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Michael B. Oren’s new book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the
Middle East: 1776 to the Present” has enough analytic power to make
anyone who thinks they understand the Middle East reconsider their
assumptions.
The book, as its title suggests, tells the history of
America’s relations with the Middle East from the nation’s birth to the
War on Terror. Oren weaves the history together with three overlapping
threads, which he argues are the factors that have most influenced
America’s relations with the tumultuous region: power, particularly
militaristic and political; faith, by which he means Christian
evangelism, especially its relationship to Zionism; and fantasy, the
depiction of the Middle East as a mystical, faraway land in popular
culture from “Lawrence of Arabia” to Disney’s “Aladdin.”
Despite its daunting scope, Oren’s book is both an easy and
an enjoyable read. He breaks his narrative down into seven distinct
parts and provides maps of the region, a clear timeline of major
events, and two sections of photographs.
The first two units of the book, “Early America Encounters the
Middle East” and “The Middle East and Antebellum America,” are possibly
the most astounding. American relations with the Middle East, we learn,
have not really changed since John Ledyard, the first American to
explore the region, traveled to Egypt in 1788.
The issue then was whether or not to fight or pay tribute to
the aggressive “Barbary pirates,” who were plundering American vessels
that could no longer rely on British naval protection. Americans of the
time debated the wisdom of aggression as a response to such
proto-terrorist tactics, an unresolved disagreement that continues to
the present day.
Oren carefully connects America’s recent history to its early
roots. President Bush’s pro-force policies can be traced back to Thomas
Jefferson, who in 1790 recommended that the United States go to war
with the Barbary pirates, and Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, who
dispatched Marines to protect Americans living in Beirut, which was
war-torn even at the turn of the 20th century. Bush’s support of
American businesses in the region even calls to mind the value Andrew
Jackson placed on Middle Eastern trade.
But though the intellectual threads have remained consistent, the policies they result in have not, Oren argues.
“The same faith that deflected [Woodrow] Wilson from entering
hostilities in the Middle East spurred Bush to decide in favor of the
war,” Oren writes. While Wilson’s deep-felt Christianity caused him to
adopt a pacifistic attitude, President Bush, partly inspired by the
attacks on the World Trade Center, has followed what Oren sees as a
“crusader” ideology.
Oren argues that America cannot find a solution to the
ongoing conflict in the Middle East because the tripartite mindset of
power, faith, and fantasy is often self-contradictory.
In the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, he
argues that Christian-American faith works to support the Israelis,
while economic concerns fall in favor of the Arabs. Rather than
informing the American people about the Middle East, popular depictions
by everyone from Mark Twain to Edith Wharton to Disney tend to
propagate a fantastic image of the region.
In Oren’s narrative, America is a country lead by the
uninformed, fighting both a secular and a non-secular war. Attempts at
peaceful negotiations or tribute have only led to aggression, and
aggression has proved futile.
Oren himself seems slightly torn as to whether or not his
glass is half full in regards to American policy. Although his book
shows that American policies and principles have been “cataclysmic,” he
concludes that by “consistently upholding its principles, the United
States might yet transform its vision of peaceful, fruitful relations
with the Middle East from fantasy into reality.” Oren, however, gives
no evidence to show that this transformation is any more realistic than
Disney’s “Aladdin.”
Although Oren’s book cannot offer any magical potions to
solve America’s conflict in the Middle East, it makes the necessary
attempt to counter the nation’s ignorance and unblinkingly inform the
American people of their long and complex history with a region whose
future is so intimately tied up with theirs. And that knowledge may be
the beginnings of a solution, in and of itself.
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