A great on the Middle East relationships as whole. A lot of history is missing, but the book touches upon the major events.

Relatively well-written history of American engagement in the Middle East since 1945. Most of the material is familiar and readily available elsewhere, but this book is a good introduction for someone unfamiliar with the topic.

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I thought this history was very confusing. I'm not against detail, but it was difficult to follow his chronology.

Good history. A little too congested.

The author looks at the current events happening in the Middle East from multiple perspectives. This book was written by a college professor and is well annotated.

A good overview of American foreign policy in the Middle East. It can appear a bit disorganized, but each chapter follows a theme and can stand on its own.

A balanced account with a thematic rather than a chronological approach. I learned a lot in reading it.

The end of the Cold War, the skyrocketing importance of oil, and the visibility of third world demagogues like Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, who spewed Anti-American vitriol, heightened the importance of the Middle East in US foreign policy. American concentration on the region came to a head after the September 11th attacks, which shocked Americans, prompting them to ask “Why do they hate us?” Clark University’s Douglas Little, a scholar on American policy in the Middle East attempts to weight the gaps in foreign policy and understanding in American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945. His third edition, written in 2008, takes place right after “The Surge,” at a time when the Iraq War most resembled the Vietnam War. This prompted Little to replace his conclusion with a more updated one. Unfortunately, because American foreign policy in the Middle East remains one of the highest priorities, the book remains extremely outdated as several events have since happened which would either strengthen or complicate his arguments, including 2010-2011’s Arab Spring, 2011’s death of Bin Laden, the 2012 attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi and its contemporary consequences, and Barack Obama’s drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
tAmerican Orientalism reads as several books in one. This may be a result of Little’s attempts to rewrite the book in an attempt to continue its relevance. The book is reminiscent of Containment progenitor George F. Kennan’s American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 in that the author attempts to explain contemporary events by pondering US policy in a span of roughly 50 years in an attempt to answer, “What went wrong?” Here, Little is not as overt about US culpability as Kennan, but Little indicates American successes, such as George H. W. Bush’s multi-national UN backed Operation Desert Storm or Eisenhower’s check on Israel, Britain, and France in 1956’s Suez Canal Crisis as well as failures such as earlier diplomacy being left in the hands of pre-OPEC oil consortiums or the Kennedy-Johnson concept of “limited warfare.”
One of the most unbalanced elements of the book is Little’s emphasis on Orientalism, which is America’s limited understanding of the Middle East, largely based on pop-cultural elements and domestic prejudices. While this ties nicely into chapters on America’s special relationship with Israel and George W. Bush’s “preventative war” on Iraq as it explains the lack of desire to maintain a successful diplomacy in an attempt to avoid war with Arab Nations, his cultural analysis, akin to Andrew J. Rotter’s Comrades at Odds: United States and India, 1947-1964, fails to flow into other chapters, such as the one on Egypt or the chapter on doctrines. The result is that Little’s links to Orientalism are not consistently played out.
The non sequiturs may largely be due to the format of the book. Little’s chapters consider different aspects of US foreign policy, giving us several ways of approaching the pivotal events like the 1953 US-backed removal of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh or the US interventions in Lebanon in 1958 and 1982. As a result, any one chapter in American Orientalism can and often reads like several disconnected essays, with the chapter on culture gap seeming to belong in another book or, at the very least, in the introduction. In the first chapter, some of his lingo, such as referring to the Anglo-American executive offices as “Whitehall” and “Foggy Bottom,” combined with his writing style had me looking into Little’s background as he seemed more like a journalist than a professor. t
Little’s idiosyncratic approach aside, American Orientalism serves as a multi-faceted approach to the relationship between the United States and the Middle East. Many recent works dealing with the subject are cynical, yet only review the history through one lens. With Little’s approach, the reader better understands the failures and triumphs of American foreign relations in the Middle East through the lens of cultural disparities, the special relationship with Israel, responses to pan-Arabism, doctrines of Containment, Post Cold War efforts of the United States to enforce a New World Order, the “Vietnam Syndrome” as it relates to a change in American intervention abroad, and more.

Strong, useful history by a leading historian of U.S. relations with the Middle East. Little runs through the history of U.S. diplomatic and cultural relations with the Middle East, showing the interaction of Orientalist viewpoints/lenses and the diplomacy and strategy the U.S. has enacted in the region. His thesis is that much of U.S. diplomacy is colored, although not necessarily determined, by Orientalism, which Little defines as a form of cultural condescension toward ARabs and Muslims that treats them as irrational, emotional, backwards, and ultimately lacking in agency. For example, he argues that the U.S. has consistently underestimated the power of Arab nationalism and pro-autonomy, anticolonial sentiment. This has led the US to think it is seen more favorably in the region than it is, to assume it can impose top-down solutions or support leaders like the Shah who do the same, and to treat Arabs as volatile and dangerous. Most of the book doesn't clearly show links between Orientalism and U.S. policy, so sometimes the book's title oversells, as this is mostly straightforward (albeit good) diplomatic history.

I've always been a little skeptical of Orientalism as an explanatory concept. There's obviously a certain level of stereotyping, essentializing, and . Little doesn't go whole hog and argue that Orientalism determines USFP, and he shows enough of it at work in policy, politics, and culture to show that it is a thing. On the other hand, the Middle East has been a pretty darn violent place, regressive on a number of measures of human progress (education, literacy, women's rights and roles, democracy, inequality) etc that it's fair to ask questions about why that's the case. Where true Orientalism goes wrong is that it attributes these problems to a cultural or religious essence of Arabs or Muslims rather than to history: events, people and their views/decisions in context, contingencies, variations as well as continuities in culture, and so on. Where advocates of the usefulness of Orientalism go wrong is saying that pretty much all critical evaluations of the Middle East are just products of Orientalism, as Said basically argues. So I'm a little on the fence as to its explanatory value.

This book is excellent chapter by chapter, but it could have been condensed a bit. The chapters are thematic, running you through the history of U.S. oil policies, strategic doctrine, military interventions, efforts to forge peace btw the Israelis and Palestinians, modernization efforts, interactions with Nasser and other Arab nationalists, and so on. The work on the IP conflict is particularly even-handed and informative, all at a reasonable length. However, when you run through each of these chapters, you go over a lot of the same ground, so the book feels repetitive at times. It's 330 pages, but they are pretty dense academic pages, so it's not a quick read and might have limited appeal to non-academics and non-teachers.

This is a very good history, although it's not always easy to pick out the core arguments (best expressed in the conclusion rather than the intro). It will be a great reference for teachers and researchers, although it might be a bit long to assign to undergrads.

As you might imagine, this is a pretty grim history of America's proprietary attitude towards the Middle East and how it's come back to bite us in the ass. Worth reading, but it doesn't do the job as well as similar works by Tariq Ali and others.

Excellent read. The chapter on oil stands out as a great summary/ analysis of the way that dependence on Middle Eastern oil has shaped global politics.