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January 18, 2007
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| Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present |
IntroductionJOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I’m Joanne
Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie
Council I’d like to welcome you all here today.
This morning it is a
great pleasure to welcome the widely acclaimed and remarkably gifted historian
Michael Oren to our breakfast program. He will be discussing his most recent
book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the
Present.
This is a work that not only fills a void that has long
existed in the literature on the Middle East, but is chock-full of unusual
information and surprising discoveries. Although publishers have issued a great
number of books about this region, before the release of this particular one
there had never been such a comprehensive history, nor understanding, of
America’s longtime involvement there.
Now, if I were to ask anyone
sitting in this room today when did America’s interest in the Middle East begin,
some of you might respond by citing our preoccupation with the Saudi oilfields;
others may recount the CIA’s involvement in bringing Nasser
to power in Egypt; or the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran; still others may refer to the intractable
Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet, any one of these replies would be incomplete, simply
because America’s interest in the Middle East is far older and more complex than
most of us ever imagined it to be. In fact, you may be surprised to know that
our connection to this region can be traced back to Colonial times, even before
the founding of this country.
In Power, Faith, and Fantasy our
speaker gives an extraordinary look at history as he confronts America’s
preoccupation with this region and makes clear just how involved we have been
for the past 230 years.
Although the study of history can be approached
in different ways, Professor Oren has chosen to draw parallels between our past
actions and our present behavior. As a historian, he firmly believes that if we
are to make an informed judgment about the future it is vital that we understand
the "here and now," which he illuminates so poignantly by exploring the profound
historical relevance of the "there and then."
As the title indicates, our
guest has used the themes of power, faith, and fantasy to establish a framework
that shows how America’s involvement in the Middle East tended to follow
distinct patterns. These themes provide the context through which it is hoped
that Americans can gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our current
relationship in this part of the world.
Accordingly, power is seen
as the pursuit of America’s interests, not only militarily but diplomatically
and economically.
The second major theme, faith, refers to the
irrepressible impact of religion in the shaping of American attitudes and
policies towards the Middle East, as missionaries of all denominations helped to
fuel America’s involvement and introduce new ideas about health care, human
rights, education, and social equality.
The third critical idea is the
transcendent effect of fantasy and how our imagination, based on the exploits of
real live heroes and fictional characters, came to influence not only our
perception of the area but impacted on government policy as well.
Given
our present involvement in this part of the world, Power, Faith and
Fantasy will not only enrich your understanding of the Middle East but also
substantiate just how dangerous it has been to shoot first and ask questions
later.
Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our very special
guest, Michael Oren, and we are delighted to have you join us.
RemarksMICHAEL OREN: Good morning, everyone. Thank
you, Joanne. It’s such a great pleasure to be here with an urbane and august
audience at the Carnegie, having narrowly escaped a fatal ribbing on "The Daily Show" the other night with Jon Stewart.
I
made the mistake of mentioning to him that in 1776 one-fifth of America’s trade
ran through the Middle East and that the trade involved, in essence, large
barrels of rum, Boston in particular, which were sent out of New England to the
Ottoman
Empire. There it was dumped and the barrels were filled up with opium. From
there, the ships went to China and they dumped the opium in China and filled it
up with tea and came back to New England.
Whereupon Jon Stewart said:
"Let me get this straight. The Americans were giving them booze and drugs and
we’re getting tea?"
I said, "It’s even worse. We dumped the stuff in Boston
Harbor."
How’d you like to be on that show? I had to work very
quickly.
We are going to start with an imaginary situation this morning.
Imagine that you are a high-ranking American diplomat in the Middle East and you
are about to meet with an emissary of a prominent Middle Eastern leader to
discuss the possibility of establishing peace between this Middle Eastern
kingdom and the United States.
You open your discussion by telling this
Middle Eastern leader that the people of the United States desire nothing more
than peace between your nation and his; have no animosity whatsoever toward the
Middle East, to anybody in the Middle East; all Americans desire to do is to
conduct their trade freely and bother no one.
And suppose, rather than
responding and embracing these enlightening offers, the Arab representative says
no, his country wants to go to war. Suppose he tells you that God has empowered
his people to rule over all infidel states, including yours, and that if one of
the believers should fall in this battle against infidels, then he shall alight
immediately to paradise.
How, then, would you as an American diplomat
respond? Well, probably you would respond by saying, "America will have no
choice but to fight this threat. America has no option but to go to war." This
was precisely the conclusion reached by the American ambassador, in this case
the American ambassador to France, who first heard this emissary’s response.
His name was Thomas Jefferson. His interlocutor was one Abdul Rahman Adja, who was the envoy of the pasha of Tripoli,
which is today in Libya. The date was March 1785. Pirates from Tripoli, from
Algiers (what is today Algeria), Tunis, (which is today Tunisia), and
Morocco—the so-called Barbary States—had seized dozens of American ships in the
Mediterranean and kidnapped more than 100 American sailors.
America was
facing its first hostage crisis in the Middle East. And, since so much of
America’s trade went through this area, it actually posed a mortal threat, an
existential threat, to the fledgling and fragile economy of the newly
independent United States. Now, Jefferson wanted to fight the pirates. He first
turned to the Europeans and asked them to form a coalition against the pirates.
They turned him down. Jefferson had no option but to turn to his own United
States.
