Although the title suggests a cohesive volume, Syria: Civil War to Holy War? contains a collection of the author’s articles—chronologically arranged—about his reporting trips to Syria over the course of the country’s civil war, plus his pre–civil war experiences in Syria and views on the country’s modern history.

We now know the result of the Syrian civil war, but Glass did not when he wrote the articles. For this reason, some of the views expressed therein are already anachronistic and, by the time of the book’s publication, of dubious value. Thus, we read that “Assad had won, but the war did not end” at the conclusion of chapter 11.

Glass appears to adhere to a self-flagellating view of Syria in which external—and particularly Western—dynamics and machinations are largely responsible for the country’s ongoing tragedy. He twice references Hosni al-Zaim’s CIA-supported coup of 1949 as the foundational moment for authoritarianism in Syria but does not mention the homegrown authoritarian trends, nationalist and Islamist alike, that dominated Syria over the subsequent seventy-six years. Unsurprisingly, he refers to the 1990s abortive diplomacy with Israel as the period when the Palestinian national movement “sold out” the Palestinian people.

This unfortunate orientation, quite typical of Middle East journalists of Glass’s generation (he was born in 1951), distracts attention from the author’s occasionally valuable on-the-ground reporting; the chapter on the Armenian communities of Syria holds particular interest. In all, Syria: Civil War to Holy War? showcases a particular mentality about the Middle East that has disserved Western understanding of the region.

Jonathan Spyer