BOOK REVIEW: POLITICS : A Dash of Grudging Admiration for America’s ‘Arabists’ : THE ARABISTS: THE ROMANCE OF AN AMERICAN ELITE; <i> by Robert D. Kaplan</i> ; Free Press; $24.95, 333 pages

Who are “the secret drivers” of American foreign policy in the Middle East?

Not the so-called Israel lobby, argues Robert D. Kaplan in “The Arabists,” but rather a shadowy network of ‘diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, (and) scholar-adventurers” who have championed the Arab cause in American diplomacy since the earliest days of the Republic.

“Few American government officials over the decades have been so vilified as a group,” writes Kaplan, “while remaining so mysterious and unknown as individuals as the Arabists.”

“The Arabists” is not a hit piece, and Kaplan displays a grudging admiration for the Americans who have dedicated themselves to winning over the Arab world through evangelism, education or diplomacy. They do not resemble the “sand-mad” Britons like Lawrence of Arabia, insists Kaplan, nor are they merely a cabal of willful bureaucrats who manipulate foreign policy from desk jobs in the State Department.

Rather, as Kaplan sees it, the Arabists include earnest, compassionate and gifted men and women whose intellectual and spiritual roots go back to the earliest days of the American democracy. Among the Arabists, he writes, are “people with a keen and self-reflective sense of American idealism.”

At the same time, Kaplan suggests that “the Arabists” are sometimes victims of their own myopia. They are “an elite within an elite, who have been more systematically wrong than any other area specialists in the diplomatic corps,” says Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department policy planner who is quoted in Kaplan’s book.

“The Arabists” harks back to the early years of the 19th Century, when various Protestant churches in the infant republic sent their advance guard to the farthest reaches of the globe to preach the gospel of Christ and the American way. “It was almost a transplanted version of New England itself,” Kaplan writes of the American missionary colony in what was then an ill-defined province of the Ottoman Empire, “a glorified tableau of Ivy League Brahmins, each with a foothold in the Lebanese mountains, a magical kingdom of Protestant families brimming with the spirit of adventure, rectitude, and religious idealism, where the twentieth century would not fully arrive until 1948.”

“And when it came,” Kaplan adds, “it came with a vengeance.”

With the creation of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland, the fault lines in American foreign policy cracked wide open.

“From the early 1950s onward, two definitions of the word Arabist would exist side by side,” writes Kaplan. “There would be the Foreign Service and Protestant missionary definition: someone who spoke Arabic well and had substantial living experience in the Arab world. And there would be the public’s--particularly the Jewish public’s--definition: someone who loved Arabs, often because he hated Jews.”

“The Arabists” is an authoritative and exacting account of the friction between these two points of view over a half-century or so of American foreign policy. But his book, although detailed, is never dry. Indeed, Kaplan is a chatty, sometimes even gossipy reporter, and he delights in allowing the foreign-service insiders to indict themselves with their own loose talk.

“Henry, of course, was just a fifth columnist, as far as I’m concerned,” snarls foreign service officer Andrew I. Killgore about his boss, Henry Kissinger. “He was working for the Israelis.”

Kaplan presents himself as an even-handed observer, but his attitude toward the Arabists comes across in the asides and anecdotes that he includes to spice up the narrative. He recounts, for example, how April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Iraq, met with President Saddam Hussein one week before the invasion of Kuwait and remarked that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

But he also pauses to give us a condescending and even vicious portrait of Glaspie as “a quirky . . . middle-aged woman who wore pigtails, and little or no make-up and had a high-pitched laugh.” He points out that she is “a single woman who traveled around the Arab world with her mother,” and concludes that she “was more than just a loyal (Foreign Service Officer), she was married to the Foreign Service as though to some religious order.”

Kaplan insists that “the case for more and better Arabists is clear,” and suggests that “U.S. embassies in the Arab world (are) being stocked with a more contemporary brand of area expert.” But his cheerful conclusion does not quite conceal his true feelings: “Arabists in Iraq not only failed, but their performance was a disgrace.”