Martin Seiff is a veteran foreign correspondent with United
Press International. His 2008 book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the
Middle East is a breath of fresh air in a field otherwise obscured by foggy
theory and wishful thinking. He has little time for liberals and neocons who dream of
imposing democracy in the area (and doing so in only a few years), and he is scathing about the inadequacies of various
government leaders, particularly during the British administration of much of
the Middle East in the last century. If
you are committed to believing Churchill never made mistakes, you won’t like
this book. If you are committed to believing that free elections always bring
good democratic government (despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary),
you won’t like this book.
I don’t agree with all of his points (his brief for Saudi
Arabia as a new center of stability in the region seems to me a bit of a
stretch, for example), but his blunt, non-nonsense appraisal of the history and
current condition of the Middle East seems to me far more realistic than what
usually comes out of the academic world on this subject. And it is certainly
politically incorrect - it will offend diehards on both the left and the right! It has been clear ever since we launched the Iraq and
Afghan wars that our government is woefully naïve about the cultures of
that area of the world, with consistently painful and expensive results. A book like this
might help dispel some of that naiveté
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