Reviews 641

The author also gives credit where credit is due to the wise leadership of Karen Hughs, Bushs
under secretary for public diplomacy, for encouraging all FSOs to be proactive in interacting with
media and audiences, promising to back them up if they slipped. The story of Alberto Fernandez,
a PD specialist, who described the US effort in Iraq as stupid and arrogant is a classic. Hughes
stood by him and supported him against those who wanted to have his hide over the incident. As
the writer of this review recalls, Fernandez, soon after the incident, received a standard superior
performance award amounting to $15,000. Al Kamen quipped, in one of his columns, I suppose
this was $5000 for saying U.S. policy was stupid, $5000 for describing it as arrogant, and another
$5000 for saying it all on al-Jazeera! Rugh correctly puts this controversy in its proper context,
quoting Marc Lynch on the need to show US ability to self-criticize, something we do not see
often in the public diplomacy of other nations.
Overall, Rughs effort is as valuable to the practitioner of diplomacy as it is for the history
archives. Two main criticisms, however, are in order: first, the book offers precious little by way
of the stories that breathe life into the concept and practice of public diplomacy. Second, the
absence of two-way diplomacy scarcely receives mention in the book.
The experiences of PD officers working side by side with their political and military colleagues
are rich with anecdotes the recounting of which would liven up this book and enhance its credibility. During the first Gulf War, for example, USIA officers visited the front lines to interview
soldiers from various coalition countries, talked to Kuwaitis fleeing Saddam Husseins army after
the occupation of Kuwait, and worked with military information specialists on efforts to reach
audiences inside Iraq. In 2003, PD officers stood side by side with military public affairs officers
at the information center at Centcom in Doha and were shot at and bombed along with their
military colleagues in Baghdad after the war. The debates with US critics on al-Jazeera were
often emotionally charged and difficult, but represented the substance of the war of ideas and the
challenges faced by PD officers on the front lines in defense of their country.
Finally, the concept of two-way public diplomacy has largely been observed in the breach rather
than in the practice, both before and after the merger. Political analyses offered by PD officers in
the field are among the best political reports available, and yet this fact is rarely acknowledged
in Washington. Under secretaries of public diplomacy have rarely sat around the same table with
policy makers to offer feedback from the field on US policy, and suggest, therefore, how it might
be amended to avoid the hostility faced by US diplomats and private citizens alike.
In conclusion, William Rugh renders a valuable service to the students and practitioners of public
diplomacy in his thoroughly researched facts and meticulous depiction of the institutions that carry
out Americas cultural, educational, and informational exchanges. This effort, however, would gain
much wider general readership with more personal anecdotes from the field, particularly those
that shed light on the substance of US foreign policy and the controversial issues with which our
diplomats in all specialties have to grapple.

MUHAMMAD IDREES AHMAD, The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Pp. 336. 70.00 cloth, 19.99 paper. ISBNs:
9780748693023, 9780748693030.
REVIEWED BY PAUL R. PILLAR, Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University, Washington,
D.C.; e-mail: prp8@georgetown.edu
doi:10.1017/S0020743815000823

The launching of a war in Iraq in 2003 by the administration of George W. Bush was an extraordinary departure in US foreign policy. The first major offensive war that the United States

642 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 47 (2015)

