HAVING SOWN:

How America Met the Mideast: The U.S. encounter with the Middle East began centuries before the Iraq War, propelled by idealists eager to tranform the region in their own image. : a review of POWER, FAITH, AND FANTASY: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren (Robert Kagan, January 21, 2007, Washington Post)

As a historian, Oren is more storyteller than grand theorist, so as a study of the complex and contradictory motives of American behavior, his book is a bit thin. Nevertheless, three powerful themes emerge from his tales: that from the Founders onward, Americans have repeatedly tried to transform Arab and Muslim peoples -- politically, spiritually and economically -- to conform to liberal and Christian principles; that since the days of the Puritans, many Americans have been obsessed with the idea of "restoring" Palestine to the Jews; and that from the colonial era to the present, many (and perhaps most) Americans have regarded Islam as a barbaric, violent and despotic religion. Whether these purposes and perceptions have been intelligent or misguided, based on reality or fantasy, Oren shows that they have been the dominant features of our foreign policy tradition in the Middle East.

Oren demonstrates that suspicion and hostility toward Islam are almost as old as the nation. John Quincy Adams called it a "fanatic and fraudulent" religion, founded on "the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel."

This was partly religious prejudice, of course, but that prejudice was reinforced by unfortunate experience. In the perilous early years of the republic, the Muslim Barbary powers preyed on American shipping and captured, tortured and enslaved hundreds of innocent men and women. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson implored the pasha of Tripoli to stop, Oren recounts, the pasha's emissary insisted that the Koran made it the "right and duty" of Muslims "to make war upon" whichever infidels "they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners." George Washington raged, "Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence." And Congress did create a navy in the 1790s primarily to crush the Barbary powers and protect American traders and missionaries. President Jefferson -- so often mislabeled as an idealist, pacifist and isolationist -- eagerly launched the war and ordered the permanent stationing of U.S. naval forces thousands of miles from the nation's shores.

As Oren relates, the modest number of 19th-century Americans who lived in the Middle East largely considered Islam -- in the words of a former Confederate officer hired to improve the Egyptian army -- a religion "born of the sword," one that was "opposed to enlightenment" and crushed "all independence of thought and action." They found the oppression of Muslim women appalling. Being Americans, they thought the best antidote was a thorough transformation of culture and society. Protestant missionaries utterly failed to convert Muslims to Christianity, but they did work to spread the "gospel of Americanism": liberalism, technology and democracy.

Over the next century, American politicians and policymakers repeatedly imagined they could liberalize a people who seemed to them bursting with "democratic aspirations," as one New Dealer put it in 1943.

Yet, at the crucial moment -- after we'd won WWI for the Allies -- Woodrow Wilson chose to push his pet transnational project at the cost of putting the Middle East back under the colonial thumb. An unforgivable and un-American blunder they and we are still paying for.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2007 10:22 AM