The Tao of the Arab center.

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.

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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.