had initiated in more than a century, it defies any straightforward explanation in terms of a national decision-making structure pursuing national interests. No such structure was engaged in
the run up to the war, and there was no policy process that addressed the question of whether
invading Iraq was a good idea. Although a combination of circumstances made the war possible, the invasion was the culmination of a prolonged and concerted effort by a network of
committed ideologues known as neoconservatives. Many subsequent commentaries and books
about the war have failed to capture the essence of what the war was about, and instead have
been trapped in a framework established by the neocons themselves in selling the war to the
public.
Understanding why this war was launched is not primarily a matter of beliefs about unconventional weapons programs or about chimerical ties to notorious terrorist groups, although obviously
such beliefs were involved in mustering enough public and political support to take such an extraordinary step. Understanding how and why the United States got on the road to war in Iraq
instead requires an understanding of what drove the neocons and how they were able to build on
previous endeavors and the relationships among themselves to take over enough of the national
security apparatus to be able to bring their project to fruition. Such understanding is largely an
exercise in sociology. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, a sociologist, has provided a valuable aid to such
understanding. The Road to Iraq is one of the most insightful and instructive books for anyone
wanting to know why the United States launched the Iraq War, one of the biggest blunders in the
history of US foreign policy.
The book provides a history of the neoconservative movement that is concise yet thorough,
and follows the unbroken progression of neoconservatism from its emergence during the Cold
War and focus on hard-line stances toward the Soviet Union to the more concentrated militarism
and unilateralism in the Middle East that characterizes it today. The story is partly one of ideas,
and the author argues that ideological coherence is one of the advantages that the neocons have
used to stay ahead of their adversaries. But the story is also one of personal and professional
relationships, weaving a web that has extended from the classroom of Leo Strauss to corridors
in the Pentagon and the Executive Office Building in Washington. Included in that web are think
tanks, letterhead organizations, wealthy financiers, and individuals who have at different times
promoted the neocon agenda from seats either inside or outside government. The book is especially
detailed in descriptions of how the careers of those who would become prominent neoconservatives
have interwoven, often with one of these individuals being instrumental in advancing the career
of another of them. The overall result has been cohesion of personal relationships at least as much
as of ideas, again working in the neocons favor.
The network does not respect lines on any government organization chart. Inside the George
W. Bush administration during the run up to the Iraq War, the lines of communication and responsibility that mattered were not found on any chart but instead were those that the neoconservatives
created for themselves, often exploiting whatever official positions they had been able to secure.
The author borrows Janine Wedels concept of a flex net in describing the neocon approach
of having no allegiance to institutions, of valuing personal relations over bureaucratic chains of
command, and of unapologetically putting public information to private use and using private
information to influence public policy. The Road to Iraq convincingly brings the story of neoconservatism, and its successful exploitation of its assets both inside and outside government, to
the launching of the war in a way that corroborates Tom Friedmans observation that he could
name twenty-five people whose existence and presence in Washington were critical to the Iraq
War taking place.
While this well-researched book accurately explains the war as a neocon project, it does not
overstate this part of its case. It takes proper note of the other political circumstances, including
the suddenly increased militancy of the American people in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
which made the war possible. It correctly describes how some of the key figures in making the

Reviews 643
warespecially President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
were not neoconservatives themselves but had other objectives that meshed with those of the
neocons. The book does not get right some of the details of what was going on elsewhere in the
US government, but that is not the area of its main contribution.
The book explains the neoconservative objectives at work chiefly in terms of supporting the
objectives of Israel and especially of the rightists who have dominated Israeli politics in recent
times. A substantial appendix about the Israel lobby functions as a sort of update to the work on
the subject by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Unquestionably there is a huge overlap, in
terms of agendas and leading persons, between the Israel lobby and the neoconservative enterprise.
There also have been blatant neocon moves that have served Benjamin Netanyahus objectives
rather than US interests, as when some neocons who later would become leading promoters of the
Iraq war advised the Israeli prime minister on how to discard the Oslo peace process while staving
off any contrary US pressure. Idrees Ahmad is probably most correct about the Israel dimension
of the Iraq War story when he argues that neoconservatives were able to ride their extensive ties
with the Israel lobby to gain greater financial and political clout, and with it greater influence over
policy, to pursue their Iraq project.
The heavy emphasis on Israel leads the author to go a bit too far in dismissing other objectives
underlying the Iraq War. Most of his dismissals are accurate and persuasive, but he understates the
extent to which the spread of democracy and free enterprise, in a region that has been comparatively
short on both, was a genuine objective. At least this was the case for many neoconservatives, even
if less important for some others who were more interested in supporting the objectives of Likud.
It also would have been useful had the book analyzed how, if the rosy neocon scenarios for Iraq
had materialized, this would or would not have served the purposes of the Israeli right wing. It
would not have served those purposes if a peaceful and democratic Iraqthe image the neocons
were selling, and in which many of them seemed genuinely to believehad actually emerged and
become a major Middle Eastern partner of the United States, and as such a competitor in that role
to Israel. Perhaps this possibility could be explained away (although the book does not address
this) by saying that the emergence of such an Iraq would have cleared the playing field for more
focused enmity toward Iran. And it is with regard to Iran, including more recent efforts to torpedo
any agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, that neoconservatives and the Israel lobby have
been in lockstep.
The Road to Iraq is an illuminating read about one of the most disturbing episodes in recent
US history. What the neocons did in hijacking US policy was the closest thing to a coup that
the United States ever experienced, and this book does an excellent job of explaining how the
coup-plotters pulled it off.
ZAREENA GREWAL, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of
Authority, Nation of Newcomers: Immigrant History as American History (New York: New
York University Press, 2014). Pp. 409. $85.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. ISBNs: 9781479800889,
9781479800568.
REVIEWED BY EDWARD E. CURTIS IV, School of Liberal Arts, Indiana University, Indianapolis,
Ind.; e-mail: ecurtis4@iupui.edu
doi:10.1017/S0020743815000835

Islam Is a Foreign Country is a beautiful, original, and generative book. Zareena Grewals careful
use of analytical categories such as social citizenship and moral geographies offers a fresh
language for discussing Muslim American affairs. The book also expresses palpable love for
Islamic tradition. Rather than discarding the problematic notion of tradition, Grewal combines her