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Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present Hardcover – January 16, 2007
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“Will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years.”―Christopher Dickey, Newsweek
This best-selling history is the first fully comprehensive history of America’s involvement in the Middle East from George Washington to George W. Bush. As Niall Ferguson writes, “If you think America’s entanglement in the Middle East began with Roosevelt and Truman, Michael Oren’s deeply researched and brilliantly written history will be a revelation to you, as it was to me. With its cast of fascinating characters―earnest missionaries, maverick converts, wide-eyed tourists, and even a nineteenth-century George Bush―Power, Faith, and Fantasy is not only a terrific read, it is also proof that you don’t really understand an issue until you know its history.” 68 black-and-white photographs, 4 maps- Print length832 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateJanuary 16, 2007
- Dimensions6.38 x 1.71 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100393058263
- ISBN-13978-0393058260
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Review
An absolutely vital work that will change the way Americans look at their role in the Middle East and beyond. -- Walter Russell Mead, Council of Foreign Relations
Not only a terrific read, but also proof that you don't really understand an issue until you know its history. -- Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus and The War of the World
About the Author
Michael B. Oren, Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, has written numerous works on the Middle East, including the New York Times bestsellers Six Days of War and Power, Faith, and Fantasy. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities, and currently serves as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
From The Washington Post
We often hear that Americans know little about other nations; a bigger problem is that we know too little about ourselves, our history and our national character. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, in particular, we were all born yesterday, unaware of how present policies and attitudes fit into persistent historical patterns. So when a brilliant, lucid historian such as Michael B. Oren does bring the past back to life for us, revealing both what has changed and what has stayed the same, it is a shaft of light in a dark sky.
Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.
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. nav!
al 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. This may have been hubris, but if so, it was an enduring hubris. Oren quotes a mid-19th-century Arab guide warning a missionary: "You Americans think that you can do everything . . . that money can buy or that strength can accomplish. But you cannot conquer Almighty God." Yet a century later, Harry S. Truman insisted, "God has created us and brought us to our present position of power . . . for some great purpose. . . . It is given to us to defend the spiritual values . . . against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them."
No act of international social engineering was more audacious than American support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the middle of an implacably hostile Arab world. But this idea, too, had deep roots. The earliest members of the "Israel lobby" were the Puritan settlers, who even before they reached America had petitioned the Dutch government to "transport Izraell's sons and daughters . . . to the Land promised their forefathers . . . for an everlasting Inheritance." Their prominent heirs included John Adams, who imagined "a hundred thousand Israelites" conquering Palestine; Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward; and, a century later, Woodrow Wilson, who delighted in the thought that he might "be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people." Thus, President Truman felt a deep sense of historical and religious destiny when he recognized the newly created state of Israel in May 1948, comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who also had repatria!
ted the Jewish exiles and helped rebuild a Judean state. "I am Cyrus," Truman crowed. "I am Cyrus!"
Few acts in the history of U.S. foreign policy have been less in accord with "realist" principles. Oren, an Israeli historian whose previous book was the bestselling Six Days of War, shows that U.S. backing for the establishment of Israel was rooted in religious convictions going back more than four centuries. Americans' response to the enormity of the Holocaust helped transform old Puritan dreams into reality. But even so, the essential element here was the rise of the United States to global predominance; it is doubtful that any other country -- including Great Britain, which ruled Palestine after World War I -- would have placed religious conviction and moral sentiment above selfish and practical interests.
Critics from World War I onward warned that American support for a Jewish state would produce unending war, severely damage America's otherwise amicable relations with the Muslim world and, after the discovery of massive deposits of Middle Eastern oil in the 1930s, endanger access to this vital commodity. Saudi Arabia's pro-American first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, flatly warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that the "Jews have no right to Palestine" and that Arabs would die fighting to resist a Jewish state. When the typically American president spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust, the typically Arab king questioned the fairness of making "the innocent bystander," Palestine's Arabs, pay for the crimes of others. If 3 million Jews had been murdered in Poland, ibn Saud reasoned, then there was now room there for 3 million more. Many Muslims' sentiments have not changed over the past six decades.
And neither have those of many Americans. Despite all the crises of the past years, including the present war in Iraq, Oren predicts that the United States will continue "to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement." Policymakers "will press on with their civic mission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana." American "churches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually." And Americans will regard the region as both "mysterious" and "menacing," as they have for centuries, and will seek to transform it in their own image. Many today may want to disagree, but they will have to wrestle first with the long history of American behavior that Oren has so luminously portrayed.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (January 16, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 832 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393058263
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393058260
- Item Weight : 2.53 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.38 x 1.71 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #495,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #644 in Middle Eastern Politics
- #1,557 in Middle East History
- #2,808 in Political Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Having grown up in the 60s Oren ties together a lot of events for me that are just sitting in the back of my mind memories. Sometimes things need to be viewed with hindsight. He does a good job telling this very interesting story.
