Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East

As the unofficial “Mom of Congress”, QG has a reading assignment for all representatives and Senators: Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren.

Too many of the Congresspersons yakking in front of the microphones in the current debates over the course of the war in Iraq are displaying woeful ignorance of the history of America’s involvement with this region. It didn’t begin with Bush 41 or Bush 43 or Clinton or Reagan or Carter. America’s relationship with the Middle East has been complex and difficult since before the establishment of the republic. The author of Power, Faith and Fantasy Michael Oren has degrees in Middle East history from Columbia and Princeton and has been a lecturer on the subject at Harvard and Yale. As a resident of Jerusalem, where he is senior fellow at the Shalem Center, Oren has lived the subject. He knows whereof he writes.

QG hereby adjorns Congress until she has received book reports from all members. This will take a while because the book has 604 pages of text and 174 pages of footnotes and index. There will be an oral exam to make sure the reports were not written by Congressional aides and pages. The country shouldn’t mind being spared the politically motivated speeches and sound bites from Democrats and Republicans alike in the current debate over the war in Iraq in the interest of giving some historical perspective to our policymakers.

Actually, this book is a must read for anyone who cares about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Much of this history is not remembered today, but it has a profound impact on the current situation.

Did you know that….

 The adoption of the Constitution, which established a strong central government with the authority to create, maintain and deploy military forces for the common defense, came as a response to the inability of the government under the Articles of Confederation to respond to the hostage-taking and enslavement of American sailors aboard American merchant vessels trading in the Middle East?

 Biblical scholar and distinguished professor of Hebrew at New York University George Bush (yes, a forebear of Bush 41 and 43!) was a leader in the antebellum movement to restore the Jews to Palestine?

 The earliest efforts to build ties between Christians and Muslims in Africa were made by African-American Presbyterian missionary, and later Ambassador to Great Britain from Liberia, the Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden during the period before the Civil War?

 Egypt’s military forces were built up and trained by a group of ex-Confederate officers in the post- bellum period? Remember the Camel Corps?

 The Statue of Liberty was originally intended to be a statue of a Muslim peasant woman guarding the entrance to the Suez Canal and would have been named “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia”?

 Until the modern period, the Middle East IMPORTED American oil and kerosene?

 Col. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the General of the same name and Desert Storm fame, was responsible for modernizing Iran’s police force as head of a United States law enforcement mission in that country in 1945?

I didn’t think so. I didn’t either.

PresbyReaders will be interested to see how often “Presbyterian” turns up in this history, as Presbyterian missionaries established modern universities and hospitals across the Middle East, although they made very few converts from Islam. These colleges were very influential in shaping the intellectual class and fostering their desire for independence from European colonial domination.

I’m usually a fast reader, but found myself pouring slowly over this book. It is written in a lively, narrative style, not an academic, pedantic one. The history of the US in the Middle East involves a fascinating cast of characters that makes for compelling reading.

The conflict between America’s idealistic goal of bringing its own founding principles of individual freedom and democracy to this part of the world and European colonialism in the area in the years between the Civil War and WWII is sharply highlighted. Oren makes the case that the failure of the United States to intervene in the genocide of the Christian Armenians by the Muslim Turks during WWI kept America from influencing the carving up of the Middle East into spheres of influence by the triumphant European Allies which set the stage for much of the political/cultural/religious conflicts in this area to the present day.

The last chapter of the book, "In Search of Pax Americana", dealing with the period since WWII, is not as good as the rest. Oren begins this chapter by noting that writing the history of the major events of the last thirty years is “hampered by lack of internal government documents—the bedrock of serious research—which are still classified and closed to the public.” Perhaps he was also rushed in completing it. There is an epilogue with an interview with a recently returned American soldier from Iraq who describes his experiences and says, "They (the Middle Eastern countries) can go the way of modernization or they can go the way of Sub-Saharan Africa. The choice is theirs."

The author predicts the US will continue to pursue the traditional patterns of Middle East involvement that have characterized its policy since the eighteenth century. Which is to say, policymakers will continue to see themselves as mediators and liberators; American churches and evangelists will seek to save the region spiritually; and producers of films about the Middle East will never lack for audiences. Finally, Oren warns that the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq “may merely herald the outbreak of other, potentially more devastating conflicts lasting long into the twenty-first century.”

This book helps answer the questions "why are we involved in the Middle East?" and "why do they hate us?" I highly recommend it, despite the weak final chapter.