But America had a problem. America did not have a navy in 1785.
America had managed to survive its war of independence without one warship
intact. They had all been captured, sunk, or sold off. Nor did the United States
in 1785 have the means for creating a navy. The states were still loosely
federated under the Articles of Confederation. There was no federal government.
There was no government that was capable of raising taxes to make a navy.
Moreover, many Americans were afraid of having a navy. They had recently had a
bad experience with a navy, the British navy, and were afraid that if America
created a navy, it could turn its guns on America’s inchoate democratic
institutions; it was liable to get America embroiled in all sorts of nasty
European entanglements.
And, while Jefferson wanted to fight, a great
many Americans said: No. It is better to negotiate with the pirates, better
perhaps to pay them off, which was the age-old European practice. We should
really do everything we can, they said, to avoid getting bogged down in an
open-ended war in the distant Middle East.
Now, more than 220 years
later, Americans are still confronting similar threats from the Middle East, and
grappling with similar choices: whether to fight or to negotiate; whether to
palliate their enemies in the region or to destroy them. Today, Americans are
being asked to make fateful decisions in the Middle East, decisions that will
not only impact their future but the future of people throughout the
world.
And yet, few Americans are aware of the situation I just described
to you this morning, aware that their own Founding Fathers faced
these similar situations, situations not at all unlike their own today. Few
Americans know of their very rich, centuries-long legacy in the Middle East.
It’s a multifaceted heritage of war and statecraft, altruism and beneficence,
wild artistic imaginings, and swashbuckling adventure—especially swashbuckling
adventure.
Rather, a great many Americans seem to believe, as Joanne
alluded to earlier, that America’s involvement in the Middle East began sometime
in the aftermath of World War II, with the rise of Arab oil, the advent of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, and the outbreak of the Cold War.
Many Americans
would be shocked to hear that not only Jefferson, but also Andrew
Jackson and Abraham Lincoln had Middle East policies; that Egyptian
soldiers fought on the North American continent during the Civil War; that one of
Lincoln’s assassins managed to escape to Egypt; that the original Statue of
Liberty showed a veiled Arab woman holding a torch, and that the original
"Star Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States, spoke of
turbaned Middle Easterners bowing in humility to the star-spangled flag of the
United States. How would you like to sing that before a ball game?
I,
too, would have been surprised. As a graduate student twenty years ago, I was
shocked when my professor of modern Arab history mentioned an episode that
occurred in the late 1860s in Egypt. A group of Civil War veterans, Confederate
and Union officers, were sent by General Sherman, the Chief of the U.S. Army, to Egypt to
help modernize the Egyptian army. While there, these officers proceeded to build
a school system to teach democracy and literacy to Egyptian kids. Now, I found
this just fascinating.
I ran off to the library. I wanted to find out
more about it. Almost nothing had been written about this episode. But, more
glaring was the absence of any single text that would take this experience of
Civil War officers in Egypt and place it in some type of meaningful historical
context of American involvement in the Middle East. The fact is there were many
books about Britain’s involvement in the Middle East, there were a couple of
books about France’s involvement in the Middle East. There was no one
comprehensive history of America’s engagement in this very crucial
area.
Flash forward twenty years to the aftermath of 9/11, and suddenly American's need for a historic point of
reference for plotting their course in the Middle East had become acute, so much
so that when my editor, the editor of this book and a good friend of mine, Bob
Weil, and I were having dinner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2002, and
he asked me, "Okay, what is the one book about the Middle East that has yet to
be written but which must be written?" I didn’t hesitate a nanosecond: America
in the Middle East.
The great challenge was: how can you begin to
approach this very long, very complex history and present it to readers in a
meaningful and accessible way? The only way was to identify the themes which
somehow bound this narrative. I identified three of these themes.
The
first, the most obvious, is power. Power is the pursuit of America’s interest in
the Middle East through the use of military, economic, and diplomatic means.
Power described that first dilemma, faced by Jefferson and other early
Americans, over whether to bribe the Barbary pirates or to somehow fight them
back. That dilemma loomed particularly large in May of 1787, as the delegates
from the states convened in Philadelphia to discuss whether to transform these
Articles of Confederation into a more binding constitution. They met under the
shadow of this hostage crisis. By May 1787, there were 127 American captives in
Algeria alone.
Indeed, the debates over the ratification of the Constitution are rife with references to the existential
dangers posed by these Middle Eastern kingdoms, and statements to the effect
that "if we do not create a federal government, create a navy, we will be
destroyed as a nation" come not just from the delegates from maritime New
England; they come from Georgia, they come from South Carolina. According to one
delegate from Kentucky, "If we do not fight back against Barbary, we will have
Algerines"—as they were called back then—"landing on our shores in North America
and imprisoning our sons and daughters."
America did unite under a
constitution, and six years later Congress voted to build six warships.
According to the bill of Congress, these warships were being created
specifically to fight in the Middle East.
A long and often painful war
followed. The first American servicemen killed overseas after American
independence were killed in the Middle East. But it was not before the Marines
marched on Tripoli in 1805—hence, the lyrics in "The Marines' Hymn"—and not before Commodore
Stephen Decatur, for whom twenty-seven cities are named in this country,
bombed the shores of North Africa in 1850—only then were the pirates finally
subdued.
