John Cole: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Cole. I'm the Director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is the reading promotion arm of the Library. Our job is to spread the word about reading. We do it in many ways through talks such as this one today at the Library of Congress, through state centers for the book in every state, through other programming including the National Book Festival, and this afternoon's author Michael Oren was also at the National Book Festival this last year, and we're very pleased to have a return visit from him and pleased that you're here. This talk is being videotaped for showing later on the Center for the Book's and the Library of Congress's Web sites, and with that in mind, I'd like to remind you to please turn off all beepers. We also are going to have -- all things electronic, including beepers -- we also are going to have a book signing following Michael's talk, and we would invite you to stay for that as well. We anticipate the talk lasting around 40 minutes with 20 minutes for questions and answers. I know Michael has answers; I hope you have questions. But if you ask a question, you're also giving the Library permission to have you on our videotape which will make you part of the program that you can enjoy later on the Center for the Book's Web site. As you know, it's great fun to be able to both promote books but also to talk about substantive books that are historical and also are real insights in today's culture and, of course, what could be closer to the main reasons and concerns for the United States' concerns in the Middle East than the history of the Middle East, and we're very lucky to have the story about the history of the intertwining between America and the Middle East told to us today by Michael. Power, Faith and Fantasy was published, his book, in July 2006, and the edition that we'll be selling today is newly updated with an afterward dated in 2007, and if you think of just what's happened in the past year, it gives you an insight and some thinking about how our involvement not only has increased dramatically but the stakes have been raised, I think, This event is part of a series that the Center for the Book sponsors that concentrates on books that also help show off the resources of all libraries, but of course in particular the Library of Congress, and in preparing this book, and you will see, if you look at the footnotes as we librarians do, and the sources, you'll see that our author used several manuscript collections at the Library of Congress including the papers of Amin Rihani, FDR -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- Henry Morganthau, James M. Landis, Oscar Straus, and this being the Library of Congress, of course Thomas Jefferson. Michael Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an academic research center in Jerusalem. He is the author of the best-selling, before this book, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East published in 2002 which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; a history of the 1956 Sinai Campaign, published in 1993, and dozens of scholarly and popular articles on the history and politics of the Middle East. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and many others. I also learned in arranging for this talk that Michael Oren is a novelist, and as a special treat to him and also for the publisher of this novelist, we will have several copies of one of his recent novels up for sale along with the paperbound edition of this book. It's my pleasure now to turn the floor over to Michael Oren. Michael... [applause] Michael Oren: Can I borrow this? Can I borrow the book for a second? I want to show something. Male Speaker: Of course. Michael Oren: Thank you so much, John. What a delight and honor it is to be back at this nonpareil institution, the Library of Congress, and John mentioned that if you look in the index, you look in the bibliography, you see many references to collections that were garnered here, but two that you didn't mention, interestingly enough. This picture, the front cover, was found at the Library of Congress. Also the inside cover, there was a, in 1909 the Great White Fleet that had been created by Teddy Roosevelt made its maiden global voyage and became the largest naval force ever to traverse the Suez canal. It closed the Suez Canal town for three days, and in the course of crossing the Suez Canal, many of the sailors were given a 24-hour leave to Cairo. Later these sailors published a journal, and album of their journey of which this picture is one. There are several pictures inside which were also taken from the Library of Congress. We found these pictures from several Web sites, but it was only here there that you had the 300 pixels per inch, the PPI that you needed for cover-grade reproduction, so thank you for that. And you mentioned the papers of Amin Rihani. Amin Rihani was an Arab-American, a great poet. Many people remember Kahlil Gibran today, but not many people remember Amin Rihani who was actually, I think, a much better poet. But the White House issued a statement several weeks ago during the President's journey to the Gulf saying that he needed something to talk about Arab-American legacies, and some of his advisers produced this book, and they look in the index and they came up with a story of Amin Rihani which apparently President Bush told to the Saudi king. I wonder with what impact. I hope he was impressed. In any event, let's not begin with recent history today. Let's begin with a flight of fancy, if you will. I'm going to ask you to imagine something. Imagine that you are all high-ranking American diplomats. I know this is not so hard in Washington. Imagine that you are high-ranking American diplomats who have been assigned by their government to undertake a very delicate mission abroad. You are assigned to conduct negotiations with a representative from an Arab nation that has declared war against the United States. And you proceed to some undisclosed location in Europe. You meet this Arab emissary and you say to him, "America does not want war with your nation. We don't want war with any nation in the Middle East. Americans really want to conduct their trade freely in this vital area without, free of attack, depredation. America wants peace." So you make your ardent case and then this Middle