September 11 showed how unreformed political and economic systems in the Middle East, previously deemed irrelevant to U.S. security interests, could affect U.S. security after all-they bred the sort of extremists who conducted the terrorist attacks.

But this is not only about stemming extremism. Another part of Pollack's argument is that there is a danger of revolutionary upheaval that could lead to the creation of new regimes hostile to the United States. Yet another is his contention that unreformed structures simply cannot endure and that change of some sort-favorable or unfavorable, violent or velvet-is inevitable. Unrest already rooted in these deeply ailing societies is shaking existing structures so badly that continued repression will be unable to hold them together.

These arguments are persuasive. Pollack's case draws on a broad corpus of scholarship and would be worth reading as an approachable tutorial on the social, economic and political predicament of the Arab world-even if one did not agree with his conclusions. His description of the dimensions and consequences of closed economies and polities in the region is excellent. So is his treatment of terrorism, which helps to debunk some common misconceptions-such as the notion that economics is irrelevant to the recruitment and motivation of terrorists. The issue is not poverty but instead the more complex story of a dearth of opportunities and frustrated aspirations, both of which are prevalent in the sclerotic, statist economies of the Middle East.

Pollack's recommended principles for encouraging reform are moderate and mainstream. The United States should encourage both top-down and bottom-up reform from within, rather than being seen to impose it from the outside. It should do so on political, economic and social tracks simultaneously. It should seek multilateral involvement. It should be flexible and patient, and it should avoid the Bush administration's mistake of promising too much. Pollack's prescriptions do not break any more new ground than his diagnoses; their value comes mainly from putting them into a cogent and cohesive package.

Part of that package is a frank recognition of costs and trade-offs. Pollack acknowledges that some of the encouragement he has in mind, such as aid-related incentives, would be expensive. He also recognizes that encouragement of reform sometimes appears to collide with other U.S. objectives in the Middle East. The more influence the United States expends in pressing a regime to reform, the less it has left to press the regime on something else, such as tactical cooperation on counterterrorism. Pollack puts such a trade-off in perspective, however, by properly characterizing it less as reform versus counterterrorism than as the short term versus the long term. The political and economic structure of Middle Eastern countries will, over the long term, be the principal determinant of the amount of extremism and terrorism that emanates from the region.

WHEN IT comes to developing Middle East strategy, the Iraq War is probably the biggest complication of all. It continues to divert a huge amount of resources and policy attention, and it remains a damaging representation of the United States in the eyes of many people in the region. At home, discussion of Middle East policy is clouded by the emotional and political baggage still surrounding positions on the war, especially apparent in the inverse relationship between support for the original decision to invade and subsequent criticism of the execution of the war as the cause of later problems.

Pollack, who devoted an earlier book to arguing in favor of invading Iraq, exhibits some of this pattern. Sharp criticisms of the Bush administration's execution of its war policy pepper his current book. His own history of support for the war decision (based largely on presumed Iraqi unconventional weapons) appears to underlie some of the few unconvincing lines in A Path Out of the Desert. He contends, for example, that democracy was only a "minor consideration" in the decision to invade, and cites as evidence the Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for the post-invasion political reconstruction of Iraq. But once the administration decided to remove the Iraq regime, such planning was essential and the inadequacy of it inexcusable; the failure to plan tells us nothing about any possible motives for the war, including democratization.

Moreover, there is too much prewar neoconservative doctrine on democratization and Iraq to dismiss the goal of shaking up the politics of the Middle East as being of minor import. And there are too many other reasons to believe the perceived unconventional-weapons programs was more a selling point than a prime mover of policy. The chief reason is that a presumed weapons program in a problem-country simply does not equate, logically or empirically, with a case to launch a war-as is suggested by Pollack's own very sensible recommendations, in a later chapter of his book, for dealing with Iran's nuclear program through measures short of war. An attack on Iran, as he points out, would lead to Iranian retaliation and rally Iranians behind the hard-liners in Tehran while doing little to set back Iran's nuclear program.