Americans had learned their first lessons of power in the Middle
East. A mortal threat from this area had compelled the United States to become
truly a united states, to become a singular rather than a plural noun. It had
forced Americans to create power and for the first time to project that power
thousands of miles from America’s shores. And by creating a navy not to rule the
waves but to free them, America opened the seaways to the Middle East to the
agents of American faith.
Faith, the second of these themes. By faith, I
mean the impact of Christianity, largely Protestant Christianity, on America’s
Middle Eastern involvement. We’re talking about an almost irrepressible
missionary urge, not only to evangelize the Middle East, but also to imbue it
with America’s civic faith of democracy and basic human freedoms.
I say
that basically the faith in America has two sides of the same coin: there is the
religious missionary urge to impart Christianity; but on the other side of the
coin is the civic version of the idea, of bringing democracy and republican
government to the world. They exist side by side.
Now, this is the faith
of the Colonial Americans, who viewed themselves as the settlers of a new
Promised Land. They proceeded to give no less than 1,000 Biblical place names to
their towns and cities, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard—those of you
know who live in New Canaan, Connecticut, or in Bethlehem, or in Jericho. They
considered themselves to be the "new Jews," who were divinely enjoined to help
restore the "old Jews" to the Promised Land, which was then part of the Ottoman
Empire and known as Palestine.
Tellingly, the United States had a great
contest to determine what would be its great seal. This was after 1783, after
the peace with Britain. There was one candidate for the great
seal that showed an American bald eagle clutching thirteen arrows in its
talons. But a close runner-up was the seal that showed Moses leading the
children of Israel out of bondage across the desert and into the Promised Land.
That almost became the great seal of the United States. You almost had Moses on
your lecterns at the White House. That seal was designed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin.
Three years after the end of the Barbary Wars, in 1818, the
first American missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, left Boston for the
Middle East. Their stated goal was to help restore the Jews to the Holy Land, to
help recreate a Jewish state there. But they also wanted to convert the Jews in
the process, and they wanted to convert the rest of the peoples of the Middle
East. To their chagrin, however, Fisk and Parsons discovered that the Jews in
the Middle East did not want to become Congregationalist Protestants. They also learned that if they
tried to convert Arabs, particularly Muslim Arabs, they risked losing their
heads.
So a frustrated Fisk and Parsons gave up on proselytizing and they
turned to institution building. They built the Middle East’s first modern
elementary schools, later the first modern secondary schools, and ultimately
their descendants built the Middle East’s first modern universities, what later
became the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, and Roberts
College in Turkey [now known as Bogazici University].
Through these
institutions, the missionaries no longer preached Christianity, but rather they
imparted American ideals of tolerance, of republican government, and especially
of patriotism. American educators became the primary catalysts for the emergence
of an entirely new identity in the Middle East, the identity of Arab
nationalism, an identity that embraced Muslims and Christians and Jews and Druze
under this common rubric, which did not exist before.
Many of those
descendants of the missionaries went on, because they spoke Arabic and they grew
up in the Middle East, to serve in the State Department. These became the
so-called Arabists. And later they served in the oil companies, which in the
1930s began to exert a substantive influence on America’s Middle East
policies.
Back home, meanwhile, the support for the recreation of Jewish
sovereignty in Palestine, the so-called Restorationist
Movement, remained prominent. John
Adams, the second president of the United States, said openly that he wished
for "someday 100,000 Jewish soldiers as well-disciplined as the French
army"—talking about the French army back then—and that the French army would
march back into Palestine and reclaim it as a Judean kingdom.
Asked what
he thought of the idea in 1863, Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that the dream of
restoring the Jews to their statehood in Palestine was one that was shared by a
great many Americans and expressed the hope that the United States could help
realize that dream once it emerged from its terrible Civil War.
Perhaps
the greatest single expression of the Restorationist idea in 19th century
America appeared in a book published in 1844, called The Valley of Vision. It specifically called on the U.S.
government to spearhead an international effort to detach Palestine from Ottoman
control and to convey it to the Jews so they could make their state.
That
book became an antebellum best-seller. It sold about a million copies, an
extraordinary number. That would be a lot by today’s standards. It was certainly
a lot by early-19th-century standards. The Valley of Vision was
authored by the head of the Scripture and Hebrew Department of New York
University. His name was Professor George Bush. Two days in the genealogy room at the
Library of Congress enabled me to determine without a doubt that Professor
George Bush is the direct forbear of two American presidents of the same
name.
For other Americans, however, merely envisioning this return of
Jews to Zion was insufficient. Starting in the 1830s, groups of American
Christians left the United States to create colonies in Palestine. A great
number of American women were involved in this, by the way—Harriet Livermore from New Hampshire, Clarinda Minor from Washington.
All of these colonies
had the same goal: it was to teach the Jews how to farm. They were good
Jeffersonians, and they believed that the basis of any viable modern state was
an agrarian economy. Jews, over the course of 2000 years of exile, had forgotten
how to farm, and so, as good Christian Americans, they felt that it was their
duty to teach the Jews how to farm.
In 1855, for example, Mr.
Dickson, his wife, and twin daughters, left Groton, Massachusetts, and set
up a farmstead outside of Jaffa, called Mount Hope. Their daughters married two
German preachers, also brothers, Johann and Friedrich Grosssteinbeck, and they
set out to try to teach the Jews how to farm. The Jews did not want to learn how
to farm, alas, and the colony barely survived. It faced starvation, disease, and
ultimately attacks.