Eastern diplomat turns to you and says, "No, we want war. We have this holy book. The holy book is called the Quran, and the Quran enjoins us as believing Muslims to wage a holy war against all infidel states. The United States is an infidel state; therefore, we must attack you, we must enslave your inhabits, and our holy book further tells us if any of our soldiers are killed in the process of conducting this campaign, they will alight immediately to paradise." So this is the response of your Middle Eastern interlocutor. What then, on the basis of that response, is your recommendation to the U.S. government? Well, if your recommendation is that America has no choice but to defend itself against this Middle Eastern threat, America has no choice but to go to war in the Middle East, if that is your recommendation, then it would have echoed the recommendation of the first high-ranking American diplomat to conduct precisely such a mission abroad in Europe to meet with the Middle Eastern emissary who had declared war, and his name was Thomas Jefferson, and the month was March, and the year was 1785, and Jefferson had been sent by Congress, first to London, then to Paris, to meet with one Abdul Rakman Anujar [spelled phonetically] who was the emissary of the pasha of Tripoli, Tripoli, one of the four so-called Barbary States, Tripoli, what is today Libya; along with Tunis, today's Tunisia; Algiers, contemporary Algeria; and Morocco, the Barbary states that were piracy-sponsoring states. They sponsored pirate attacks against merchant vessels in the Mediterranean, and they were attacking American merchant ships, and they were enslaving their crews, plundering their cargo and actually posing a mortal threat to the nascent United States. America, a seafaring nation, heavily dependent on its foreign trade, 20 percent of its foreign trade went through the Mediterranean to the East. Any nation that threatened that 20 percent threatened the United States' very existence, and that was just the beginning of the bad news. The worst news was America had no means of defending itself. America had no navy. America had managed to come to the Revolutionary War without a single warship intact. They were all sold off, enslaved, destroyed, and worse than worse, America had no means of creating a Navy. You may recall that the 13 states were then united under the Articles of Confederation. There is no central government, no means of raising taxes to create a naval force, certainly no means of protecting that force far from America's shores. And following the American Revolution of 1783 the Barbary pirates began to attack American ships. Now the relationship of the Barbary pirates, you should know, was complex. Morocco proclaimed to be the first foreign nation to recognize the United States after it declared independence. The second treaty ever signed by United States, after the Anglo-French Treaty, was the Moroccan-American treaty. There's a facsimile of it in the book. You'll see Thomas Jefferson's signature, John Adams signature and right below it the signature of the Moroccan emperor in Arabic with an Islamic date on it. That's America's second ever treaty, but by the mid-1780s is all that was forgotten. The rich were attacking these American ships, opposing these mortal threats to the American economy and in the face of that threat, a great many Americans said we can't fight back, we're going to have to emulate the age-old European practice of bribing the Pirates, paying them off. They called it rather euphemistically paying tribute to the pirates and within time, American was spending about one-fifth of its federal budget in bribes to Middle-Eastern pirates. It was literally breaking the federal economy. And there was really no opposition to this policy among prominent American leaders, with one exception. The exception was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson believed the American people had a certain temper that distinguished them from Europeans. Americans did not abide by bribery. He believed that America was better off actually investing in a navy, even though investing in a navy would be more expensive than paying the tribute because ultimately you could not sign a treaty with the non-democratic governments of the Middle East. The next government would come along, the next ruler, the next pasha or emperor would come along and violate the treaty and the more you pay them off, the more piracy you would get. But Jefferson was really in the minority in the seven the 1780s. The majority of Americans were hesitant. They feared getting bogged down in a distant open ended potentially bloody conflict in the remote Middle East. And today over 220 years later, Americans are grappling with some of the same issues in their relations with this region. The question of whether to try to negotiate with our adversaries in the Middle East, tried to palliate them, conciliate them or whether to confront them and, if we have to, and can, to crush them. I think many Americans today would be surprised to hear that not only Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, had important Middle Eastern policies, but also Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln were deeply engaged in the Middle East. I think many Americans would be surprised to hear that one of the individuals implicated in the assassination plot against Lincoln managed to escape to and was arrested in Egypt, and during the Civil War, 500 Egyptian soldiers fought on North American soil. Surprised? How about this one. The original lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner spoke of humbled Muslims bowing down to the victorious flag of the United States. Imagine standing up in front of ball games and singing that one. [laughter] That would be politic. Or that the original Statue of Liberty showed a veiled Arab woman holding a torch. No kidding, picture of it right here. I imagine you would be surprised to hear this because once upon a time I would have been very surprised to hear this. Once upon a time, this is now a long time ago, when I was in graduate school, I believed, as I think many people in this country believed, that America's involvement in the Middle East began sometime in the aftermath of World War II with America's deepening dependence on Middle Eastern sources of oil, the coming of the Cold War to the Middle