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GLENN FRANKEL: First of all, let me say congratulations on completing such a modest project. It’s only 733 pages without the index and it only covers 230 years. It’s got hundreds of characters from American missionaries to Civil War generals. What prompted you to decide to undertake such a vast and ambitious project?

MICHAEL OREN: I first had the idea for the book twenty-five years ago when I was a graduate student at Princeton. I was listening to a lecture on the general history of the Arab world and the professor just happened to mention that in the 1870s there was a group of former Civil War officers who had gone to Egypt in an attempt to modernize the Egyptian army. They ended up building a school system that not only educated Egyptian soldiers but also their children. And in addition to teaching literacy, the school also imparted American ideals such as democracy and patriotism.

I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ Like many Americans I thought that America’s involvement in the Middle East began with oil or with the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Cold War. I suddenly realized that America’s relationship with the Middle East was far older and more complex than I’d imagined. And yet, when I went to the library to read more about this legacy I found very little on the subject. The United States was deeply engaged with the Middle East, and yet there was no book that enabled Americans to view that interaction in an historical context. There were many comprehensive histories of British involvement in the Middle East, and of French involvement, but no study of America in the Middle East from colonial times to the present.

Flash forward about twenty years and I’m having dinner with Bob Weil, my good friend who’s a senior editor at Norton. Suddenly Bob asks me what is the one book about the Middle East that had yet to be written but which must be. Without hesitation I answered, “America and the Middle East.” He said, “Very well,” and taking out a pencil, he began outlining the chapters on the back of a menu. That is the outline of this book.

GLENN FRANKEL: How much of the idea is related to September 11th ?

MICHAEL OREN: No question that September 11th and the war in Iraq added a tremendous impetus to the book. I felt that Americans were being asked to make decisions about their policies in the Middle East that would impact not only the future of the United States, but of the entire world. Their frame of reference, I felt, was very contemporary and short of historic depth. The need for a context was greater than ever.

GLENN FRANKEL: It’s very striking indeed that the themes that emerged from the very beginning of the book play themselves out all the way through. For example, you write as early as the 1790s when dealing with the pirates of North Africa, “many Americans had grown dismayed with the country’s Middle East policy of admonishing the pirates verbally while simultaneously cobbling them with bribes.” Do you see this gap between our self-declared principles and the reality of the policies we followed?

MICHAEL OREN: The gap is a theme that recurs throughout American history and you see examples of it today. America sometimes talks about democracy in the Middle East and at other times it supports rather autocratic, if not dictatorial, Middle Eastern regimes. It talks about supporting the democratically elected government of Lebanon but on the other hand opening a dialogue with Syria, which is trying to deny liberty to Lebanon.

GLENN FRANKEL: The Iran-Contra Scandal seems to me to be another example of this contradiction. The Reagan administration on the one hand was denouncing terrorism and kidnapping while at the same time negotiating with the terrorists and their state sponsors.

MICHAEL OREN: The book suggests that Ronald Reagan hadn’t learned the lesson of the Barbary Wars, namely, that you cannot negotiate with hostage-takers in the Middle East and combat them at the same time. The Barbary Wars taught us that America is much better off combating them rather than bribing them.

GLENN FRANKEL: I think most of us know about Mark Twain’s trip to the Middle East, but how did Herman Melville land up there?

MICHAEL OREN: Melville traveled there because his previous book, Moby-Dick, had sold a mere three thousand copies. He was desperate to find a source of inspiration, similar to that which he previously discovered in the South Seas. Like so many Americans of his day, he was avid reader of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and dreamt of one day visiting the Middle East. So, in 1856, with a toothbrush and one change of clothing, Melville set sail. He kept an extraordinary journal of his journey, truly a work of literature. Through it, we get to see what the Middle East looked like through Herman Melville’s eyes.

GLENN FRANKEL: He had a rather jaundiced view of American missionaries he met there. What’s the balance sheet, pro and con, on the American missionaries in the Middle East?

MICHAEL OREN: I think that on balance the missionaries did an immense amount of good in the Middle East. They didn’t accomplish what they set out to achieve--recreating the Jewish state in Palestine and converting all the Arabs to Christianity. But in their failure they turned to establishing schools. First they built elementary schools and then universities. In 1866, they created the Syrian Protestant College, which later becomes the American University in Beirut, and the American University of Cairo and Robert College in Turkey. These institutions exerted a vast influence on the history of the Middle East. Through them, American ideas percolated through the area and contributed to the rise of new identities and political movements, such as Arab nationalism. You might say that there is a direct line between the appearance of people like Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s and the 1960s and the work of American missionaries exactly a century before.

