New York Times, NY
Jan 27 2007
Midnight at the Oasis
By MAX RODENBECK
Published: January 28, 2007
POWER, FAITH, AND FANTASY
America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.
By Michael B. Oren.
Illustrated. 778 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Around the time of the War of Independence, America’s main contact
with the Middle East consisted in trading Caribbean rum for Turkish
opium. It’s hard not to wish, reading the epic story of this 230-year
relationship, now usefully condensed into a single well-researched
volume, that things could have remained as simple as the swapping of
your recreational poison for mine.
But things never were quite so simple. Even then the potential for
friction loomed as large as the possibility of mutual gain. Before
the end of the Napoleonic wars, Christian sailors risked capture and
enslavement by Muslim pirates from the Barbary ports of Algiers,
Tunis and Tripoli. Governments could either front protection money,
cough up ransom or threaten force.
America tried all three approaches, and its erratic policy echoes
with sad familiarity in the 21st century. We find the same wrangling
in Washington between those who counsel appeasement (the cheaper,
saner option) and those who demand armed action (the more glorious);
bickering among Western capitals over whether to act singly or in
concert (Thomas Jefferson tried to corral a coalition, but Congress
balked); and daring strikes carried out with near-fatal clumsiness
(an attempt to blockade Tripoli led to the capture, in 1803, of the
U.S.S. Philadelphia and its 308-man crew, and a subsequent,
heroically farcical attempt to free them by effecting regime change).
Michael B. Oren, an American-born Israeli scholar and the author of a
well-received study of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, recounts such
exploits with admirable detachment. `Power, Faith, and Fantasy’ is
hugely ambitious, drawing on hundreds of original sources to create a
finely balanced overview of this enormously complex subject. Out of
understandable necessity, the later chapters, dealing with more
recent times and America’s role as a superpower, preoccupied with a
multilayered and often contradictory agenda in the Middle East, grow
sketchier and less conclusive.
Yet it is a diverting tale over all, full of forgotten twists and
memorable characters. Who remembers now, for instance, that the
Statue of Liberty was initially conceived by her French sculptor as
an Egyptian peasant girl, intended to adorn the entrance to the Suez
Canal? Or that the first Zionists to settle in Palestine were in fact
American Protestants, who planted successive, ill-fated colonies
aimed at `restoring’ the Holy Land to Jews, so that their subsequent
conversion to Christianity would speed the Second Coming? Or that
Civil War veterans officered Egyptian campaigns in Sudan and
Abyssinia? Or that before landing in North Africa during World War
II, the United States Army dropped leaflets advertising the arrival
of `Holy Warriors … to fight the great jihad of freedom’?
Some of these episodes may sound trivial or obscure, but Oren
cleverly weaves them into the overarching themes of his title.
Consider America’s missionary effort. The printing of native-language
Bibles, and the founding of schools, clinics and three universities,
in Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul, that remain among the best in the
region, failed to win more than a trickle of converts. Yet a hundred
years of American mission work produced some unexpected change.
It was, in part, the missionary doctors’ reputation for altruism that
persuaded the Saudi king to offer his oil patch not to British, but
to American prospectors. And while the proto-Zionist restorationist
movement faded to the fringes of Protestant preaching – at least,
until its revival by some modern evangelicals – a sentimental
attachment to the ancient Hebrews infused the religious upbringing of
Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, the two presidents who did most to
cement American ties with Israel.
Such underlying trends have seldom been so well explored, but Oren
occasionally overstates their importance. Truman’s own words reveal
that `faith’ was perhaps a secondary motive behind his crucial
decision to back the creation of Israel. `I have to answer to
hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism,’
Oren quotes Truman as explaining. `I do not have hundreds of
thousands of Arabs in my constituents.’
Important context is missing from some of the book’s pages. Oren
artfully touches on Middle Eastern influence on American popular
culture, from the hootchy-kootchy dance to Camel cigarettes, but
tends to dissociate this from the wider Western tradition of
Orientalism. There is much gory detail about the Armenian genocide,
but scant mention of the fact that Ottoman Turkey faced repeated
invasion by a Russia whose czars, disastrously for the Ottomans’
Armenian subjects, claimed leadership of all Orthodox Christians. At
several junctures, Oren paints Europe as stubbornly resistant to
American policy, without adequately substantiating the charge or
explaining European motives. We hear nothing of how America’s
fateful, post-World War I decision to restrict immigration helped
push desperate Jewish refugees toward Palestine.
While correctly noting the peculiar mix of cultural disdain and
romantic fascination that has marked American attitudes to Muslim
Middle Easterners, Oren curiously declines to distance himself from
some unflattering views. We hear, for instance, of an 18th-century
diplomat whose `experience had taught him that in the Middle East
power alone was respected,’ as if this were a quality unique to the
region. 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.
Commendably, in a work of such scope, there are very few errors of
fact or omission. Yet, as a reserve major in the Israeli Army, Oren
ought to know that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was not provoked
by the P.L.O. `regularly striking’ at Galilee. Yasir Arafat’s group
was certainly an elemental threat to the Jewish state, but had
actually been observing a long, American-brokered cease-fire before
Ariel Sharon’s drive to Beirut. 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.
Such subtle reinforcement of America’s self-image as an innocent
among Middle Eastern sharks mars an otherwise exemplary work. This is
a pity, since, as Oren amply illustrates, it is America’s failure to
be clear and honest about its own motives, as much as its serial
failure to interpret the Middle East, that has so often befuddled
relations with the region.
Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.