East, the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that's where it began, somewhere around the Truman-Eisenhower period. And then one day when I was in graduate school, I was listening to a lecture by my professor about the emergence of modern Egypt in the 19th century and he happened to mention parenthetically that in the late 1860s a group of Civil War veterans, former Confederate and Union officers, were sent by their commander, Chief of Army Tecumseh Sherman, to Egypt to help modernize the Egyptian army, and when they arrived in Egypt, much to their chagrin, these civil war veterans found that much of the Egyptian army was illiterate, and so the Americans decided to create literacy schools for Egyptian soldiers and when they opened the schools the next day the soldiers showed up with their kids. And so the Civil War veterans got into the business of teaching literacy to Egyptian school children, and while they were at it, they said why don't we impart American ideas to these Egyptians, and so the veterans of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were in Egypt in 1869 talking about patriotism, civic virtues, and democracy, 1869. And I'm listening to this as a graduate student absolutely fascinated because I had never heard anything about this, and I ran up to the library and much to my frustration, I find that there is absolutely nothing about this. There are many books about Britain in the Middle East, many books about France in the Middle East. There is not one comprehensive history of America in the Middle East. And flash forward several years to the aftermath of 9/11, suddenly Americans are being asked to make some very fateful decisions about their future in the Middle East, decisions that are not only going to impact their lives but the lives of much of the inhabitants of this planet, and there is no historical context in which to make these decisions. And suddenly the absence of that became glaringly apparent, so much so that one night while I was sitting with my editor and good friend in a restaurant in New York, he leaned across the table and said, "Okay, Michael, what is the one book about the modern Middle East that has not been written but must be written?" I said without hesitation, "American in the Middle East." And then my problems began. As John mentioned, my previous book about the Six Day War, I wrote upwards of 400 pages about six days of history. Now I was contracted to write about 230 years of history, and how was I about to get a handle on that monumental massive amount of information, and it occurred to me early on that the only way to cope with that volume was to identify the underlying themes that somehow bound together this vast long rich legacy of America in the Middle East. And the most obvious theme that I identified first, and I think it would be the theme that you would identify first is the theme of power. It plays such a big role in our involvement in the Middle East today. Power being the pursuit of America's vital interests in the Middle East to the application of power, sometimes military power, said other times economic and diplomatic power. Power certainly described the relationship that attained between the United States and the Middle East in the 1780s in the face of the Barbary pirate threat. By the spring of 1787 there were 127 American captives in the Barbary States. Imagine that today if there were 127 Americans captive somewhere in the Middle East. America was staging its first hostage crisis in the Middle East and again, no means of seeking the release, getting the release of these captives and so quite obviously when representatives from the States convened in Philadelphia, in the spring, May 17th at 87, to discuss the possibility of replacing the articles of confederation with a constitution, this Barbary pirates threat loomed extremely large. And if he would go into the ratification today's around in the proposed constitution, he would see their representatives from maritime New England which had extensive trade relations with the Middle East were getting up and saying if we don't have a constitution, which can't have the Navy. If we don't have a navy, these pirates are going to destroy our trade and it will kill us as a nation. But the arguments weren't exclusive to New England. You go further south, you go down to Georgia, to the Carolinas, and you'll see representatives to the Constitutional Convention getting up and saying if we don't have a constitution, we can't have a navy. If we don't have a Navy, will have Alger rinds as they were called back then, rather generically, landing on the shores of Georgia and enslaving our sons and daughters and we'll buy as a nation. And so by marshaling this mortal Middle Eastern threat, the proponents of a constitution managed to pass, propagate, ratified that document in 1789, and five years late in 1794 Congress passed into law a bill signed by George Washington allocating $688,000.43 for the creation of a U.S. Navy. And that Bill says the U.S. Navy is created specifically to fight in the Middle East. The boats were even designed to fight in the Middle East. Go visit the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor. It was designed to fight in the Middle East. And America goes to war. It goes to its first foreign war. It goes to its longest foreign engagement, the Barbary Wars, and with many, many setbacks. It's not 'til 1805 that that small group of U.S. Marines marches 500 miles across the Libyan desert to the shores of Tripoli -- that's where that comes from in the Marine anthem -- not 'til 1815 that Stephen Decatur for whom about 27 cities and towns in this country are named, and for this reason, he sails a fleet into Algiers and Tripoli Harbor, he vanquishes these pirates at canon point. And so America learns some of its first lessons in power from the Middle East. It is this Middle Eastern threat that impels 13 disparate states to unite to become a truly united states, a secular as opposed to a [unintelligible]. It impels these countries, these states, to create naval power for the first time, and for the first time to project that power thousands of miles from America's shores. And in creating a navy not to rule the waves, but to free the waves, America opened the sea-lanes to the Middle East to the agents of American faith. Now faith was the second theme that I identified in America's interaction with