As mentioned, I own a copy and have bought three more for friends over the years. This book is good reading.
The history can be roughly broken up into three phases. The first is the Barbary Wars where out Nation found it's strength (as well as it's Navy) and much of it's character in a drawn out, and often meandering, struggle against Muslim pirates. The second is a long period from the end of the Barbary Wars to World War I, which is characterized almost exclusively by the efforts of private missionaries travelling far and wide across the Middle East to bring the word of Christ, as well as more pedestrian tourism. The missionaries efforts at proselytizing were almost universally a failure, but they did leave behind a large number of relatively sophisticated schools and universities which were unknown in the Middle East at the time and later became the fountains of power for the Arab Nationalism movement. Both the missionaries and the tourists however generally returned home disappointed by the whole experience. The Middle East remained a place that promised so much but delivered so litte. The last, "modern," phase of the history stretches essentially from World War I to now. The watershed event of this period was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire which eliminated any sizable, coherent Muslim power in the world, a first since the Caliphate was founded over a thousand years ago.
For me this period was the most relevant, although the previous two were certainly very interesting. At the end of World War I the victors proceeded to thoroughly "lose the peace" in the middle east, promising freedom -which so many there thirsted for after living under the generally unwanted yoke of the Turkish Ottomans- but delivering colonialism instead. This poured anti-western fuel onto the fires of both the reactionary / fundamentalist Islam being espoused by Wahabbi mosques and others, and the countervailing, secular nationalist movements at home in the schools founded by the American missionaries. Through a long series of events, -the introduction of Israel and muslim intolerance of it, continued western meddling such as the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez Crisis, the failure of Middle Eastern governments to adapt to the modern world, and the collapse of Arab nationalism which adopted the unworkable theory of socialism as their mantra- the Middle East never achieved any of the dreams that its various inhabitants saw as eerily within grasp following the end of WWI, be it freedom, Arab unity, or the re-emergence of an Islamic power reformed from the corrupt and backward Ottoman Empire. This has led to an inexorable slide into the Middle East we find today, a corrupt thugocracy whose people are unfortunately turning increasingly towards radical islam as their savoir and the outlet of their anger now that the alternate (and false) hope of Nationalist inspired Socialism evaporated into failure, and post colonial freedom has proven to be a chimerical mirage.
While much of the Middle East's problems have been intensified by outside interference, more of them have been home grown. It is a place that for both internal and external reasons has never experienced real freedom. We now stand at an extremely pivotal moment in the history of not only the region and our nation but the world. After a long a bewildering history of interaction between America and the Middle East our relations have reached their zenith, with an American led liberation of Iraq that has brought the first chance of real freedom to the Middle East while at the same time teetering on the brink of occupation through mistakes and incompetence. The Middle East is now walking a deadly tightrope between radical Islam on the one side and American inspired freedom on the other. America walks a similar tightrope, between facing the bloody and expensive proposition of spreading of our ideals into the region -with the sobering realization that this won't necessarily bring peace or friendship towards us-, or falling back to a diplomatic preference for a farcical and self serving "stability" in the region which has marked our relations with the region from 1945 to 2003 -hopefully with the equally sobering realization that this has contributed immensely to the current woes of the region that spilled over onto our shores on 9/11.
Michael B. Oren's book is an amazing and extensive tour of the history of the Middle East, how America has interacted with it, and how we have gotten to the situation outlined above. His writing style is fast and fluid, and while the middle half of the book gets bogged down a good deal, it is truly useful reading for anyone trying to understand what is going on in the Middle East today and trying to figure out what we should be doing in kind.
Highly recommended.
Top reviews from other countries
This is an amazing book which is well thoroughly researched. The contribution of Islam goes to the core of the American constitution "all men are equal" a passage from the Quran.
If the Muslim could receive America with an open arm after its independence from the British rule, the geopolitics of the world would have been shaped differently. Instead of promoting north African pirates if the Ottoman had a professional navel the Mediterranean would have had a different story to tell.
The Arabs blame America as bias towards Israel, it was the ability of the American Jews to broker deals between USA and Middle East that handed the Jews with a powerful influence in American foreign policies. If anything Ottoman arrogance is to blame for much of the double standards that is often the accusation made towards the west. What this book does is explains brilliantly fact that are not known and only now is being revealed to the world
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