And yet, still these colonists came. Some of you
have been to Jerusalem. You know the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem is the vestige of the last
of these efforts, from 1884.
But in 1867 a more interesting initiative
was mounted by George Adams of Indian River, Maine, who left with 156 artisans,
craftsmen, and farmers. They picked up, left Maine with seventeen clapboard
houses, prefabs—two of them you can still see standing in downtown Jaffa—and set
up another
colony. Again they suffered terribly in their effort to try to help recreate
this Jewish state in Palestine.
The Christian advocates of Jewish
statehood and their no-less-devout detractors in this country would continue to
disagree—and they are disagreeing still, as you can tell by one glance at Jimmy Carter’s recent book—and yet the fact remains they
spring from the same tradition, and that is the tradition of the impact of faith
on American attitudes toward the Middle East.
And finally, we come to the
most elusive and mystical theme. That is the theme of fantasy. This is the image
of the Middle East as the realm of unbridled romance and eroticism, or dark-clad
nomads who, spurring their steeds, sweep innocent Western damsels off into the
desert. You all laugh because you’ve seen the movies.
The roots of
America’s Middle East fantasy go very far back. Back in the 18th century, the
second-most-popular book on the Colonial American bookshelf, after the Bible,
was The Arabian Nights. Everybody read it over and over
again. It’s actually not Arabian nights. These are medieval Persian tales that
contain the stories of Sinbad and Ali Baba, these images of minaret-orbiting carpets and veiled
but available harem girls. Read it. The Arabian Nights is, even by 21st
century standards, rather pornographic.
In the 19th
century, people actually believed that this is what the Middle East looked
like. They had no other point of reference. By the 19th century, these lurid
myths had brought thousands of American tourists to the Middle East. By the
1860s, Americans accounted for the single largest group of tourists in the
Middle East. Everyone was complaining how the Americans bought up all the hotel
rooms in Damascus.
One of those who came to the Middle East was a writer
whose previous book, Moby Dick, had sold a mere 3,000 copies, and he was
depressed and desperate for some type of new inspiration for a travel novel. So
in 1855 Herman Melville
packed two shirts and a toothbrush and he left for the Middle East. He kept a
vivid diary of his travels. I strongly recommend you read it. It’s
beautiful writing.
Twelve years later, another aspiring American writer,
a humorist from Missouri, named Samuel Clemens, embarked on a steamship out of Philadelphia,
THE QUAKER CITY, that took him to the Middle East. Later he would publish his
collected dispatches from the trip as a book called Innocents Abroad, which became the largest-selling
book of the second half of the 19th century in the United States. He published
it under his new pen name, Mark Twain.
Melville and Twain and others soon
learned that the Middle East bore absolutely no resemblance to what they had
read in The Arabian Nights, and yet still the fantasies persisted. By
the early-20th century, they were embraced by the entertainment industry, by
movies such as The Sheik, which propelled Rudolf
Valentino to stardom; and by the hit song of that same year, 1921: "I Am the
Sheik of Araby, My heart belongs to thee. At night when you’re asleep, into your
tent I creep." Make no mistake about it, there’s the fantasy.
There
followed an almost unbroken series of Arabian Nights knockoffs. You
know how many "Ali Babas" and "Sinbads" Hollywood has made—Indiana Jones
fantasies, Saharas, and Hidalgos.
Mystified by these myths, many Americans
might have wondered why picturesque men on camels would leave their palmy oases
one day, come to the United States, hijack airliners, and crash them into
American skyscrapers.
Power, faith, and fantasy. Sometimes they exist in
independent themes in American history, but more often they intertwine,
threadlike, throughout this narrative.
For example, fantasy met up with
faith in 1855, when Herman Melville during his journey through the Middle East
happened to visit the Dickson colony outside of Jaffa and had lunch
with Dickson, his wife, and his two daughters, and with the Grosssteinbeck
boys, Friedrich and Johann.
One month later, in January 1856,
the Dickson colony was attacked by Arab bandits. Dickson himself was
knocked mortally on the head. His wife and two daughters were brutally and
repeatedly raped. We have a terrible deposition given to the American Consul
General that describes this rape in vivid detail. Friedrich Grosssteinbeck was
shot in the groin and died a painful, long death. The only survivor of the
Dickson colony was Johann Grosssteinbeck, who at that point left Palestine for
California, and there he Americanized his name.
Melville alluded to this
attack in his 18,000-line poem "Clarel," but so too did Johann Grosssteinbeck’s grandson, John Steinbeck,
in such tragic and biblical epics as East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath.
Faith blended with fantasy
again 1867, when The QUAKER CITY, still carrying the soon-to-be-famous Mark
Twain, evacuated the last starving survivors of the George Adams colony from
Jaffa. Power then mixed with faith in 1903, when Teddy Roosevelt sent battleships into Beirut Harbor to protect
American missionaries who he believed were threatened there by the Ottoman
authorities.