the Middle East. It turned out to be a far greater, larger dimension than I ever anticipated, ever imagined. Faith in the American context really is a two-sided dimension. There is the civic side of it. It's the side of patriotism, the side of civic virtues and democracy. It's the civic side of a faith of a puritan America going back to the 17th century that saw itself as a city on the hill, as a nation that was coming into being to bestow liberty not only on its own inhabitants but to bring freedom to all of humankind. It's an extraordinary event in human history, really nothing like it. But faith, in the American context, also has a purely religious meaning, a Christian, Protestant meaning. It also has its roots in the Puritan experience, a state, a Puritan America that saw itself as a new Israel and having a new Promised Land to bring salvation, not just to its own inhabitants but to all of mankind. Keep in mind who the Puritans were. They were a dissenting Protestant sect in England that had suffered terribly at the hands of the official church of England, and in an attempt to find the biblical model that would enable them to better cope with their suffering, the Puritans looked back into their Bible, at the New Testament and didn't find it so they look further back into the books they called the Old Testament. There they found something extraordinary. They found a God who spoke directly to his people in their language. He made them a promise. He promised to rescue them from exile, to restore them to the Promised Land. And the Puritans loved the story. They embraced it; they became the new Jews, the new Israel. England became the new Egypt, they escaped that cross that expense of the Atlantic Ocean, which they likened to the Sinai, and they landed in this new Promised Land. They immediately imposed the map of the old Promised Land on this new world. That's why if you're a little bit north of here, but not so much, in the Northeast, you'll find many, about a thousand towns and cities with biblical Hebrew names, your Bethlehems, and your Jerichos, and your Sharons, and your New Canaans, I just recently taught in Connecticut, and they're all there. They gave biblical Hebrew names to their children, the Davids and Rebeccas and the Sarahs and the Isaacs. They made Hebrew a mandatory language at universities. James Madison was a Hebrew major at Princeton. He failed. [laughter] He had to do an extra year. Trust me, tough language. They put Hebrew in the logos of Dartmouth, Colombia, Yale. Yale logo, Urim v'Thummim, put there by Ezra Stiles in 1770 because he spoke fluent Hebrew. Ezra Stiles. So closely been identified were the founding father generation with this biblical narrative that at the conclusion of the revolution in 1783 there was a debate over what would be the Great Seal of the United States. And several American leaders said we really should have that bald eagle clutching 13 errors in its talons, one for each state. You're probably familiar with that symbol. But another group of prominent Americans said no, the seal of the nation of the United States should be Moses leading the children of Israel out of bondage into freedom. And there was a hotly contested debate in Congress over what was going to be the Great Seal, and America came this close to having Moses as its symbol, and they lost out to the bald eagle, with all due respect to the bald eagle. But the designers of that Moses seal were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. That's how closely identified they were with this biblical narrative. Now for many of the founding father generation, they fact that they were the new Jews meant that they had a kinship relationship with the old Jews, it also meant they had a close association with the old Promised Land, then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire, and many of them concluded that to be good Christians, to be good Americans, that it was their divinely ordained duty to help the old Jews returned to their old Promised Land and recreate their kingdom, their state there. Thus was born the notion of restorationism, which was an immensely pervasive notion in colonial America through the 19th century, 20th century -- we'll see the 21st century as well. Elias Boudinot, the President of the Continental Congress, writes a book in which he predicts that when the Jews return to Palestine, they'll make the desert bloom like a rose. John Adams, second president, said that it was his most fervent wish that 100,000 Jewish soldiers, as well disciplined as the French army -- that is, the French army of 1798 -- would march back into Palestine and reclaim it as a Jewish kingdom. Abraham Lincoln in 1863 says that recreating the Jewish state was an idea, a dream, that was cherished by a great many Americans and that he, Lincoln, would personally pledge to help realize that dream once America had restored its unity after the Civil war. Perhaps the greatest single expression of this restorationist idea appears in a book which is located in this building, published in 1844 called Visions of the Valley and Visions of the Valley calls on the U.S. government to send the U.S. Navy back to the Middle East to detach Palestine physically, forcefully from the Ottomans and to give it to the Jews as a state. And Visions of the Valley becomes an antebellum best seller. It sells 1 million copies, 30 printings, if only, and it is authored by the chairman of the Hebrew Language Department of New York University, and his name is Professor George Bush. [laughter] And two days in the genealogy department in this Library of Congress enabled me to prove that Professor George Bush, 1844, Visions of the Valley is a forebear of two American presidents of the same name. Now for some Americans, merely dreaming about envisioning this recreate Jewish state was insufficient. Some American Christians felt impelled to actually go to Palestine and help to realize this vision, and starting in the 1830s, groups of American Christians did just that, particularly American Christian women, Harriet Livermore here of Washington D.C, Clarinda minor of Philadelphia picked up starting in the 1830s, went to Palestine to create colonies there, all with the same extraordinary goal. The goal was to teach the Jews how to farm. They had concluded that the Jews had been exiled for two thousand years. They had forgotten how to farm. They