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January 12, 2007

Beyond the Shores of Tripoli

By Martin Peretz

The war for independence aside, no long-term military experience so agitated the American colonies and the nascent republic than the relentless aggressions against the nation's shipping in the waters off North Africa. But the battles were not limited to the sea. The honor and prestige of the U.S. were also tested in the desert and around ancient walled cities. American sailors were actually enslaved, and for a while the U.S. government capitulated to the necessity of tribute to free them. The Barbary Wars lasted roughly two decades.

Almost two centuries after these conflicts between Arabs and Americans, a conflict between Persians and Americans sounded an ominous echo. The revolutionary Shiite government of Iran -- acting through student militants -- put the U.S. through perhaps the most humiliating diplomatic incident in its history by seizing occupants from the American embassy and holding them hostage. It was not short, taking 444 days. And the personnel in captivity were not few, at the end 52 prisoners. Oddly, Jimmy Carter, whose presidency foundered on his weak response at the time, seems warmly inclined to Iran's equally belligerent leadership today. He seems indifferent to the lesson of his own political ruin -- that one cannot tame the enraged with displays of anguished timidity.

Sweeping Chronicle

These instances of uncivilized aggression serve as near bookends to America's long experience in the Middle East. (Surprise: neither had anything to do with the Jews.) In "Power, Faith, and Fantasy," Michael Oren offers a sweeping chronicle of America's Middle Eastern policies and perceptions, arguing that the lands of the Ottoman Empire -- before its dissolution and after -- have long loomed large to Washington and to the wider American populace, helping to define America's sense of itself and its role in the world.

One result of the early battles with the Barbary states, Mr. Oren argues, was the realization that the Articles of Confederation were crippling America's capacity to raise a national military force. "The United States had no navy, nor even a constitutional instrument for constructing one," Mr. Oren writes. Anxiety about this weakness informed the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and helped persuade delegates -- overcoming their aversion to foreign affairs and wariness of central government -- to endorse a document that provided for a national defense. The new nation had moved from infancy, and its concerns were made concrete and world-wide.

The country's focus on the Mediterranean had multiple sources, of course: the vivid presence of the Hebrew Bible in old American Protestantism; the Christian proselytizing instinct, which made Americans both hostile to Islam and sympathetic to a possibly more secular (and less anti-Christian) Arab nationalism; and the imperial designs of other nations, which the U.S. resented even as it moved to protect its interests by ensuring American access to the Suez Canal and desert oil fields.

Mr. Oren handles these complexities with admirable clarity. He is equally adept at describing the characters who drive the story. Not a few are nutcases latching on to identities and causes, sometimes spurious, sometimes real. In "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land," Herman Melville brought to life the Americans he met on his own visit to Palestine. Among them was a missionary named Walter Dickson, who told Melville that he had "permanently settled on the soil of Zion, Sir." Many of Dickson's family members and traveling companions (though not Dickson himself) were later slaughtered by Arab intruders.

And then there was the encounter of a revivalist preacher from New Hampshire, Harriet Livermore, and Lady Hester Stanhope, the self-styled Queen of the Desert and niece of William Pitt. Both women were lured to Palestine in the 1830s by reports of a Jewish settlement there -- a sign, they hoped, of Jewish restoration and the fulfillment of prophecy. As Mr. Oren recounts, the two "should have bonded" but instead "quarreled over which of them was the truly elect and which would accompany the Lord on His triumphal reentry to Jerusalem."

The Role of Brandeis

It would be another century before the Jewish restoration in the Middle East would truly take hold. Decisive American support for Zionism, Mr. Oren notes, can be traced to the induction of Louis Dembitz Brandeis in the cause. A prominent lawyer and progressive activist, he supported the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East full-throatedly, even after he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

It was Brandeis who persuaded American Jewry to dream of a Jewish state. It was he, too, who enrolled Wilson in the practicality and justice of the idea. It didn't hurt that Wilson's commitment to the sovereignty of nations had as one of its beneficiaries the group that had first given substance to the very meaning of peoplehood. One can say that Brandeis was a spiritual co-author of the Balfour Declaration, the British writ to Palestine in 1917 declaring "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations."

Where there are wise men, alas, there are also fools. One of Wilson's advisers was Charles Crane, a major contributor to the 1912 campaign. "If Brandeis saw Zionists as avatars of the hardworking Pilgrim colonists," Mr. Oren writes, "then Crane subscribed to the popular American image of the Arabs as lovers of liberty and revilers of radicalism, the 'Unitarians of the Desert.'" Crane, the heir to a Chicago toilet-manufacturing fortune, was also interested in the infamy of Jews, so he defended the czarist pogroms and Henry Ford's campaigns against "the international Jew." Later, he would pronounce Adolf Hitler "the real bulwark of Christian culture."

In 1919, President Wilson appointed Crane and Henry C. King, the pious president of Oberlin College, to co-chair the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates, convened to ponder the destiny of Ottoman lands. (England and France refused to participate, so the U.S. was the only "ally.") The commission's staunchly pro-Arab report (which, happily, came to nothing) might have been expected, given Crane's background. Wilson defended his appointment of Crane, as well as King, by saying that the two men "knew nothing" about the Middle East and thus, presumably, brought along no biases (yet Crane was a self-described anti-Semite). What they thought they knew turned out to be nonsense.

Reading about the King-Crane Commission, it's difficult not to think of a more recent gathering of ineffective sages: the Iraq Study Group. Though "Power, Faith, and Fantasy" went to press too early to address the findings of the commission headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, Mr. Oren does a sterling job of putting in context Mr. Baker's role in the Middle East over the years.

The former secretary of state, of course, is a longtime underminer of Israel, and Mr. Oren shows, among other things, the paltriness of what Mr. Baker considers one of his brightest achievements: the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991. Ostensibly called to encourage negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the summit was essentially a reward to Syria and Egypt for doing nothing during the first Gulf war. As the catalyst for the peace process, Mr. Oren writes, Madrid was "a nonstarter."

Mr. Oren's skillful narrative shows that America's bond with Israel is as intrinsic, as axiomatic, as its bond with England. It is inconceivable that these two nations -- these three nations, really -- would be other than together in the current struggle against dogma, zealotry and the darkest habits of violent life. Such a bond has consequences for America's role in the world -- confirming yet again Mr. Oren's theme -- and for the orbit of militant Islam in the Middle East. Mr. Oren reminds us that the stakes are very high.

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