America's Middle East: How Washington brought ruin to the region

America’s Middle East by Marc Lynch is a book written against amnesia, and against the greasy consolations by which empires survive their crimes. 

It is also, improbably, a magnificent act of civic faith. Lynch begins in rage, but he does not remain there. 

The anger that animates these pages is not the ornamental fury of the columnist or the safely retrospective indignation of the memoirist. 

It is the rage of someone who has lived inside the institutions through which American Middle East policy is made, and who has finally concluded that the machine did not merely malfunction. It worked as designed.

Lynch is unusually well placed to make the case. A professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School, he is one of the most important American interpreters of Arab politics of recent decades. 

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