TLS: America in the Middle East

Into Barbary
M. E. Yapp
review of POWER, FAITH, FANTASY. America in the Middle East, 1776 to the present. By Michael B. Oren. 672pp. Norton. $17.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. 978 0 393 05826 0.

From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." So sang the United States marines in the days when they still marched to war - or so, at least, Hollywood would have us believe was the case during the Second World War. In reality they probably sang something rather coarser, but to a schoolboy entranced by Americans the sound and spectacle were thrilling enough, if rather mysterious. The reference to Montezuma, one eventually learned, was an allusion to the 1847 Mexican war and the story of the marines' encounter with Tripoli is told in some detail by Michael B. Oren in this long and colourful history of America's involvement with the Middle East.
The first problem with which the young Republic had to deal in the region arose from the operations of the Barbary corsairs who, from their ports on the North African coast in what are now the states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, attacked the trading vessels of other powers, seized their cargoes, and enslaved their crews and passengers. When US ships fell victim to the corsairs, the choice was straightforward: pay up or fight. As the Americans had no navy, they had to pay the blackmail demanded. The humiliation rankled; moreover, the corsairs were encouraged to attack more American vessels. In 1801, the USA went to war but the expedition failed ignominiously and American prestige suffered accordingly. "There is but one language which can be held to these people," wrote William Eaton, the belligerent US consul in Tunis, "and that is terror." In 1805, Eaton assembled a small and variegated force, which included nine Americans, and marched from Egypt against Tripoli with a view to securing a change of regime. He got as far as the port of Darna, which he assaulted and captured with the loss of two marines. President Jefferson, however, decided to make a deal with the existing ruler of Tripoli and reversed the policy of the disgusted Eaton, who was evacuated together with his troops, leaving only the memory of the assault to be celebrated in marine song and legend. In 2003, a special marine task force sent to capture Saddam's home town of Takrit was nicknamed "Task Force Tripoli". But the Barbary story has a triumphant ending: the United States did build a navy, and, in 1815, a powerful squadron under Stephen Decatur forced the submission of the Barbary states, released the American captives, and ended the payment of tribute by the United States.

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Oren dwells on the story of America's encounter with the corsairs for three reasons. In the first place, the problem, the attempted solutions, the debates and the course of events all seem strangely, even eerily familiar to those who study later American adventures in the Middle East. Secondly, he derives a moral from the drawn out struggle with the corsairs: paying tribute may be cheaper but it is better to fight. The decision to fight salvaged the prestige of the United States and gave that country the will to build a navy which became the basis of her future power. "The seminal lesson of the Barbary Wars", he remarks later, was that "providing arms to pirate states in the Middle East only produces more piracy", a statement intended to apply to Iran and not to Turkey, Israel or any other recipient of American arms in the region. And, thirdly, Oren believes that the episode demonstrates the importance of the Middle East to the United States from the earliest times, an argument which forms one of the principal contentions of his book. Writing of the present day, he argues that "the United States is extensively, profoundly, and perhaps even existentially involved in the Middle East" and refers to "the paramount importance of the Middle East". Although part of the basis for that contention derives from contemporary conditions, it is very much Oren's belief that America's concerns go back far into the history of her dealings with the region.
The conflict with the Barbary states was about power, the first factor in Oren's epitome of US involvement in the Middle East. The second factor is faith, and is exemplified in the activities of American missionaries in the region. Evangelical Protestants could not fail to be interested in the fate of Palestine, and their interest was enhanced by the prevalence of Restorationism, that doctrine which held that the Second Coming of Christ must be preceded by the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. American missionaries, however, found it difficult to establish themselves in Palestine or to accomplish much in the way of conversion. Their principal impact was in the field of education and was most visible in Istanbul (Robert College) and Beirut (the Syrian Protestant College, later better known as the American University of Beirut). The historian George Antonius ascribed great importance to the educational role of the American missionary schools and colleges, and saw them as an important factor not merely in the transmission of American ideas and values, but in the rise of the ideology of Arab nationalism. Subsequent historians challenged this thesis and ascribed a much more modest achievement to the American missionaries, but Oren repeats the Antonius view. Indeed, Oren also detects substantial American influence, via a few US mercenary soldiers, in the modernization of Egypt and the growth of Egyptian nationalism. No attempt is made to balance these arguments with any assessment of the contributions of British, French, Russian and other European missionaries and others to the development of the region, let alone to consider the role of internal or domestic influences. In these areas, as in others, there is persistent exaggeration of the importance of the American impact on the Middle East.
The third factor is fantasy, under which heading Oren subsumes a popular view of the Middle East derived from The Thousand and One Nights and books and films which portray a Middle East of luxurious and tyrannical rulers, dashing sheikhs, swooning maidens, belly dancers, deserts, tents, camels and palaces.
It is difficult to know how widespread or influential such visions of the Middle East might have been. One would have thought that the principal source of information for most early Americans concerning the Middle East was the Bible, which, while it may not be an especially useful guide to the contemporary Middle East any more than is the Koran, does not feature prominently the elements mentioned. And the principal impression which a careful reader of The Thousand and One Nights might retain is of an exceptionally clever woman. Moreover, Hollywood films sometimes give a much more diverse and more subtle impression of the Middle East than the word "fantasy" suggests. Rather than fantasy one would like to have seen more emphasis given to pure ignorance as a major factor in the American view of the Middle East. It may be that ignorance allows fantasy to fill the mind, as it may also permit the invasion of what Oren refers to as ideals, which he emphasizes as one of the two poles of the United States's approach to the region, the other being interest.
Ignorance, ideals and interest coincide neatly in the episode of the Greek War of Independence. Popular enthusiasm in the United States (which was shared by President John Quincy Adams) was wholly pro-Greek, but at the same time it was perceived that any intervention on behalf of the Greeks would jeopardize the position of American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, and also the burgeoning US trade with the Empire. There were no US vessels at the decisive naval Battle of Navarino, but the United States secured a commercial treaty soon afterwards. The triumph of interest over idealism in the case of Greece makes Oren's description of the traditional role of the United States in the Middle East as one of liberator and champion of minority rights and of the independence of Ottoman provinces like Greece and Hungary rather odd, the more so in view of the circumstance that Hungary was taken by Austria from the Ottomans more than eighty years before the birth of the United States. Nor is one convinced by Oren's assertion that the United States continued thereafter to work for the freedom of the people of the region. Some individuals may have done so, but official US policy remained characterized by a steadfast refusal to become involved.
Another example of the same conjunction of ignorance, ideals and interest is provided by President Woodrow Wilson's intervention in the Middle East during and immediately after the First World War. Oren bemoans America's failure to declare war on the Ottomans and consequently her loss of an opportunity to play a more active role in the shaping of the new political structure in the region.
In fact, the United States had ample opportunity to play a considerable role in the region and could have taken over the administration of Armenia, Constantinople and Palestine. But neither the American people nor Congress wanted the responsibility; in truth they were not very interested in the region. Wilson and his advisers knew little of the Middle East; no member of the celebrated Inquiry had any special knowledge of the region; and his expert on the Middle East was a classicist. Ignorance was accompanied by a few simple and, in Middle Eastern terms, useless axioms about democracy, self determination and anti-colonialism. The chief effect of Wilson's interventions was to delay a settlement of the region, to the disadvantage of almost everyone concerned. But the United States did manage to come out of the business with a share of Iraqi oil.
When the economic interest of the United States in the Middle East is discussed, it is trade in the period before the First World War that is cited first, and oil afterwards. Oren fails to make clear the significance of the oil factor in US policy. He appears to imply that Middle Eastern oil was required for use in the United States.

