Resumo de Power Faith And Fantasy

In this book the author writes a series of fascinating and beautifullywritten stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries andtheir contact with Middle Eastern cultures. As a historian, Oren is morestoryteller than grand theorist, so as a study of the complex and contradictorymotives of American behavior, his book is a bit thin. Nevertheless, threepowerful themes emerge from his tales: that from the Founders onward, Americanshave repeatedly tried to transform Arab and Muslim peoples -- politically,spiritually and economically -- to conform to liberal and Christian principles;that since the days of the Puritans, many Americans have been obsessed with theidea of restoring Palestine to the Jews; and that from the colonial era to the present,many Americans have regarded Islam as a barbaric, violent and despoticreligion. Whether these purposes and perceptions have been intelligent ormisguided, based on reality or fantasy, Oren shows that they have been thedominant features of our foreign policy tradition in the Middle East. Oren demonstrates that suspicion and hostility toward Islamare almost as old as the nation. John Quincy Adams called it a fanatic andfraudulent religion, founded on the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel.This was partly religious prejudice, of course, but that prejudice wasreinforced by unfortunate experience. In the perilous early years of therepublic, the Muslim Barbary powers preyed on American shipping and capturedtortured and enslaved hundreds of innocent men and women. When John Adams andThomas Jefferson implored the pasha of Tripolito stop, Oren recounts, the pasha's emissary insisted that the Koran made itthe right and duty of Muslims to make war upon whichever infidels they couldfind and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners. George Washingtonraged- Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, orcrush them into non-existence. And Congress did create a navy in the 1790sprimarily to crush the Barbary powers andprotect American traders and missionaries. President Jefferson eagerly launchedthe war and ordered the permanent stationing of U.S. navy! As Oren relates, themodest number of 19th-century Americans who lived in the Middle East largely considered Islam a religion born of the sword, onethat was opposed to enlightenment and crushed all independence of thought andaction. They found the oppression of Muslim women appalling. Being Americans,they thought the best antidote was a thorough transformation of culture andsociety. Protestant missionaries utterly failed to convert Muslims toChristianity, but they did work to spread the gospel of Americanism:liberalism, technology and democracy. Over the next century, Americanpoliticians and policymakers repeatedly imagined they could liberalize a peoplewho seemed to them bursting with democratic aspirations, as one New Dealer putit in 1943. No act of international social engineering was more audacious thanAmerican support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the middle of animplacably hostile Arab world. But this idea, too, had deep roots. The earliestmembers of the Israel lobbywere the Puritan settlers, who even before they reached America had petitioned the Dutch government totransport Israel?ssons and daughters to the Land promised their forefathers for an everlastingInheritance. Their prominent heirs included John Adams, who imagined a hundredthousand Israelites conquering Palestine; Lincoln's secretary of state, WilliamHenry Seward; and, a century later, Woodrow Wilson, who delighted in thethought that he might be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.Thus, President Truman felt a deep sense of historical and religious destinywhen he recognized the newly created state of Israel in May 1948, comparinghimself to the ancient Persian king who also had repatriated!Critics from WorldWar I onward warned that American support for a Jewish state would produceunending war, severely dame America's otherwise amicable relations with theMuslim world and, after the discovery of massive deposits of Middle Eastern oilin the 1930s, endanger access to this vital commodity. Saudi Arabia's pro-American first king, AbdulAziz ibn Saud, flatly warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Jews have no rightto Palestine and that Arabs would die fighting to resist a Jewish state. Whenthe typically American president spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust, thetypically Arab king questioned the fairness of making the innocent bystander, Palestine's Arabs, payfor the crimes of others. If 3 million Jews had been murdered in Poland,ibn Saud reasoned, and then there was now room there for 3 million more. ManyMuslims' sentiments have not changed over the past six decades. And neither have those of many Americans. Despite all the crises of the pastyears, including the present war in Iraq,Oren predicts that the United Stateswill continue to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement. Policymakers will press on with their civicmission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana. Americanchurches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually.And Americans will regard the region as both mysterious and menacing, as theyhave for centuries, and will seek to transform it in their own image. Manytoday may want to disagree, but they will have to wrestle first with the longhistory of American behavior that Oren has so luminously portrayed.

Resumos Relacionados