But determining what to do about the Iraq quagmire now is more important than explicating past decisions. Pollack's chapter on the subject begins with the accurate observation that every option looks bad. Though he still wants to try to turn a mess into something that could be billed as a success, rather than cutting losses from an expedition that never should have been undertaken, he can't be accused of overselling this preference. He emphasizes the risks of leaving more than the risks, and the certain continued costs, of staying. He repeatedly mentions Congo as exemplifying the kind of boundless civil war he fears. Yet, it would have been less of a distraction from the impressive case he makes in the rest of his book to have recognized the invasion of Iraq as the strategic blunder that it was and to move on from there. What he has to say about reform is too important, and too well argued, to get dragged down by old baggage about the war decision.

POLITICAL, ECONOMIC and social reform isn't solely about grand designs on infrastructure and systems of governance. It is also about nationalism, ethnic and religious identity, and the ability of Islamist groups to embrace democracy. And so even though Olivier Roy's The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East is not in disagreement with Pollack's arguments about reform, it is a concise reminder of the extent and, even more importantly, the complexity of the region's problems. Roy shows that the solutions to these conundrums do not flow directly from grand strategy-Pollack's or anyone else's. That's because the problems that bedevil the West in the region today are not ones defined as lines of conflict between the Middle East and the West. The lines that matter are within the Middle East itself. They are indeed chaotic identities-complex, overlapping and contradictory. This central theme is what is implied by the word "chaos" in Roy's title.

The most important form of identity, says Roy, is nationalism. "No reform will succeed," he writes, "if it is not part of a national, even nationalist vision." This is why he sees not only Iraq breaking up, but also that the war-generated upheaval has sharpened the sectarian identities of Shia and Sunni throughout the region. America's own actions have intensified some of the other conflict-ridden lines of identity in the Middle East as well.

In this regard he observes that the Bush administration had things backward and was destined to fail when it insisted that Palestinians introduce democracy and reform as a prerequisite to-rather than as part and parcel of-being granted their own state.

All three authors wrestle with this broad problem of what posture to take toward Islamist parties and movements, and the juggling of reform and democracy. They all accurately portray political Islam as an outlook that embraces groups with a wide variety of objectives and methods.

Marwan Muasher, a Jordanian diplomat and politician, offers a threefold division of political Islam in The Arab Center: terrorists with a global agenda such as al-Qaeda; militant movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which use violence as a means to achieve what they regard as national liberation; and peaceful movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan or Islamists in Morocco. Roy, whose scholarly involvement in the subject is long and deep, presents a typology ranging from transnational terrorists to nonviolent "cultural" Muslims who just want to advance Islamic community identity. Roy criticizes U.S. policy for failing to appreciate the differences among such categories, and argues that democracy will never come to the Arab world unless it includes integrating Islamists who accept democratic methods. Muasher-an Arab Christian-agrees with Roy on this point, citing the Bush administration's unfortunate tendency to equate violence in the West Bank with terrorism à la al-Qaeda.

Pollack recognizes the diversity but displays more general wariness of anyone bearing the Islamist label. He mulls over the old "one man, one vote, one time" worry that an Islamist party that gains power through peaceful and democratic means might later turn to autocratic methods, even making comparisons with the Nazis coming to power in Germany. He is willing to accept Islamist parties that meet his definition of "moderate," but only if, as in Turkey, a strong and independent military is on hand to step in if the Islamists start going too far. Pollack recommends increasing U.S. assistance to the militaries in Arab states-despite Israeli nervousness about any such aid-in the name of "professionalizing" them. But his main interest in doing so seems to be to solve what he calls the "Islamist dilemma" of how to democratize while keeping undesirable Islamists out of power by wielding the implied threat of a pro-U.S. military conducting the very unprofessional act of a coup.

