Rashid Khalidi wrote, in March 2003, an oped denouncing the neocons and Iraqi “exiles in expensive suits” who were advising Washington. Khalidi warned that America’s welcome in Baghdad would be brief. Learn the lessons of history, he urged: the British were welcomed to Iraq in 1917, the Israelis to South Lebanon, and the Americans to Beirut in 1987. But on the back of broken promises, these welcomes quickly turned to rage against each foreign occupation.

This book is a history lesson, something of a potted history, with Khalidi – an eminent historian – quoting the best in the field. It is also an angry, anti-war polemic. Its central argument is that the current uprising against US forces in Iraq isn’t the result of policy blunders – too few troops, heavy-handed tactics – but was in fact inevitable given the ugly history of outside intervention in the Middle East. Khalidi recounts that history in an engaging, though sometimes repetitive, way. Unfortunately, his moral condemnation of this history often overshadows his argument, which is that whether past interventions were moral or not, the distrust they created among Middle Easterners makes successful foreign intervention in the region simply impossible.