GLENN FRANKEL: I wanted to ask you, I am surprised that even the Statue of Liberty seems to have had its origins in the Middle East. We tried to influence people there, but they have also influenced us in ways we don’t even know about. How does the Statue of Liberty, originally designed for Egypt, end up in New York harbor?

MICHAEL OREN: The French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi had been living in Egypt in the 1860s and was very much influenced by the ancient statues at Luxor. He decided to make himself a colossus. He envisaged a giant statute of an Arab peasant woman holding aloft a torch which he thought might grace the entrance to the newly built Suez Canal. The Egyptians approved the project but in 1869 their economy crashed and they could no longer afford to build the statue. Bartholdi went into a depression and, as therapy, he decided to travel to the United States. Sailing into New York harbor he saw Bedloe’s Island and he said to himself, “I think my statute would look very good on that island.” He interested some American and French backers in the idea, but the Americans insisted that he change the Arab peasant to an American woman. Bartholdi waited outside a church in New York and he saw an appropriately American looking-woman and took her as his model. So the Statue of Liberty, too, was connected to America’s Middle East experience.

There is sort of a curious epilogue to the story. To build his statue, Bartholdi turned to three American engineers he had met in Egypt. All three were part of the delegation of Civil War veterans who had been sent to advise the Egyptians about making war but ended up instructing them in democracy. By constructing a monument to liberty back in the United States, the veterans completed a circle.

GLENN FRANKEL: But didn’t those officers fail to bring democracy to Egypt?

MICHAEL OREN: Yes, they did. And some people might say that George Bush should have looked at that experience and decided against invading Iraq. And yet the setback in Egypt never prevented other American leaders, such as Woodrow Wilson, from trying to democratize in the Middle East. At the height of World War II, Roosevelt was sending personal emissaries to the Middle East to promote native independence. His hope was that the region would one day merge into a United States of the Middle East, based on the American federated model.

GLENN FRANKEL: It is astonishing when you read the book to see how we are capable, generation after generation, of reproducing the same mistakes and the same hopes. You quote one British diplomat complaining how the Americans see a budding George Washington in every Middle Eastern revolutionary. Have we been idealistic or naive or both?

MICHAEL OREN: I think we have been American. I think that there are certain factors that are hard-wired into the American perception of the world and of the Middle East in particular. Americans are especially connected to this area from their bible reading, their dependence on oil, and their fascination with the Middle Eastern fantasies that have long been a Hollywood mainstay. Americans, I stress in the book, have traditionally regarded the Middle East as a type of mirror in which they can glimpse themselves. They often don’t see the region for what it is, its unique characteristics and cultures.

GLENN FRANKEL: There’s a very poignant moment in the book, in 1919, when Felix Frankfurter representing American Zionist groups meets with Prince Feisal, who is the commander of the Arab revolt, in Paris. Feisal serves him coffee and he praises the Jews as cousins in race and wishes them a hearty welcome home to Palestine. You can’t help but think that there were possibilities for peace then. What went wrong?

MICHAEL OREN: Unfortunately, the Arab nationalist movement quickly condemned that statement and later Feisal himself denied ever having made it. So there was little the United States could really build on there. But the United States did work to establish ties between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Starting in 1813 and continuing through to the 1920s, the State Department developed a tradition of appointing American Jews as ambassadors to the Middle East on the quaint notion that American Jews formed a natural link between Christian America and the Muslim Middle East. The practice became so entrenched that by 1912, when he was appointed ambassador to Istanbul, Henry Morgenthau protested to Woodrow Wilson that the job had become a Jewish sinecure. “How would you feel if the ambassadorship to Sweden were reserved for Presbyterians?” he asked. Amazingly, many of these American Jews, most of whom were German-born, felt a strong kinship with the Arabs. The book contains a protocol of a conversation between Simon Wolf, the American consul in Cairo, and the Egyptian nationalist leader Ahmed Urabi in 1882. Wolf tells Urabi Pasha that he supports Egyptian nationalism both as an American who believes in freedom as well as Jew who remembers the long history of brotherhood between the Muslims and the Jewish people.

GLENN FRANKEL: Your book suggests that Israel has been an important factor in America’s involvement in the Middle East. What are the roots of that relationship?

