Well, the rest of the book, surprisingly, works. It is not the best work on the Middle East and is based on research mainly from other book sources, a compilation of historical information rather than first hand research. But Freedman does provide a reasonably good political overview of events concerning the Middle East with most references coming from western sources.
In an area that has huge geostrategic interest, Palestine and Israel, A Choice of Enemies works well. From my research over the last several years, the chapters on Palestine - "Camp David", "The Intifada", and "Return to Camp David" - are well balanced and accurate. While there are many other references that could have been utilized, the chapters on Palestine give a generally accurate picture of Palestine/U.S./Israeli relationships, in particular around the time of the first intifada.
There are some problems along the way in similar veins as the Iraq war and Mossadegh statements made above, but the overall information, the general presentation of the flow of events reads quite well from all the sources that I have read - many of which are listed in Freedman's bibliography.
There are no new ideas here, but for a lay person wanting a general overview of trends in the Middle East this is a reasonable source of information on how the various U.S. administrations worked their way through the complexities of the Middle East. The reader needs to read the book aware of the "amero-centric" view expressed at the beginning and the end, but they could also do well to simply ignore those passages and get on with reading the rest.
1 | 2