Faith then triumphed over power in World War I, when President Wilson had to determine whether the United States in
entering the war would also declare war not just against Germany, Austria, and
Hungary, but also against the Ottoman Empire, the other member of the central
powers. Both houses of Congress were demanding that he declare war against the
Ottoman Empire. Teddy Roosevelt, the ex-president, was demanding that he declare
war against the Ottoman powers. Wilson said no. He said no because he was the
son, the grandson, the nephew of Presbyterian preachers and he feared that if he
waged war in the Middle East that the Turks would do to American missionaries in
the Middle East precisely what they had done to the Armenians.
Faith finally triumphed over power again in
1948, when a unique situation occurred, when the entire foreign policy
establishment of the United States—the State Department, the Defense Department,
Secretary of State George Marshall—warned that American support for Zionism would lead to a Communist takeover of the entire
Middle East, the fall of Western Europe, and a global energy crisis.
Harry Truman, a strict Baptist who had
read the Bible repeatedly and knew it by heart by age fourteen, decided no.
He ignored this mountain of advice, and on May 14, 1948 made the United States
the first nation on earth to recognize the newly declared state of Israel.
Since 1948 and its ascendancy as the primary
power in the Middle East, with its growing dependency on Middle Eastern oil
sources, America has struggled mightily to reconcile these competing impulses of
power, faith, and fantasy. The result has been an almost dizzying zigzag in U.S. policy toward the region.
Pursuing power, America
orchestrated the overthrow of the nationalist Iranian prime minister Mohammed
Mossadeq in 1953. But, impelled by a faith-based anti-colonialism, the United
States, three years later, saved another Middle East nationalist leader, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, from almost certain defeat at the hands of
Britain, France, and Israel. American forces fought against Libya, against
Syria, and against Iran, and yet those very states largely owed their
independence to American intervention. American presidents backed the state of
Israel, but at crucial junctures they also withheld arms from Israel and
pressured Israel to relinquish territories as part of the search for
peace.
During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had beefed up Saddam
Hussein as a foil to the Iranians, and then he turned around and sold arms
to the Iranians in an attempt to induce them not to kidnap Americans in
Lebanon. Remember this? In doing so, Reagan violated Jefferson’s first law in
the Barbary Pirates wars, that the more you try to bribe hostile elements in the
Middle East, the more they are going to kidnap you.
American leaders
strove to establish a Pax Americana in the Middle East. And yet, American forces
have engaged almost uninterruptedly over the course of the last thirty years.
The last chapter of my book is called "The Thirty Years War in the Middle East."
During that period, we have seen how the uniforms that American service men and
women wear have transformed from a Vietnam green in the late-1970s to a tawny
Arabian brown today.
Then, in 2003, America invaded Iraq, and for one gleaming moment the bearers
of American power were patrolling the streets of the fabled capital of The
Arabian Nights, Baghdad, and they were bestowing democracy on a people who
appeared desperate to embrace it. But that moment, alas, has proved
fleeting.
Today, America must once again strive to balance pursuit of its
vital interests in this region with the pursuit and upholding of its ideals, all
the while distinguishing between the real and the mythical in the Middle East.
The task is gargantuan.
My book does not prescribe a path for achieving
this. As an historian, I always say I have enough problems predicting the past.
But yes, I do want to share my fascination with my readers. I want to tell them
why the original Statute of Liberty was an Arab woman holding a torch. I want to
tell them why "The Star-Spangled Banner" initially spoke of humbled Muslim
warriors bowing down to the American flag, and to hear those stories in any
detail you’re just going to have to read this book.
Far more importantly,
I would like to instill in my readers an appreciation of America’s extraordinary
legacy—a legacy of militancy at times—indeed of greed, yes—but also one of
generosity, of tolerance, and of courage. My aim here is to provide a context, a
context of the past in which Americans now profoundly, and even existentially,
engaged in the Middle East can begin to chart their future.
Thank
you.
Questions and AnswersQUESTION: Would you contrast the
American experience in the Middle East with that of the British and the French?
They've had a very different role there, and America has gone in parallel and
sometime against it.
MICHAEL OREN: It is a constant
theme in the book. America begins in the Middle East with this question: "Are we
going to be like the Europeans or are we going to be different?" The Europeans
for 300 years had been paying off the Barbary pirates. It worked very well.
Thomas Jefferson believed that bribery not only was counter-productive, but it
went against the grain of what he called "the American temper." He believed that
Americans should strive to achieve an erect and independent attitude in the
Middle East, which was very much distinguished fr om Europe. However, it was
very expensive. Building ships was expensive and maintaining a permanent naval
force was very expensive. Ultimately, that argument worked out that we were
going to be different than the Europeans.
Then there were the
missionaries. They came next. There were many European missionaries in the
Middle East. Going through the missionary correspondence—a rather arduous task,
thousands and thousands of pages of handwritten notes from the 19th century—you
see American missionaries complaining about the competition they face from the
Europeans. There’s no room to missionize everybody. There’s two Protestant
Christians in this village, and the British are here and the Dutch are
here.
What the Americans did that very much distinguished them from the
missionaries from other countries was to build the schools and to build the
hospitals. The French built some schools, but nothing of the magnitude of, say,
the American University of Beirut, and they certainly did not have the impact of
these institutions.
