Arabian Plights: The Future Middle East.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

ARABIAN PLIGHTS: The Future Middle East

Author: Peter Rodgers

Published by: Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2009, 250pp, A$29.95.

THE DEVIL WE KNOW: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower

Author: Robert Baer

Published by: Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2009, 279pp, A$32.95.

These books have a lot in common: both offer opinionated but highly informed contemporary comment on the state of the post-Iraq War Middle East and both make very useful analyses of the fragility of the Gulfoil states and the rise of Iran as a hegemonic player in a region where only 10 per cent of the population are of Shia persuasion. These tomes are like a boxed double set, with Rodgers being capacious in his over-view while Boer plumbs for exacting and highly revelatory depth of coverage of Iran's ambitions to become a global hyper-power and offering a blueprint for progress towards a long overdue American detente with Iron.

Peter Rodgers is a former Australian ambassador to Israel and writes trenchantly and with informed passion about the huge infrastructural and demographic problems facing Arab leaders, for whom he asserts that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will, 'like an endlessly running conveyor belt', provide 'a rationale for the problems of their creaking fiefdoms' which labour under 'often sclerotic governance'. Rodgers notes acidly how aligned are the US ideologues and Islamist extremists in wanting fixed and pleasing electoral results (citing US rejection of the Hamasled government in 2006), but his wider intention is to glimpse the future Middle East as the continuing lynchpin of an oil-addicted global order that runs on the black gold like 'oil junkies'. He dissects the Arab world as a realm high on youth and a fertile population but dangerously low on food, water and employment opportunities--the classic powder-keg, in short. Rodgers asserts that the region's longstanding (and largely Western-created) problems will continue to strain the world until:

* serious pressure is placed on Israel,

* the Sunnis of Hamas are engaged in genuine dialogue and

* the super-powers talk to Iran under the Shia 'mullahtocracy' without unrealistic Western expectations of a future reign of secular/non-theocratic governance.

Rodgers exposes the hugely corrupt arms industry as it sucks up oil profits and keeps Arab regimes locked in extremes of poverty and wealth, and the blurb statement concisely expresses Rodgers's moral passion: 'Perhaps the real problem of the Arab world,' Rodgers concludes, 'is that it too closely mirrors the hypocrisies of our own'. This book is right up to date, concluding with some astute assessments of policy priorities in the Obama administration. This is a probing, well-researched and deeply thoughtful work, and now that its author is no longer an Australian diplomat, he is able to abandon politesse for outbursts of astoundingly flank and penetrating judgments. He reminds us of Islam's internal stresses (such as the distinction between Shia Islamo-nationalism and the bin Ladenesque...