In fact, until the 1960s, the United States produced most of her own oil, and US oilmen did not want competition from cheaper Middle Eastern oil, much of which was produced by US companies and sold around the world. Middle Eastern oil was imported by the United States as a convenience rather than a necessity, a situation quite unlike that of the European powers. The oil was more important to the United States as a valuable source of foreign currency. Only when US domestic production was curtailed for reasons of cost and conservation did oil from the Middle East begin to play a significant, even vital, part in US consumption. In this way, during the 1960s, oil became one of the factors which gave the Middle East for the first time a large weight in the foreign policy of the United States. The other factors were the Cold War and the new salience of Israel.
The Cold War first drew the United States into the northern tier of the region in support of Iran and Turkey after Britain gave up the burden. The 1947 Truman Doctrine was a major step forward for Americans. Not until the mid 1950s did US interest in the southern, Arab Middle East become of major significance. At that time, the United States assumed a greater role in response to the spread of Soviet influence within the Arab states and the virtual extinction of British and French influence after the Suez fiasco. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 signalled the change. America's commitment to Israel is also of much more recent date than is commonly supposed. The major part played by President Truman in the birth of the state of Israel was inspired more by a desire to rid himself of Zionist importunities than by any great desire to see a Jewish state in the region. The key date in the development of US policy towards Israel is 1967, when Israel's dramatic and total victory over her Arab neighbours inspired a wave of sentiment in her favour and paved the way for the United States to identify her as an ally and a strategic asset in the region, a long way indeed from John Foster Dulles's dismissal of Israel as a millstone round the neck of the USA.

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Only a hundred pages of this large book deal with the period when the Middle East finally became important to the USA and the USA to the Middle East. Oren does not discuss the mechanisms of Israeli influence in the United States and the extent to which US policy in the Middle East has become Israeli policy. He does not question his own assertions about the importance of the region to the

USA. He says little about the Iraq war and does not explain the great mystery of how a so-called war against (Islamic) terror had as its centrepiece the destruction of one of the principal secular barriers to its spread. His book should be read and enjoyed primarily as a diverting collection of anecdotes about the encounters of individual Americans with the Middle East over a period of more than 200 years. Most of them disliked the region, and its people.