Product Review

Chas W. Freeman is one of America's most distinguished diplomatists. In a government career spanning three decades, he negotiated on behalf of the United States with over 100 foreign governments. In America's Misadventures, Freeman presents two dozen of his essays on the Middle East, all of them trenchant and many of them previously unpublished. The essays span the period from 1990-when as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Freeman helped plan and implement the massive, U.S.-led effort to liberate Kuwait from occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraq-through 2010, by which time he had developed many thoughtful and well-informed criticisms of the policies Washington had pursued toward the region throughout the past two decades. The book includes considerable new material on Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, much valuable information about the structure and politics of Saudi Arabia, and many trenchant essays in which Freeman applies his smart and wide-ranging "Realist" form of analysis both to defining America's national interests in the Middle East and describing the often sad, confused, or counter-productive way in which it has sought to pursue them.