More fundamentally, European missionaries often acted
as surrogates, as ambassadors for European imperial ambitions. The American
missionaries never did. America did not have any imperial ambitions in the
Middle East. There is actually an interesting note from the French Consul in
Beirut from 1868, where he is reporting back to the Quai d’Orsay. He says:
"Listen. I’ve conducted a serious investigation and I’m miffed. I cannot find
any imperial impetus behind these American missionaries. Incredibly, they seem
to be operating purely on altruistic means." He couldn’t quite figure that
out.
Politically, diplomatically, the United States viewed much of the
Middle East going into the 20th century as a European bailiwick, as their
exclusive sphere. There were tremendous debates over whether the United States
should get involved in the Arabian Peninsula. It belonged to the British. There
was nothing there anyway; it was just sand. Palestine, right up until World War
II—that’s the British mess; let’s stay out of that.
Even though many
American leaders had this restorationist notion when Britain passed the White Paper in May 1939 that closed off Jewish immigration
into Palestine, Roosevelt did nothing. That actually ended the Balfour Declaration.
The great changing of the guard in
the Middle East occurred post World War II, particularly in the 1950s, when the
United States, again operating mainly on a faith-guided policy—we were the
victims of colonialism too; we know what it feels like to languish under
imperial rule—supported the liberation movements in Tunisia, in Morocco, in
Egypt, in Syria, and in Lebanon, and basically kicked their own European allies
out of the region, or were instrumental in kicking them out. And guess what?
They turn around and find out that many people in the Middle East are viewing
the Americans as the new imperialists.
Since that time, much of the
invective, much of the animosity that was once directed at Britain and France
now gets rechanneled against the United States. The United States is finds
itself confronting some of the same dilemmas.
That is really the origin
of the zigzag I talk about. I was fascinated by that switch between Mossadeq and
Nasser, because here the United States is operating with Britain in 1953 to oust
Mossadeq because they think he’s pro-Soviet. The next year the United States
works with Nasser to oust Britain from Egypt. In 1956, the United States joins
with the Soviet Union—let me get this straight—at the same time that Soviet
tanks are crushing Hungarians, to save Nasser from the British and the French.
If you read Dulles’s
correspondence on this, it is all about
anti-colonialism.
QUESTION: Michael, thank you for an
almost perfect book talk, which mixed together major themes, tantalizing
details, and a lot of wit.
MICHAEL OREN: Thank
you.
QUESTIONER: I have a question on a little piquant
detail. You mentioned the seal that wasn’t, but you didn’t mention one American
seal which does include an important Middle Eastern symbol, and that’s the back
of the U.S. dollar, which includes a pyramid and an eye. The eye, I think, is a
Masonic
symbol, but what’s the pyramid doing there?
MICHAEL
OREN: It’s related to Egypt. In the book there’s a discussion of the
pyramid and how it gets there, and other Middle Eastern symbols that find their
way here. It was also influenced from Masonry, but mostly they wanted to show a
sense of stability and timelessness, and here was an image.
They also
import the obelisk. The obelisk is a very important early American symbol.
Obelisks proliferated. There was an obelisk craze, starting in 1820. It’s
interesting that much of the marble used in the Washington Monument is imported
from Turkey. It was actually a gift of the Ottoman sultan you’ll
note.
Those of you who jog around Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum there’s an obelisk
there too, Cleopatra’s Needle. This actually goes back to your question.
I have a chapter on it because it fascinated me. Starting in the 1870s, New
Yorkers decided that they were a major capital, just like London, Paris, and
Rome, all of which had obelisks, and that they really couldn’t look at
themselves in the mirror anymore unless they had an obelisk. That’s actually a
quote.
They turned to President Grant. President Grant turned to his ambassador to
Egypt. The ambassador went to the president of Egypt Khedive Ismail and said, "We want an obelisk." He said, "Take
your pick." He gave him the choice of three obelisks. They chose Cleopatra’s
Needle.
But guess what? The British, the French, and the Italians raised
objections. First, Egypt owed them a lot of money, and they basically were
holding all of Egypt in escrow. They were saying, "This really belongs to us."
So it really became a fight. This was the first time America got involved in an
imperial fight in the Middle East over who owns what.
What the Americans
did was they actually just ignored the British, the French, and the Italians.
They sent an engineer to Egypt. They sent a huge boat. They gouged a hole in the
hull of this boat. It took years. Finally, in 1880 they managed to take this needle off of its pedestal. It
weighs tens of thousands of pounds. They put it into the boat, inserted it, and
brought it up to New York Harbor, where it was unloaded on 54th Street. A team
of sixteen horses dragged it up to the corner of Central Park at 82nd Street,
onto that knoll behind it. Twenty thousand Americans were there, cheering as it
was raised, looming over the east—you notice it’s on the East Side.
So
there you have the story of an American symbol that is imported from the Middle
East. Next time you are at the Met, know that that monument also stands as a
monument to America’s rising ascendancy in the Middle
East.
QUESTION: I’m just wondering if you could help us
measure the degree of fantasy that we are functioning on today, if at
all.
MICHAEL OREN: Fantasy is tough territory. It’s
extraordinary. I thought that 9/11 was the day the fantasy died. But no.
Hollywood keeps on turning it out. Those of you who have seen the movie
Hidalgo, or unfortunate enough—I hope the producer isn’t here—or
fortunate enough to see a movie like Kingdom of Heaven, Middle East fantasies persist. Sexy. A
made-for-television movie, Arabian Nights, won the Emmy Award in
2000. So it’s still out there. But you’re really asking about policy, aren’t
you?
