WHEN the Americans displaced the British in the Middle East after the British Suez debacle a half-century ago, they seemed to promise a new era. The United States would sort out the conflict between the Arab states and Israel, and help bring prosperity and peace to all in the region.

President after president, from Eisenhower on, applied himself to these tasks, certainly difficult, but surely not beyond the reach of a resolute superpower. All failed, some miserably. It is the most dismal chronicle of incompetence, ignorance, ineffectiveness, indecision and inefficiency imaginable, and one that, in the light of recent events, must be very vivid in the mind of the new leader of the US.

In the rush to get books on to the president`s bedside table, Patrick Tyler`s account — A World of Trouble — of how Obama`s predecessors and their advisers not only missed their chances but made things worse by an increasing partiality for Israel, a vendetta with Iran and a bungled invasion of Iraq deserves to be on the top of the pile. It is an anthology of cautionary tales for a new president — a compendium of how not to do it, and, if only obliquely, a guide to how to do better in the future.

If Obama ends his first term without registering some considerable success in the Middle East, the last chance for a moderate order in that region may pass. It falls to him, in other words, to turn round the long record of American failure.

Success may in many areas come from doing less, from more modest aims, and from retreating from the attempt to control the affairs of others. But if more modesty is the general prescription, the exception is the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, where both sides need American mediation, and where one side, Israel, needs to face the reality that it cannot indefinitely dominate its neighbours by drawing on American weaponry and resources.

Tyler is interested in moments — moments when confused and angry leaders and their counsellors swear at one another, weep, get drunk, or tell outrageous lies.

Moments such as the one where Bill Clinton, still just president, rang Colin Powell, the incoming secretary of state in George W Bush`s new administration, to tell him that Yasser Arafat was “a goddamned liar” who had destroyed the chances of peace.

The blame for the failure at Camp David, as Tyler writes, belonged to Ehud Barak and Clinton rather than to Arafat but, cheated of the achievement that might have balanced the Lewinsky scandal, a self-righteous and self-deceiving Clinton was intent on “poisoning the well”.

Or moments such as the one where Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it.

Nixon`s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”.

The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”.

So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position.

— The Guardian, London