Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.(Book review)

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. By Michael B. Oren. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007. Pp. xxi, 737. $29.95.)

Israeli scholar Michael B. Oren has a Ph.D. in history and is a fellow at the Shalem Institute in Jerusalem, a conservative think tank backed by William Kristol. This sweeping account of America and the Middle East has all the trappings of scholarship, including one hundred twenty-seven pages of footnotes and bibliography. But despite the author's often brilliant prose and occasionally balanced comments, his ultimate goal is to persuade American readers that support for Israel should be a paramount concern now and in the future as it was in the past. The Puritans backed a Jewish return to Zion as did a midnineteenth-century preacher named George Bush, ancestor of the American presidents. The corollary of this argument for support of Israel, supported by misrepresentations of sources, is that Arabs who oppose Zionism only understand force and that military action was and still is the only way to resolve issues in the Middle East.

Oren uses the Barbary wars of the late eighteenth century, when North African rulers preyed on shipping of many nations and held captive sailors for ransom, to establish a recurrent motif of an America threatened by Arabs and Islam. Quotations abound, providing American impressions of Arab treachery and the uselessness of negotiating with the deys of Algiers unless backed by force. The author provides reality, as opposed to fantasies about harems and desert romance. The "shrewd and hard-nosed" American negotiator remarked that "Islamism ... requires little instruction ... [and] seems peculiarly adapted to the conceptions of a barbarous people" whose piracy, for Oren, "had threatened America's survival" (74-75).

Beliefs to the contrary are the "fantasy" in the title that must be countered by "power" and Christian "faith." Oren condemns the Eisenhower administration for opposing the Israeli-French-British joint attack that sought to depose Egypt's Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1956 Suez crisis: "IS]purred by romantic notions of Middle Eastern nationalisms [fantasy[ and an anticolonialist creed, the United States had banded together with its perennial Soviet enemy against its European friends and saved an Egyptian dictator whom [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles had planned to depose" (516). Oren makes no mention of Israel's contributions to Egyptian-Israeli tensions, nor does he explain how, in the midst of nationalist liberation movements against European colonialism, Britain and France remained "the two powers most capable of safeguarding the Middle East" (515). His comments suggest sympathy for Western imperialism in the region then and now.

America's misguided actions at Suez were encouraged by the Foreign Service officers interpreting the region who were "Arabists." For Oren, Arabists are people who continually questioned Israel's role as a stabilizing force in the Middle East; he fails to note that they critically analyzed Arab policies as well. Oren contrasts these Arabists with the ...