I’d rather draw on faith. There is a certain interface between faith
and fantasy. There is the faith of going into a country and believing that
America can take a country which has never known democracy, where the ideas of
American democracy are quite alien, and saying that with a certain amount of
effort and an investment of money and manpower we can transform this region.
It is so thoroughly American. The Russians would never do that. The
French certainly wouldn’t do that. Americans feel not only that they can do it,
but that they have to do it. It is so deeply engrained in the American world
view. Certainly it is faith-guided. There is a certain point where that
faithfulness edges into the fantasy that the peoples of the Middle East will
rise up to embrace this democracy, that they are freedom-loving nomads.
One of the earliest tropes we have of American fantasy in the Middle
East goes back to the first American explorer in the Middle East. John Ledyard, in 1788, writes about how fascinated he is by
the idea of a man on a horse in the desert who is unfettered and loves liberty,
and won’t let anybody rule over him. It is very much connected, by the way, to
the American fantasy of the cowboy and the frontiersman. That fantasy pervades
also in Hollywood. Somehow that percolates into this notion that somehow these
people are natural lovers of liberty and all we have to do is remove the
fetters.
But I see fantasy even in the detractors of that policy. The Hamilton-Baker Report, the
Iraq Study Group, had as its centerpiece the notion that somehow the Syrians
and the Iranians share our interest in a stable Iraq. I have a difficult time
with that one, empirically. I think that is very faith-based.
All of
these approaches stem from one of the few critiques that I level in the book. As
an historian, I don’t view my role as being the hangman of history. It’s very
prevalent in the historical field today. I’m an observer and an analyst. But I
do note critically that Americans for well over 200 years have regarded the
Middle East as you might a mirror. They look at the region and they don’t see
the face of the Middle East; they see their own faces. The effort then becomes
to remake this Middle East in such a way that they will resemble us, the United
States in the Middle East. This used to drive the Europeans crazy. They noticed
it all the time. And Americans sometimes notice it too.
George
McClellan, the less-than-successful Civil War general who became a very
successful Middle Eastern traveler in the 1870s and wrote a series of articles on Middle East travel for Scribner’s Magazine, made what I think is one of the
most insightful remarks about Americans in the Middle East. He said that
"Americans, as long as they persist in viewing this area as an extension of the
United States and do not recognize that it is a separate, distinct culture and
civilization, will be doomed to misunderstand this region." Wise words from
George McClellan.
QUESTION: I’ve been reading a few
things lately about the German involvement in the Armenian genocide,
and that the Germans were basically responsible for it by encouraging the young
Turks because they wanted to get the Ottoman Empire on their side against the
Russians. Is that something you deal with, and is it
true?
MICHAEL OREN: I know the Germans were aware of it.
There is a large section in the book on the Armenian massacres and the role of
Henry
Morgenthau in it. I’m meeting with his grandson right after this meeting, as
a matter of fact, to talk about it. And I have a lengthy article coming out in
The New York Review of
Books about the Armenian genocide.
It was one of the most
difficult things I had to research in the book. I actually had to go through the
documentation, reports by
American missionaries, American consuls, in the field about what was happening,
and it was just harrowing and haunting. There is no question in my mind that
this was an adumbration of the Holocaust, that this was a genocide in the fullest extent. I
think the Turks managed to enjoy it far more than the Nazis did. They actually
seemed to get glee out of torturing these people.
The Germans, though
they denied it assiduously, there is significant documentation that they knew
about it. I was not convinced by anything I saw that they encouraged it. They
just engaged in genocide denial.
I recommend you get a book by Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian who is actually living abroad
because there is a law in Turkey now against genocide assertion, and you can get
ten years in a Turkish prison for saying that. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish
Nobel Laureate, has also been accused.
QUESTION: Prior
to the current Bush Administration, I think one could say that many American
administrations have focused on stability as a goal of American policy in the
Middle East, keeping these regimes going. Do you think that is as chimerical as
the goal of pursuing democracy?
MICHAEL OREN: On the
contrary, I think stability is the way to go—the problem is stability. You come
up against American ideals, because stability means maintaining some nasty
dictators in office. Stability led the Reagan Administration to support Saddam
Hussein. It led successive American administrations to uphold the Saudi regime
and others.
The problem is when you come up against, for example, the
pursuit of ideals. How do you square that with a nation that conceives of itself
as conveyors or purveyors of democracy to the world? This is the way this
country was conceived—from its Founding Fathers. That is difficult.
There
is also the notion—I’m going to be very specific; let me take off my gloves, if
you will. I live in Jerusalem and I’m engaged in politics there. I’m not just an
historian. I try to keep the two separate, but here they are going to blend a
bit.
Empirically, we can look back to the 1920s and there have been
successive attempts to impose a Palestinian state-making structure. The British tried it, with
the Mufti; the UN
tried it in the Partition Resolution. If you look at my Six-Day War book, you see that the Israelis tried it after
the Six-Day War. Certainly, since the Oslo process there have been repeated attempts to impose a
state structure and state leadership on the Palestinians. It has always
imploded.
It has imploded because the Palestinians, I think, cannot meet
the criteria necessary for creating a state in the Middle East—that you have one
family with an army. That is what went wrong in Iraq, by the way—we took away
the family with the army.
