The Apocalyptic Eschatologist

Gwynne Dyer, the well-known Canadian journalist, broadcaster and military historian, has produced yet another polemical and damning analysis of our contemporary world with The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq. This indictment of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy is not only a venomous attack on Washington’s venture into regime change but an examination of American policy in the Middle East as a whole, as indeed the title suggests. The tale is told in broad strokes, replete with a plethora of hypotheticals and prognostications. It has, like Dyer’s television presentations and interviews, an easy conversational style, compelling in its simplicity, sweeping in its forecasts.

Dyer seems everyman’s apocalyptic eschatologist. Critics of George W. Bush will applaud the author’s enthusiasm for his subject: a pathetic American president, simple in his mindset, determined to realize a domino theory that would transform the countries of the Middle...