were also good Jeffersonians. Jefferson believed that the basis of any viable modern state was an agrarian economy; therefore these Americans thought it was their duty to reacquaint Jews with agrarian life. So they went to Palestine. They founded their colonies and found very quickly that the Jews did not want to learn how to farm, not from them anyway, and they suffered. They suffered terribly from disease and deprivation, exposure, attack by Arab bandits, but it didn't matter. Waves continued to go to Palestine. In 1855 Phillip Dickson of Groton, Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters left Massachusetts, resettled on an abandoned hill outside of Jaffa that they rather optimistically christened Mount Hope. The twin daughters married two German Lutheran brothers who were also preachers and restorationists. Their name were Frederick and Johan Grossteinbeck, and the Dicksons and the Grossteinbecks together set out to teach the Jews how to farm. They did not want to learn how to farm. And the Dickson colony was attacked again and again by Arab bandits and they suffered just unspeakable, unspeakable, horrors and still waves came. In 1867 George Adams from Indian River, Maine, picked up with 156 of his followers and moved to another hill outside of Jaffa. They established the Adams colony. If you go to downtown Jaffa, there are still two 1867 clapboard houses that they brought, prefabs sitting in downtown Jaffa. Nobody knows why they're there, but now you'll know. And they failed. Jews didn't want to learn how to farm. They contracted the plague; they died by the dozens, complete failure of the Addams Colony. It did not discourage anybody. None of this -- the restorationism remained the hit in the United States, and it spurred a completely different movement of Americans to the Middle East, A movement that would come to have profound, profound impact on the political course and map of the Middle East, and this movement was that of the American missionaries. The first two American missionaries that went to the Middle East, went to the Middle East were Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk. And on October 31, 1818, Fisk and Parsons delivered their parting sermon in Old South Church in Boston. You remember that from the Paul Revere story. And they got up in front of this packed church, and they said that there were going to the Middle East to reassemble the Jewish people in Palestine so that they would have a state. Once the Jews were ingathered then they would all convert en masse to Congregationalist Protestantism. [laughter] Failing that, Fiske and Parsons said that they wanted to convert the Arab Muslims, and so they left for the Middle East, and they found very quickly that the Jews did not want to ingather, not under their auspices, did not want to become Congregationalists, and they further found that if they tried to convert the Arab Muslims, they would lose their heads because proselytizing is a capital offense under Ottoman law. So in frustration they turned to building schools, and they built the first modern elementary, secondary schools in what is today Syrian Palestine. By the 1860s the success of waves of missionaries' work transforming the schools into what to become the first modern Western universities in the Middle East, what would become the American University of Beirut, the American University of Cairo, and through these institutions these American missionaries switched from one side of American faith, the religious side, to the civic secular side. They ceased teaching the gospel of Christianity and began teaching what they call the gospel of Americanism, democracy, patriotism. And they became deeply involved with generating a new identity in the Middle East, a secular Arab nationalist identity in which Muslims, Christians, even Jews could participate, and they became personally involved in the political struggle for Arab liberation, first from Ottoman rule and then after World War I from European colonial world, and to the degree to which aspirations of Arab nationalism after World War One became incompatible with the goal and dream of restorationism, which is already being called by its 20 century name Zionism, then you have one group of American Christians who are promoting recreated Jewish [unintelligible] statehood in Palestine, another group that's opposing recreated Jewish state in Palestine, and to a large degree, that debate goes on today. Open up the pages of Jimmy Carter's recent book. Here is a person who views himself as an observant Christian who approaches the Middle East through a religious lens, and he's very much at odds with many evangelical Christians in this country who are among Israel's greatest supporters. What's interesting for me as an historian is the fact that whether you are Jimmy Carter or whether you are pro-Israel evangelical, your approach to the Middle East is faith-based. You both emanate from the same faith type of American interaction with the Middle East. And finally, we come to the last theme, and it's the most elusive fame, potentially the most controversial theme. It's the theme of fantasy. And the fantasy of the Middle East, some of them you know, it's the highly romanticized, exoticized, eroticized image of the Middle East, an image of the Middle East of genies emanating out of bottles and carpets orbiting minarets and failed but available harem girls. Lots of harem girls. It is the highly centralized image of the Middle East that arouses America's first explorer of the region, a gentleman by the name of John Ledyard, a Dartmouth dropout who had lived with the Iroquois for 10 years, and an extraordinary man. He had sailed around the world with Captain Cook. He had probably seen more of the world than any other American of his generation, and a good friend of Thomas Jefferson. His correspondence with Jefferson and through his letters to Thomas Jefferson, we today get a window into what the Middle East looked like to America in 1788. That's when Ledyard landed in Egypt, and what the Middle East looks like to Ledyard is not very good. There is nothing mythical about this area. It's full of backwardness; it's full of poverty and sickness. There is one aspect, however, of the Middle East that absolutely enchants Ledyard. He looks out into the desert, and he sees Bedouin on camels, and he says to himself, well you know, these nomads