Other Islamist parties and movements are ruled out for any role in a reformed Middle East because they do not meet Pollack's definition of moderation, which includes as the number-one criterion the rejection of violence. His criteria are common and reasonable, but they do not take into account some of the realities of a still-unreformed Middle East characterized by autocracy and occupation. One is that groups may employ violence not out of any fondness for violence itself but as a recourse when they do not see peaceful opportunities for pursuing their objectives. Another is that groups evolve and the methods they use change as such opportunities come and go and self-determination is withheld or granted. After all, dealing normally with leaders who once led terrorist groups and employed violence against civilians is not new policy for the United States-it did so in Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams and in Israel with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

The problem is not just with the criteria for who deserves to be called moderate, but with trying to shape policies on specific difficult problems in terms of any general criteria. Grand strategy does have a role; as Yogi Berra said, if you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else. But the most difficult problems, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are difficult precisely because they do not fit neatly into anyone's grand strategy, however thoroughly the strategy is thought out. Talk of criteria for ruling in or ruling out Islamist groups as legitimate interlocutors becomes a kind of code for preferred ways of handling a specific policy problem, such as what posture to take toward Hamas, the victor in a free Palestinian election in 2006. Rather than talking in code, it is better to address the specific issue directly. This means, in the case of Hamas, considering what policy toward the group would be most likely to reduce the shedding of Israeli and Palestinian blood, would be most likely to yield a legitimate and effective Palestinian interlocutor, would improve chances for a peaceful settlement with staying power, and would show U.S. pro-democracy policies to be genuine and consistent. These questions should be considered not against abstract criteria for what defines an Islamic moderate but instead with an eye toward Hamas's specific characteristics, including its strength, its role as a conduit for Palestinian nationalist sentiment, its real (not just rhetorical) objectives and how amenable it is to compromise.

THE ARAB-ISRAELI conflict constitutes another big and sticky issue whose solutions are not to be found in any single regionwide grand strategy. Here, Muasher's book provides an especially valuable perspective. The first Jordanian ambassador to Israel, later Jordan's ambassador to the United States and foreign minister, Muasher was directly involved in more than a decade's worth of diplomacy aimed at resolving the conflict, such as playing a leading role in getting the now-moribund "roadmap" on the road. Much of his book is a memoir of that diplomacy. Beyond requisite devotion to the two Jordanian kings he has served, Muasher is consistently fair-minded. Israeli leaders receive a large share of the responsibility for the setbacks and frustrations he describes, but many others on the Arab and U.S. sides have their shares as well. He expresses admiration for much of what he sees in Israel, including the work ethic of its citizens and the accountability, transparency and creativity of society there-aspects of the state that hold lessons for the Arab world. Pollack says that the United States should listen to the people of the Middle East, both the leaders and the led. Muasher's voice is unquestionably among the most reasonable and insightful ones on the subject.

One of Muasher's principal messages is that the Arab-Israeli conflict still matters-a lot. Policies toward the conflict will define much of the new U.S. administration's place-for good or ill-in Middle Eastern history. Over the last few years the conflict has competed with the Iraq War for attention, as well as to be the major source of malign perceptions of the United States. Muasher cites instances when U.S. preoccupation with the war helped to set back hopes for progress on the peace process. But the Arab-Israeli conflict, he writes, "was and remains a principal cause of frustration in the region." A related message is that there is, per his book's title, an "Arab center" that is willing and able to come to terms with Israel. He particularly emphasizes the Arab League's peace initiative of 2002 as evidence of the center's existence, and as a missed opportunity to make progress toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.

Yet another of Muasher's central points is that active U.S. involvement is essential for any progress toward peace. The story he tells of the last several years is largely the disappointing one of a U.S. administration eschewing such involvement, led by a president who once told King Abdullah "I am sick of the Palestinian-Israeli issue."

Pollack's outlook toward resolution of the conflict is both less hopeful than Muasher's about the potential for progress and evidently less worried about the consequences of failing to make any. Most of what he says on the subject is in an early chapter in which he identifies Israel as an "interest" of the United States, right after oil. It is worth recalling Lord Palmerston's dictum (which Pollack himself cites) about having no permanent allies, only permanent interests. To apply this saying to the U.S.-Israeli relationship is not to raise issues of impermanence; no serious observer of the U.S.-Israeli alliance envisions any alternative to its indefinite continuation. Rather, it is to point out that allies are not themselves interests. An ally is a means of pursuing interests, bearing in mind that one's own interests never coincide completely with those of even one's closest ally (let alone with the views of particular parties within the ally, or its friends).

