Neil MacFarquhar first lived in the Middle East as a young child, when his father worked in Libya as an engineer for Esso. At an early age, he experienced two of the region's historical turning points: he was airlifted out during the Six-Day War in 1967, and felt the effects of the Libyan Peoples' Revolution firsthand. MacFarquhar went on to serve as a foreign correspondent throughout the region, including assignments in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, in addition to several years as the New York Times bureau chief in Cairo, Egypt.
In Media Relations, he creates a portrait of the region like no other.
You know you're reading something special from the earliest pages, when he describes Colonel Qhadafi's Libyan government cracking down on foreigners by impounding their boats. "Our Sunfish sailboats were impounded for six months," MacFarquhar writes, "the entire seventh and eighth grades unanimously agreed that the glorious Libyan people's revolution sucked because we could no longer run the ten minutes to the beach to sail every afternoon."
The book continues that way as MacFarquhar takes the reader on a "feet on the ground" tour across the Middle East, a journey that is sometimes shocking, often funny, and always surprising. At one point, he mentions a television quiz show aired by Lebanon's Hizbollah (best known 'round these parts for its rocket attacks against Israel), on which contestants compete for a trip to Jerusalem by answering questions like "[w]hat grey sandstone structure built in 1972 became the source of all oppressive decisions the world over?" (The correct answer is apparently "The White House"). Later, he details Saudi Arabian girls struggling against fundamentalist attempts to thwart Valentine's Day.
Media Relations' greatest strength is that it allows us to relate to the Middle East on familiar terms, like sports. MacFarquhar describes two Jordanian soccer teams, al-Faisaly (with an ethnically Jordanian fan base) and al-Wihdat (with an ethnically Palestinian fan base). When Jordan's latest king took the throne with his wife Rania (whose family is Palestinean), Faisaly fans taunted Wihdat fans by encouraging King Abdullah to divorce his wife, and by "[chanting] for Israel to strengthen its army."
It's essentially a Middle Eastern version of the Pittsburgh-Cleveland rivalry.
Still, the book's not all fun and games. Many of MacFarquhar's guides through the region are reformers and political dissidents who have been imprisoned by Middle Eastern regimes, some have been tortured. Similarly, the twin specters of the Iraq war and fundamentalist terrorism are always lurking in the background. MacFarquhar reserves especially harsh criticism for Saudi Arabia as a fertile breeding ground for Islamic terrorism (most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi), and for its draconian treatment of women. And even though he begins to run out of steam toward the end the book, MacFarquhar reaches some important conclusions about American policy in his epilogue:
I think one key reason the United States has faced such a string of failures in the Middle East since the 1979 revolution in Iran is that its policies were too often based on expediency. If Arab dictators and despots did the right thing, they were our friend, no matter how long they stayed in power or how they treated their own people [...] Rather than trying to convert the Arabs to American values, to the way we do things, the stress should be put on human values.
Pages later, he quotes Robert F. Kennedy, writing
'We must [recognize the human equality of people] not because it is economically advantageous - although it is; not because the laws of God command it - although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.' If [the United States] stuck to that as its unwavering guideline, it would never have to worry about fixing an image problem.
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