are pretty much like our frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Why? Because like our frontiersmen, they love liberty. They hate being fettered with a tyrannical government. Unfortunately these particular desert frontiersmen are languishing under an Ottoman tyranny, but he speculates, Ledyard speculates, that if some Western power were to come along and remove that tyranny, then these liberty-loving nomads would rise up and embrace American-style democracy. Sound familiar? [laughter] 1788. Many of America's myths about the Middle East can be traced to one book, it was the second most popular book on the American Colonial bookshelf after the Bible, though you didn't display it alongside the Bible because the book was, even by 20th-century standards, rather pornographic. The book was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and you know some of those stories of Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and Shaharazad, story telling for her life, and some of the stories you probably haven't read -- those are the pornographic ones -- but Americans read these stories, and they had no other information on the Middle East, and they thought this is what the Middle East really looked like, and many of them literally were aroused to go off and see this area for themselves, and starting in the 19th century, first hundreds and then thousands of Americans follow in John Ledyard's trail, so much by the middle of the 19th century, Americans have surpassed English as the greatest number of tourists in the Middle East. They are snatching up all of the good hotel rooms in Damascus and prominent Americans begin to come, Ulysses S. Grant, Tecumseh Sherman, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, but also men of letters. In 1855 an American novelist, rather frustrated, I know the feeling, whose previous novel had only sold 3000 copies, a novel named Moby Dick, decided he needed a new inspiration of a great travel novel so in December 1855, Herman Melville packed two shirts and a toothbrush and went off to the Middle East, and he kept a very detailed diary. I strongly recommend it. It's borderline hallucinogenic and post-modern, and Melville goes with One Thousand and One Nights literally under his arm, and he finds that the Middle East bears no resemblance to the One Thousand and One Nights. He's completely despondent and really never writes the great novel. He does write a poem which I'll tell you about later. Nothing, nothing however -- the publications do not in any way discourage Americans from following this myth. Twelve years later another aspiring American writer travels to the Middle East to board a steamship out of Philadelphia called the Quaker City. He's got a contract from two American papers to publish his collected observations of the Middle East, and he publishes them under the ominous title of Innocents Abroad using for the first time his pen name Mark Twain. Innocents Abroad is about the Middle East. The Middle East makes Mark Twain. It's the largest-selling nonfiction book in the second half of the 19th century in this country, and Mark Twain has nothing good to say about the Middle East. He has nothing good to say about Americans in the Middle East, these people walking around with sledgehammers and lopping off pieces of pyramids. He calls them American vandals, and it stuck. Still Americans, waves and waves of them keep coming, and by the 20th century, these Middle Eastern myths are being uprooted by the burgeoning Hollywood industry, which makes some of its first blockbuster films on Middle Eastern fantasies. "The Sheik of Araby" that propels Rudolph Valentino to stardom, the hit song of the same year: I'm the Sheik of Araby, My heart belongs to thee. At night when you're asleep, Into your tent I creep. That's a fantasy. Now Hollywood makes dozens of these movies. If you're of my generation, you remember those Sinbad movies, and those Ali Baba movies. You get a little later, you get the Indiana Joneses and the Hidalgos and the Saharas and some of us were unfortunate enough to grow up on I Dream of Jeannie. There it is, "Master, Master." Remember? And so deeply ingrained were these Middle Eastern myths in the American imagination that I would reckon that in September of 2001 there was a segment of the population in this country that was dumbfounded to see that these berobed romantic figures left their balmy oasis, left their palm trees and their camels to come to this country and hijacked airliners and to crash them into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. Power, faith, and fantasy. These are the three themes that I found that bound together this disparate and rich narrative of Americans involved in the Middle East. Somehow sometimes they appear as individual themes. The Barbary pirates, the missionaries, John Ledyard, but more often than not they are engaged in some kind of dynamic with one another, often in opposition to one another. For example, faith meets up with fantasy. In December 1856 when Herman Melville visits the Dickson Grossteinbeck farm in Jaffa, and he writes about his experience there how these people are living in the mud and they're impoverished and the Jews don't want to learn how to farm, and he's very despondent, and about a month later, January 1857, the Dickson family farm is attacked by Arab bandits. This time they break into the compound. They knock Phillip Dickson on the head. Morally, he never recovers. The wife and twin daughters are brutally raped. Frederick Grossteinbeck is shot in the groin and dies an agonizing death, and the only member of the colony to escape unscathed is Johann Grossteinbeck, whom according to consular records at this point leaves Palestine, moves to California, Americanizes his name, and prospects for gold. Melville goes home and writes a 26,000-line poem called "Clarel" which I don't recommend to you, but it is a description of the rape of the Dickson colony there, but there's another reference to the rape of that colony in a more, I think, successful work of American literature called East of Eden that was written by Johann Grossteinbeck's grandson, John Steinbeck III whose grandfather had had lunch with Herman Melville in 1857 on an American colony in Palestine dedicated to recreating the Jewish state. Faith meets up with fantasy. Faith met up with fantasy again in 1867 when the Quaker City