TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI
By Judith Miller
BOOKS
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February 14, 2007
It seems prophetic that America’s first foray into the Middle East
involved a bribe, and ended, ignominiously, in failure.
Seeking to rescue Americans taken hostage by Barbary pirates, John
Lamb, a Connecticut businessman who had once traded mules in the
Mediterranean but had no diplomatic experience, arrived in Algiers in
1785 with authorization from Congress to bribe the reigning potentate,
Hassan Dey. But instead of releasing the hostages, the dey demanded
additional ransom that included a portrait of George Washington,
whom he professed to admire.
The fiasco did not stop the United States from paying bribes to
secure treaties with other Barbary states, writes Michael Oren, in
his compelling new book on America’s involvement in the Middle East,
"Power, Faith, and Fantasy" (Norton, 604 pages, $35).
But such ignominious episodes prompted Thomas Jefferson, who had
helped negotiate a $20,000 "gift" to the king of Morocco, to argue
that his fellow Americans preferred "confrontation with Barbary
to blackmail." Ultimately, Mr. Oren observes, Jefferson used the
humiliation of continuing Barbary seizures of American cargo and
citizens to persuade a reluctant Congress to finance the nation’s
first Navy.
America’s pragmatic use of diplomacy and force to achieve its
objectives in the Middle East would become a hallmark of its approach
to the region. The Middle East, Mr. Oren argues persuasively,
was seminal in shaping American identity — from the drafting of a
constitution that, unlike the ineffectual Articles of Confederation,
enabled the fledging state to defend its own borders and economic
interests overseas, to the lyrics of "The Star Spangled Banner."
America, in turn, also helped shape Middle Eastern identity and
aspirations. The now common term for the region once known as the
Orient, or the Near East, Mr. Oren notes in one of his many asides,
was coined by an American admiral in 1902.
The Middle East was a series of "firsts" for America: the authorization
of its first police action Jefferson’s order to his new Navy in 1801
to sink, burn, and destroy any pirate ship that threatened American
vessels — and that same year, the first time America found itself
the target of a formally declared war — by the pasha in Tripoli.
>From the outset, Mr. Oren writes, the relationship was fraught with
tension leavened by cultural curiosity and fantasies about the exotic
Orient and more critically, by economic and religious opportunity.
Americans always considered themselves morally superior to the Arabs,
a conception that "landed with the Pilgrims at Plymouth," he asserts.
American myths about Islam and the Muslims who practiced it, the
"ultimate other," he calls them, were as deep-seated as they were
occasionally inconsistent. The image of the "liberty-loving nomad,"
riding alone in the desert, "unencumbered by governments or borders"–
a Middle Eastern version of the colonial pioneers, and later the
cowboy — clashed with Americans’ perception of the region as backward,
brutal, corrupt, obsessed with hierarchy, and often savage enforcement
of tribal customs. While Americans fantasized about twisting alleys,
exotic bazaars, erotic belly dancers, and lustful Bedouin sheiks
at world fairs, in books and newspapers, and later in film, many
early American visitors to the region — even Southern slaveowners–
could not help but deplore the treatment of Muslim women, an enduring
challenge for the region. Before the Civil War, American missionaries
and other abolitionists — Horace Mann, Charles Wells Brown, and
Theodore Parker, among them — cited the barbarity of Middle Eastern
slavery in demanding that American blacks be freed.
Mr. Oren’s sweeping, highly textured history of the 230-year
interaction between America and the Middle East told me much I did
not know. I was unaware of the fact, for instance, that George Bush,
a biblical scholar and professor of Hebrew at New York University
— and a forebear of the two presidents — wrote an influential
treatise in 1844 on the need for Jews to recreate their ancient
state in Palestine. Nor did I know that one of President Lincoln’s
assassins was caught after escaping to Egypt, or that the Statue
of Liberty’s creator initially conceived of his work as an Egyptian
peasant woman who would hold the torch of liberty at the entrance of
the Suez Canal. How many Americans know that veterans of both sides
of the American Civil War wound up advising military campaigns for
the Egyptian khedive in Sudan and what was then Abyssinia? Or that
early diplomatic envoys to the region, unlike those sent after the
1920s when the State Department developed its professional corps of
Arabists, tended to be Jews?
Mr. Oren’s work is prodigious, drawing upon hundreds of original
and archival sources — letters, memoirs, books and government
documents, which he skillfully weaves into a finely drawn narrative
that alternates among cultural, political, and economic interactions.
One of the book’s major contributions is Mr. Oren’s meticulous
scholarship on the influence of American missionaries in the Middle
East and the extraordinary impact they had not only on the region,
but in Washington.