MICHAEL OREN: The idea of America and the idea of a Jewish state are very closely interwoven. It goes back to the time of the Puritans who conceived themselves as the new Jews and the New World as the New Canaan. That immediately established a sense of kinship between them and the old Jews and the old Promised Land. Since then, many Protestants in the United States have seen it as their religious and national duty to help fulfill God’s promises to rescue the Jews from exile and repatriate them to their ancestral homeland. Take, for example, a book published in 1844, The Valley of Visions, that became a bestseller and which called on the United States to lead the way in recreating a Jewish state in Palestine. The book was written by the head of New York University’s bible department, George Bush, a direct ancestor of two American presidents of the same name.

GLENN FRANKEL: Then oil was discovered in the Middle East and changed the nature of America’s involvement. Did oil make Americans more concerned with self-interest than with their ideals?

MICHAEL OREN: The book tells the interesting story of how ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi dynasty, became acquainted with the United States through the work of American missionary doctors working in the Arabian Peninsula. Then, when he wanted to find a partner to help him find oil in the Arabian desert, ibn Saud remembered those selfless Americans and chose them over the British and the French. The advent of oil was also connected to an expression of American faith in the Middle East. Since the late 1940s, however, when the United States became very dependent on Arab oil, the power component of America’s involvement in the region grew exponentially. That doesn’t mean that dreams and ideals diminished, only that that they became more intertwined with considerations of profit and power.

GLENN FRANKEL: The last sixty years, as the book emphasizes, has been the period of American ascendancy in the Middle East. We have taken over the role that the European powers used to play in the region—or so it seems to many of the people living there. They see us as supporters of autocratic regimes, as patrons of Israeli settlements, and promoters of profligacy in the Persian Gulf. And it is not only the Muslim extremists who regard us in this way, but some of the same people with whom we used to work so closely and whom we still want to befriend.

MICHAEL OREN: Certainly there is a lot of Middle Eastern anger not only against America but against the West in general. But since the fall of the British and French empires in the Middle East much of this animosity has been directed at the United States. This is not to say that all of this rage is baseless. Nevertheless, it’s important to consider America’s policies toward the region within an historical context. Yes, the United States has backed autocratic regimes and contributed to Saudi profligacy. But at the same time America has worked to assure the independence of some of its worst enemies in the Middle East—Iran, Libya, and Syria. During World War II, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing Middle Eastern infrastructure, and later played a pivotal role in ending British and French colonialism in the region. Hundreds of presidential workdays and countless millions of dollars have been spent seeking a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. No other nation in the world has done that.

I think that the basic impulse of going into Iraq and trying to democratize and create a civil society, misguided though it may have been, was basically well intentioned. The point is to weigh the narrative of American involvement in the Middle East in historical balance. That is the objective of this book.

GLENN FRANKEL: So are we always fated to be both misunderstood and misunderstanding, or is there a place to go from there?

MICHAEL OREN: I think that with a greater sense of their task in the Middle East, Americans can proceed with a clearer vision of what their future in the region can and should be. There should be a deeper appreciation of the fact the United States, with all of its best intentions and its vast resources, can only affect so much change in this region-- that the Middle East is not a mirror of the United States. Americans would do well to heed the advice of General George McClellan, who visited the Middle East in 1872. As long as Americans refuse to truly see the people of the Middle East, he said, to acknowledge that they have a distinct culture civilization, but rather insist on treating them as another breed of Americans, then we will be fated to misunderstand them.

GLENN FRANKEL: I’d like to conclude by going back to my opening question. You’ve written this comprehensive book—what was the biggest challenge you faced?

MICHAEL OREN: The greatest challenge, as with all books, was keeping my reader’s interest. This was relatively easy in my previous book on the Six-Day War, which began with one set of very engaging characters—Nasser, King Hussein, Moshe Dayan, and President Johnson—and concluded with the same set of characters. In this book, the reader is presented with different characters every few pages. So first there was a need to identify extraordinary people who would exemplify America’s experience in the Middle East. And I was fortunate to be able to find many exceptional individuals such as George Bethune English, the 1807 Harvard graduate who became a general in the Egyptian army and a secret agent for John Quincy Adams. Or William Frances Lynch, the U.S. Navy Captain who led the first expedition from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea in 1847.Or Harry Truman. I felt privileged to be writing about them.

By in additional to bigger-than-life characters, I needed themes that could bind the entire narrative. Again, the Six-Day War book was about a single week in history; this book covers 230 years. For years I’d been noticing how America’s involvement in the Middle East tended to follow distinct patterns. Later, I named these themes power, faith, and fantasy. They provide the frame around the characters’ portraits. They are the context through which, I hope, Americans can gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their current relationship with the Middle East.

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