carrying the soon-to-be famous Mark Twain evacuated the 47 survivors of the Adams colony from the beach in Jaffa, and perhaps the only non-caustic passage in Innocents Abroad is his description of the decrepit state of these survivors of the Adams Colony, extraordinary. Faith trumps power. In 1917 when America entered World War I, and you'll recall America enters World War I against the central powers Germany and Austria-Hungary. The President Woodrow Wilson immediately declared war against those two countries. The question was would the United States go to war against the third member of the Central Alliance against the Ottoman Empire, which was the Turks, and there was a huge debate in this country. Congress, both Houses, were firmly in favor of going to war in the Middle East. The British and the French were already warring against the Turks. But Woodrow Wilson, who was the grandson and son of Presbyterian ministers, was very close to the missionaries in the Middle East, and the missionaries came to him and said, "Mr. President, if you go to war against the Turks, the Turks will do to the missionaries what they are doing to the Armenians. They will massacre them. So Woodrow Wilson never brought America into the War of the Middle East, perhaps the most single most fateful decision ever made by an American President in the Middle East because at the end of the war there were 1 million British soldiers in the Middle East, several hundred thousand French soldiers in the Middle East. There was not one American soldier anywhere in the Middle East, and guess which countries got to draw the post-World War One map of the Middle East? Not the United States. Faith really triumphed over power finally in 1948. 1948, after the U.N. had voted to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish state, the Jewish state was set to come into being on May 14, 1948. On May 12, there was a meeting in the White House between the president and the secretary of state. Secretary of State George Marshall, perhaps the most revered American of his generation, tells the president that if the president recognizes the Jewish state, a global catastrophe will ensue. The Arabs will cut off the oil to the west. Western Europe will fall to the Communists. American troops are apt to intervene in Palestine to save the Jews from massacre and then the Secretary of State Marshall adds the kicker, "Mr. President, if you recognize the Jewish state, I will not vote for you in the 1948 presidential elections." The president is Harry Truman. Harry Truman who had had a strict Baptist upbringing had been a member of a restorationist group called the American Christian Committee for Palestine. Truman listens to these arguments, says thank-you, retreats into the White House for the next 48 hours. He, too, was a diarist, but he wrote nothing in his diary during this period so we don't know what goes through his mind. All we know is that at 6:11 p.m. on May 14 -- it's 11 minutes after Israel declared its independence -- Harry Truman made the United States the first nation on Earth to recognize the recreated Jewish state. Now why would he do such a thing? Why would he go against the almost unanimous advice of the entire foreign policy-making establishment? The fact of the matter is we don't know because he didn't write anything in his diary. All we know is that several weeks later there was a delegation of dignitaries visiting the White House, and they ran in the hall. You know how the White House works. If you can get into the hall, you can run into the President, and the dignitaries are introduced to Truman as the President who helped create the state of Israel, and Truman takes umbrage. He says, "Helped create the state of Israel? Helped create the state of Israel? I'm Cyrus," he says. I know who knows their Bible here." People laugh. I'm Cyrus, of course, was the ancient Persian king who restored the Jews from exile, restored them to their holy land. I'm Cyrus. 1948 was really the watershed year; it's true. It was the year America woke up and found itself very independent on Middle Eastern sources of oil. It was the year that American gets embroiled in the Arab eastern conflict, the coming of the Cold War to the Middle East and is perhaps more significantly the year that the United States begins to replace Britain and France as the primary Western power in the Middle East and so becomes the heir to about a thousand years of antagonism between the Middle East and the west. And from that point on, American leaders have to labor terribly assiduously arduously to reconcile these countervailing impulses of power, faith and fantasy, and what you get is a lot of zigzagging. You have the Eisenhower administration in 1953 joining with the British to oust a popular Iranian prime minister, a nationalist named Mohammed Mossadeq whom the British and the Americans thought was getting a little bit too close to the Soviets and the Cold War, but three years later the same Eisenhower administration turns around and goes against the British, against the French to save another popular Middle Eastern nationalist leader named Nasser who have actually gotten very close to the Soviets during the Cold war. You have American forces going to war, going into battle in any means against the forces of Libya, Syria and Iran but it's almost universally forgotten that America played an instrumental role in securing the independence of Libya and Syria and Iran. American presidents supportive of the state of Israel but at various junctures, American presidents have put tremendous pressure on Israel to relinquish territories there were that were necessary for achieving peace. At times American has levied arms embargo on the eve of war is in the Middle East against Israel. Perhaps my favorite zigzagging, the Reagan administration of the middle '80s. Reagan administration sells missiles to the Iranians in an attempt to induce the Iranians to take fewer American hostages in Lebanon, therefore violating Thomas Jefferson's first rule in the Barbary pirates, the more you give in to piracy, the more piracy you're going to get, and they got more piracy. Since 1979 America has been engaged, American forces have been engaged almost enough uninterruptedly in operations against some adversary or another in Italy, so much so that those of us of a certain generation can remember back in the late '70s, '80s