AP

IF ONLY men could learn from history. Alas, experience is a “lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us”. It is fitting that Martin Indyk, one of America's most seasoned diplomats in the Middle East, starts his insider's account of peacemaking under Bill Clinton with this famous passage by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For if Barack Obama intends to make peace between Israel and the Arabs, his first job is to understand why Mr Clinton, the last president to make a real effort to do so, discovered that he could not.

Mr Clinton faced far riper circumstances in the 1990s than Mr Obama inherits today. He had in Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's prime minister, a visionary leader willing to return the Golan Heights to Syria and negotiate directly with Yasser Arafat, whom previous Israeli leaders considered an incorrigible terrorist. America wielded vast regional influence following its routing of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arafat himself, having alienated many Arab leaders by supporting Saddam, was short of friends, cash and alternatives; the “freedom fighter” seemed anxious to give diplomacy a chance.

Mr Indyk claims that the Clinton administration invested more time and prestige on this than on any other area of foreign policy. It is certainly the case that most of the Americans and Israelis who took part in the Camp David summit of 2000, and who have subsequently written accounts of what went wrong, blame Arafat rather than themselves for its collapse.

Since the members of Mr Clinton's peace team were Jewish (Mr Indyk says one Arab journalist called them “the five rabbis”), their neutrality is sometimes questioned. Mr Indyk himself, originally an Australian, once worked for the chief Israeli lobby in America, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, before becoming a diplomat and serving twice as America's ambassador to Israel. Yet he admits mistakes and avoids blaming Arafat alone, confessing that the “dark side” of the “innocent optimism” with which America tackled diplomacy in the Middle East was a naivety bred of arrogance. The main impression his book leaves is of the unforgiving complexity of this conflict, in a region where many conflicts connect together, and where the interplay of personality and politics can so often trip up history.

One problem, for example, was that Rabin was in a hurry. Mr Clinton was thrilled to hear in 1993 that the former general was willing to cede the Golan Heights for peace with Syria. But Rabin did not reveal that he was also negotiating secretly in Oslo with Arafat. So while Mr Clinton focused merrily on squeezing a Syrian deal out of the late Hafez al-Assad, Rabin was in the end more enticed by the cheaper (since it pushed Palestinian statehood into the future) and quicker bargain he thought he could strike with Arafat. In the event, the Syrian track failed. The deal with Arafat, which was consummated with pomp and sentiment in the Rose Garden handshake of September 1993, was deeply flawed.

Mr Indyk believes the failure of a second stab at a Syrian deal by Ehud Barak, another Israeli prime minister in a hurry, severely weakened Mr Clinton's hand. With the Syrian track dead, Arafat knew as he set off reluctantly for the Camp David summit in 2000 that the hopes of Mr Clinton and Mr Barak now depended on him. Arafat feared being caught in a pincer and dared not make too big a compromise just as Palestinians were starting to admire Hizbullah's success in ousting Israel from Lebanon by force and not diplomacy.

So Mr Indyk thinks that Arafat arrived at Camp David determined to avoid being cornered. And when Mr Barak's otherwise big concessions stopped short of yielding Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif, where the great mosques stand, Arafat got the pretext he needed. He could walk away as an Arab hero and await a better offer. A better offer, including sovereignty over the Haram, duly came in “the Clinton parameters”. But by then a new intifada had caught fire, Arafat could not bring himself to answer with a clear yes and the moment passed. The Palestinian leaders, says Mr Indyk, later misled their people into believing that Mr Clinton had offered only three disconnected cantons on the West Bank. In fact he had offered the whole of Gaza, 94-96% of the West Bank, 1-3% compensation for the rest, the Arab parts of Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Haram.

By pushing Oslo even though America had wanted Syria first, says Mr Indyk, Israel showed that the Israeli tail could wag the American dog. But he does not say as much as he is supremely qualified to about the Israel lobby's influence on diplomacy, beyond debunking the idea that this is the main thing that makes presidents go easy on Israel. He says shared values and interests, and long experience of co-operation, not least in intelligence, matter more. Allied to this is a tendency in peacemaking for America to defer to Israel's ideas “because its ally is the one that has to make the tangible concessions of territory”.

Should the next president pile greater pressure on Israel? For all Rabin's courage, notes Mr Indyk, he was “deeply cautious” towards the Jewish settlers in the occupied territories because he wanted to preserve his domestic political capital. Mr Indyk now thinks America should stand up to Israeli leaders when they plead political trouble at home to fend off pressure to curb settlements. He admits that Mr Clinton went easy not only because he sympathised with the predicament of his Israeli friends but also because George Bush senior's harsh confrontation with Israel over settlements in the 1990s was considered later to have taken a serious toll of the president's domestic support.

If Mr Indyk is a consummate insider, Patrick Tyler is a professional outsider: a reporter who has worked for the New York Times and Washington Post and who is best known for his 1999 book, “A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China”. His new work, “A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East” uses the same format to tell America's Middle Eastern story from General Eisenhower to George Bush.

The book has the merits and defects you might expect. It is fast-paced and well-sourced but runs right from before the six-day war of 1967 to the present, and so has often to oversimplify. Mr Tyler may also be a little too fond of glib judgments: Mr Clinton's peacemaking failed because he lacked the necessary “unwavering principle, and political discipline”; the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was “a fraudulent act of militarism”; and so forth. Still, for anyone needing a reminder of how America got into its present pickle in the region, this is a brisk, enjoyable way to get it. At times, as befits the Middle East, it reads almost like a thriller. Mr Obama had better take a deep breath before diving in.