In his opening pages, Pollack rightly observes that the United States has too often fallen into the trap of "goal displacement," in which its true interests are superceded by something else that seems consistent with them but really isn't. But he appears to fall into the same trap in his treatment of Israel. He cites Israel's democratic character as a reason the United States continues to support it, for example. Certainly shared democratic values are an important foundation for the alliance, but most of the difficult U.S. policy decisions involving the Arab-Israeli conflict are not matters of defending Israeli democracy. They involve considerations such as how to respond to expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which has nothing do with democracy in Israel and in which the United States has no positive stake. The only effect that Israeli activities in the territories have on the matter is the (largely negative) one on the prospects for Palestinian democracy. And as Muasher reminds us, any occupation is inherently undemocratic.

Pollack acknowledges some of this, including how difficult U.S. and Israeli policies have made it for Palestinian leader Abu Mazen even to begin to build a more stable, let alone democratic, polity. But missing from Pollack's largely sober and sensible observations about the conflict are pointed policy recommendations for the United States insofar as they relate to Israel. It would be "useful," he writes, for the Israelis to stop expanding settlements and unnecessarily harassing Palestinians in the territories. That's true, but such observations merely echo the countless-and feckless-statements by U.S. officials that such behavior by Israel is "not helpful," and offer no hope that the unhelpful behavior will cease.

Among the reasons progress toward Arab-Israeli peace is so important is that it affects Pollack's principal concern: the prospects for reform in the Arab world. Pollack touches briefly on this connection but it is Muasher, based on his unique experience, who develops the point fully. Following Muasher's stint as foreign minister, King Abdullah appointed him deputy prime minister charged with constructing a program of reform in Jordan. The challenges he confronted in that job, including resistance from what he terms the "old guard" in the Hashemite kingdom, exhibited many of the patterns Pollack identifies for the entire region. From his successive roles as diplomat and reformer, Muasher concludes that lack of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement has been a major impediment to reform. Continuing conflict with Israel has been the chief excuse invoked by old guards throughout the Arab world resisting reform. The issue has been exploited by Islamists, whose strength scares liberals as well as old guards away from democratization because of fear that the Islamists will take power. And the credibility of the United States in encouraging reform is low in large part because its credibility on Arab-Israeli peace is low. Some of Muasher's sharpest criticism of the United States is that it fails to recognize these connections.

Muasher does not overplay the point, and he is just as critical of the other sources of resistance to reform within the Arab world. He faults the Arab center, with which he identifies, for not devoting as much attention and effort to internal change as to the peace process. His final lament is that the Arab center, though more of a force than many outside the region perceive, is in danger of losing both its moderation and its dynamism. The West and especially the United States-with which the center is associated in the eyes of many other Arabs-can do much to keep that from happening.

THE NEW overseers of U.S. policy toward the Middle East would do well to read and ponder all three of these books. Pollack provides a framework for dealing with the region as a whole and a convincing case for why that framework should be used. Roy describes some of the loose and dangerous pieces that do not fit entirely inside the framework. And Muasher explains why failure to fix some parts of the whole rickety structure that is the Middle East makes it difficult-if not impossible-to fix the other parts.

A grand strategy that would effectively advance U.S. interests in the Middle East during the next several years would begin, but by no means end, with Pollack's stress on the need for reform. It would include as a second principle the need to use all dimensions of U.S. power and influence to move clearly and rapidly toward resolution of the conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Third, it would move quickly rather than slowly toward liquidation of the misadventure in Iraq. This is not because such a recommendation flows from recognition of the original invasion as a mistake-it doesn't. Rather, it is because the hoped-for benefits of continuing to prosecute the war and the feared consequences of withdrawal are both highly uncertain, while the material and political costs of staying are assured. Fourth, the United States needs to discard fanciful divisions of the Middle East into good guys and bad guys, and to discard the self-handicapping refusal even to talk to the bad. Unleashing U.S. diplomacy and engaging Hamas, Syria, Iran and others we have good reasons to dislike concedes nothing but holds out the hope of making at least some progress in resolving issues that involve them.

Paul R. Pillar is a visiting professor and the director of graduate studies of the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He formerly was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.