Milton Viorst has covered the Middle East as a journalist and scholar since the 1960s. He was The New Yorker’s Middle East correspondent, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He has written six books on the Middle East and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the poet Judith Viorst.


From the Hardcover edition. [Edit review] [Delete review]

America’s engagement with the Arab world stretches back far beyond the Iraq wars. According to Milton Viorst, the current conflict is simply the latest round in a 1,400-year struggle between Christianity and Islam, in which the United States became a participant only in the last century.

Today, the Bush Doctrine aims to free the Arab peoples from political oppression and create a democratic Iraq. So why are Arabs, and Iraqis in particular, so suspicious of our efforts? The explanation, Viorst says, is simple: “What the American leadership has miscalculated, or simply dismissed, is Arab nationalism.” In Storm from the East, Viorst offers a balanced, lucid, and vital history of America’s uneasy relationship with the Arab world and argues that brutal conflict in the region will continue until the West, with the United States taking the lead, honors the Arabs’ insistence on deciding their own destiny.

Viorst examines the long struggle of the... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]

I Memory 622—1900

America’s war in Iraq, from its start, did not go as President Bush’s administration had predicted. Though the U.S. army captured Baghdad and Iraq’s other major cities easily enough, and encountered little resistance in abolishing the detested regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis did not greet America’s forces with the gratitude that they had been told to expect. Far from treating America’s soldiers as liberators, which is how they looked upon themselves, Iraqis regarded them as conquerors. It was a characterization for which most Americans were shockingly unprepared.

Frustrated, the American invaders believed they were being misunderstood. The leadership in Washington had proclaimed repeatedly that its quarrel was not with the Iraqi people but with Saddam’s regime. It had assured its soldiers of the nobility of their mission, not just to end a dangerous military threat but to wipe out... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]