Americans, then, not looking at this empirical
evidence, keep sending, say, Condoleezza
Rice to the region every Tuesday. They keep pumping money into the Palestinian
Authority in the hope that somehow Mahmoud
Abbas will be strong enough to make these fateful decisions and sign on the
dotted line. But basically, he won't be able to. He won’t be able to because he
doesn’t have the force to do it. He doesn’t have the basics that he
needs.
And yet, every administration—and I guarantee you, the Democratic
administration, whatever administration comes in next—will proceed to do it
again and again. Why? Why has the search for Arab-Israeli peace been the litmus
of the diplomatic prowess of every administration going back to Truman?
It’s not just about stability. There is
something in the American—and you want to use one of these politically incorrect
terms—there is something in the American world view, its
Weltanschauung, that says "we are enjoined to help bring tranquility to
the Holy Land." It’s very important to us.
So you have someone like Bill
Clinton investing thirteen presidential days at Camp
David. That’s an immense amount of time for a president. It didn’t even
work, but it’s an immense amount of time. Why? Jimmy Carter spending all that time—at least there it worked.
Somebody should do a study about that, tally up the total number of presidential
days that have been spent on trying to achieve Arab-Israeli peace.
It’s not just about stability. It’s about ideas; it’s about ideals. The two
are difficult to square sometimes, and I think that’s the major theme of the
book. It’s about this tension of trying to get these two squared up.
Just
a last note. In 1944, Saudi Arabia applied for Lend Lease aid.
They were turned down by the Roosevelt Administration because the State Department
determined that the Saudis were too
anti-democratic.
QUESTION: There are so many marvelous
themes that you have introduced, but I want to go back to power and the balance
of power, which has always been important in American foreign policy, in
addition to faith and fantasy. You mentioned that Reagan wanted a balance of
power between Iran and Iraq. Recently, we have devastated Iraq and now we are
worried about Iran. So how does this fit in?
MICHAEL
OREN: It doesn’t.
QUESTION: And furthermore,
how have Americans played the Shiite/Sunni differences in the past? Have we tried to use
this as a way of keeping control in the region?
MICHAEL
OREN: You’d have to be a major power broker, a person who is very, very
focused on power to the exclusion of all other ideas, in order to do that. There
was one person who was very adept at doing that, and that was Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger, in my reading of
Kissinger, was just devoid of the faith component. He actually has a famous
quote about that, talking about the Kurdish situation in 1975, when the United States had actually
encouraged the Kurds to revolt in Iraq, then turned around and ignored them.
Kissinger was assailed for this. Kissinger said, "Well, we’re not missionaries
in the Middle East."
You have to be very, very focused to be able to play
one side off another, and also very well informed about the nature of Middle
Eastern politics. Those are extremely rare characteristics for American
policymakers in the Middle East, at least among the top American policymakers in
the Middle East.
America, alas—again, I’m going to put my bona fides on
the table politically. I was asked to testify in front of a congressional
committee in 2003 about the approaching Iraq war. I strongly objected to it. I
objected to it on two grounds. This was as an historian that they asked me, not
as a political commentator. I said the grounds were both my understanding of
Iraq and Arab politics, and also my understanding of America.
Again,
going back to what I was saying to one of the previous questioners, I
believe that all Arab states—with the exception of the national states of Egypt,
Iran, and Turkey—the central Arab states are all held together by this
preponderance of often-savage central power, which is often in the hands of one
family or group, and that if you took away the family and the group, then you
would have to hold it all together.
I doubted whether the American
people were capable of exerting that type of savagery. I knew what the British
had to do to create Iraq and hold Iraq together in the 1920s and the 1930s. They
killed thousands and thousands of people. I didn’t believe that America would be
able to do that, would be willing to do that as a country, as a
society.
I think that when the revelations of Abu
Ghraib came out, that basically reinforced my case. Look how we reacted to
that instance of torture, which is by no means rare in the Middle
East.
As a result of having gone into Iraq anyway, America finds itself
in a situation where American soldiers are being shot at by Sunnis, though their
presence there is the only thing keeping the Sunnis from being shot at by the
Shiites. They have come there to help impose a Shiite-ruled coalition, because
the Shiites are the majority and it’s going to be democratic.
The
Shiites are shooting at them too, and we have managed to remove the Iranians’
great bête noir in the area, Saddam Hussein, and the Iranians now are
also trying to undermine America’s efforts there. You would have to be a pretty
uniquely skilled navigator to get us into such an imbroglio, and I think it
would require no less skill to get us out of it.
I’m really depressing
you this morning. I suggested back in 2003 if America felt that it had to do
away with Saddam Hussein, be my guest. It would send an incontrovertible message
to the Middle East not to mess with the United States. If America felt that it
wanted to maintain a base, for example, in the western Iraqi desert and stick
60,000 troops there as a rapid reaction force in the Middle East so that the
next time there’s a crises it won’t take six months to get American forces
there, it will take six hours, that was fine.
But do not, I said, get
involved in the state-making enterprise in the Middle East because you don’t
have what it takes. Thank God you don’t. I think it’s a wonderful thing that
America doesn’t have what it takes.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank
God you have what it takes this extraordinary morning. I thank you very
much.
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