Missionaries — exemplars of "the American spirit at its best,"
as Henry Morgenthau, an adviser to President Wilson and ambassador
to Turkey, praised them — printed Bibles in Arabic, opened hundreds
of medical clinics, schools, and what ultimately became three of the
region’s most prestigious universities. Preaching not only Christian
precepts but what Morgenthau called the "gospel of Americanism,"
missionaries founded many of the institutions that helped give birth
to Arab nationalism.
The impact that other powers had achieved through war and plunder,
Mr. Oren argues, Americans secured largely through philanthropy and
religiously inspired educational missions. Such work had at least
one crucial economic payoff for America: Mr. Oren notes that Saudi
Arabia’s King ibn Saud offered oil exploration rights to American,
rather than British prospectors partly because he was impressed by
the missionary doctors’ reputation for honesty and good works.
But the missionaries failed in their main objective: spiritual
salvation. Henry Jessup, the "doyen of American evangelists," lamented
that despite the creation of more than 100 churches and the presence
of over 200 missionaries throughout the Ottoman Empire, the number
of converts from Islam remained "negligible."
As later generations of Americans would eventually discover, Islam’s
hold over the Arabs, Turks, and Persians repeatedly frustrated
the missionaries, partly because of their intense disdain for the
religion. Mr. Oren convincingly shows that antipathy toward Islam
was both profound and widespread in early America — echoes of which
are apparent today. Sarah Haight, a Long Island woman who toured the
Middle East in the 1830s, was typical in deploring the "Mohammedanism"
that "pulls down … every country in which it predominates." Walter
Colton, a liberal editor and naval chaplain, concluded in 1836 that
"Islamism" was "the grave of inspired truth and liberty."
The flip side of the early missionaries’ hostility toward Islam was
their enthusiastic embrace of the restoration of the Jews in the
Holy Land. Far more than early American Jews, who were fearful of
being labeled un-American, Christian missionaries embraced the goal
of returning Jews to Zion.
But Mr. Oren, an American-born Israeli scholar, is honest about what
motivated some of them. Like their modern evangelical counterparts
whose reverberations are heard in the words of the memorable figures
he describes in this often riveting book, "love for the Jewish people"
was often not an end in itself, but rather, a "means for hastening
Christ’s return."
Perhaps because Mr. Oren is an Israeli, and therefore keenly aware
that his every line is likely to be scrutinized by Muslims and Jews
alike for pro-Israeli sympathies or anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias,
he strives to be detached from the historic hatreds and resentments
that have long roiled the region, not to mention American departments
of Middle Eastern studies.
Only occasionally do strong feelings arise. For example, in his
description of the Armenian "holocaust" at the hands of the Turks.
His recounting of the slaughter is harrowing, but he barely mentions
the larger historical context — such as Russia’s repeated invasions
of Turkey in the name of liberating Armenian and other Ottoman
Christians. While such factors can never justify massacres, they help
explain why they occurred.
For the most part, Mr. Oren remains neutral in his discussion of the
Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine and other bitter disputes. At
times, the reader yearns for slightly more passion and/or outrage —
and a tad more skepticism — from this careful scholar.
While America, unlike its European counterparts, never sought to
colonize the region, Mr. Oren seems to accept naïvely the alleged
purity of American motives and actions in the region.
Nor is it always clear what Mr. Oren means in his references to the
importance of "faith" in shaping political views about the region.
Yes, President Eisenhower used the word 14 times in his first inaugural
address, but as even Mr. Oren acknowledges, in the most secular
way. "For the new president," he writes, faith meant "confidence in
America’s ability to protect freedom worldwide" while "respecting the
‘special heritage of each nation.’"
Only in his discussion of the rise of Islamism in the last 50 pages
of the book and in his epilogue does Mr. Oren openly disclose his
personal conclusions about America’s protracted engagement in the
Middle East. Yes, he writes, successive administrations have backed
oppressive regimes that advanced American interests and conspired to
overthrow popular leaders. And American oil companies have pumped
billions of barrels of Arabian oil "not for the betterment of the
indigenous population but for their own enrichment."
Yet for all of its shortcomings, he concludes, America has been
"unrivaled in introducing modern education and health care to the
region, in extending emergency relief and building infrastructure,
in obtaining the freedom of colonized nations, and in attempting to
achieve security and peace."
On balance, he asserts, America has brought "more beneficence than
avarice to the Middle East and caused significantly less harm than
good." But this optimistic grace note is contradicted by much of what
he outlines in this impressive book. For as his own scholarship has
shown, the Middle East has repeatedly demonstrated an infuriating
ability to surprise, confound, and ultimately frustrate usually
self-interested and often insensitive American plans and intentions.
Ms. Miller, a journalist living in NewYork, is the author of "God
Has Ninety Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East" (Simon
& Schuster).
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