"It is also odd that the author hardly touches upon the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, or on the issue of United States financial and military aid to Israel, factors undeniably crucial to any understanding of America’s involvement with today’s Middle East. Oren mostly avoids the temptation to seek historical parallels to modern events. The occasions when he succumbs reveal the peril for historians of this habit. Toward the book’s conclusion, for instance, he avers that “by protecting themselves from Middle Eastern threats while simultaneously trying to assist native people, U.S. forces in Iraq were, in effect, revisiting the earliest American involvement in the region.” Surely, as we now know, the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was more fantastical than real, until, that is, American forces hit the ground there." Later, "And a hint of distaste sometimes infuses his language. The landmass of the Middle East curves “scimitar-like through Arabia.” Elsewhere, Oren speaks blithely of “nameless Middle Eastern thugs” and “the ubiquity of Arab terror.” Such shopworn phrases tend to compound, rather than dispel, preconceived notions of the Middle East as a kind of unfathomable Badland." And this author, Oren, is widely respected in the US although his book on '67 war is deceptively advertised as partly based on Arab sources, when it provides the official Israeli narrative.