how the uniforms worn by American servicemen were the striped colors of Vietnam, green and today have morphed, they have burnished into a tawny Arabian brown. It's extraordinary; we actually wear the colors of the Middle East now in our uniforms. Then in March 2003 America invaded Iraq and for one gleaming moment, it all seemed to come together. Here with the purveyors of American power, the American forces patrolling the streets of Baghdad, the fabled capitol of One Thousand and One Nights, and they were there to impart an American-style democracy to a population that seemed at the time desperate to rise up and embrace that idea. And that moment has proven rather tragically fleeting. Today again American decision makers, policy makers are going to have to labor mightily to try to reconcile the pursuit of America's vital interest in the Middle East, and they are vital, while upholding the essential principles of American faith all the while learning to distinguish between myth and reality in this region. America will have to continue to project power in the Middle East. Iraq, the Middle East, it's not Vietnam. You cannot pick up and go home. America cannot disengage from the Middle East. The Middle East is not going to disengage from America whether through terror, whether through America's involvement in Middle Eastern economies which are absolutely critical, America will be part of the Middle East, and it will have a military dimension but the key I think is to know to that power does have its limits in the Middle East and elsewhere and power has to be used more prudently, more efficacious late in the pursuit of America's defense interest. Faith, know that upholding America's principles of democracy of human rights is absolutely essential, but also know that the limit to which these ideas and the way they are interpreted here can be transplanted to the Middle East is limited, that the people in the Middle East have their own ideas about what freedom and human rights are and they're not always Americas ideas. And finally separating that myth from reality. That's the hardest. Asking some very hard questions, not of all of which are being asked in this election year but in other years also, questions of exactly how long American forces will have to remain in Iraq, two years, three years, 20, 30 years questions of what are the real chances of achieving a breakthrough for Israeli-Palestinian accord given the fact that you have a weak government in Israel, a weak government in the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps the hardest question of all, what are the long-term ramifications, not only for the Middle East but for Americans themselves of a nuclear Iran? Just monumentally difficult complex questions, and the bad news is this book doesn't have any answers. [laughter] The book, listen, I wrote the book to share with you my enduring, really, unflagging fascination with this story. There's really no story like it. The story of over 230 years of America's legacy in the Middle East, and it's not just a legacy of military involvement. It is beyond, above all, a story of cooperation in the fields of education and medicine, in the arts and science and literature, just an ineffable story. I want to share with you my fascination about why the original lyrics to the "Star Spangled Banner" spoke about humbled Muslims falling down to the American flag, why the original statue of Liberty was a veiled Arab woman holding a torch. But most importantly, most crucially, fundamentally I want to create a context, a context of the past in which Americans who will still have to make a fateful decisions about their relationship to this crucial region, a context of the past in which you can begin to chart your future. Thank you, all. [applause] And now, a couple questions, please. And I will repeat the question. Sir... Male Speaker: "Star Spangled Banner," Francis Scott Key, did he have any link to the Middle East? Michael Oren: Yes, he did. He wrote the original lyrics to the "Star Spangled Banner" in 1805 to commemorate the successful shelling of Tripoli and Algiers Harbor by Stephen Decatur and his fleet, and I'm just drawing a blank on the other person he wrote it for, but I'll get it in the second. I know there's a street in Boston and Philadelphia named for him. Okay, he's in the book. It was set to a rather unsingable English drinking song, and after the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he revised the lyrics and that caught on, thankfully, because the original lyrics, like I said are very impolitic. It's interesting while that fact is widely forgotten by Americans, it is not forgotten by certain elements in the Middle East. And as a result, after 9/11, the U.S.S. Constitution moored in Boston Harbor was closed for two years by Homeland Security because the Constitution had taken part in several missions against the Barbary pirates, and there was a fear that al-Qaeda had not forgotten that fact and since the U.S.S. Constitution is still a commissioned U.S. warship, they read a role every morning, they raise the flag, they thought it would be a very good target for al-Qaeda and it was closed for a very long time. Female Speaker: Do you have any theory of why we are never taught in schools about this history? Michael Oren: Yes, because you're not, first you're not talk much about America's foreign policy in general, and secondly the degree that you are taught about foreign policy is overwhelmingly weighted either toward World War II or World War I, the Civil War, but mostly toward the west, America's involvement in the West, and it's the same degree that you're not taught extensively about America's involvement in China, you're not taught very much about America's involvement in the Middle East. The big difference is the Middle East today is so, so crucial to American security. I don't think you could, you could no longer afford not to teach this history. I'm very gratified to know that since this book publication, there have been a number of courses that have come to being on American campuses using this as a textbook, and I taught this class last semester at Yale, and it was the largest undergraduate humanities course which is very good, so a lot of people are learning this now, and it's a good thing. Yes, ma'am ... Female Speaker: I wonder why during history the U.S. never has asked somebody in Europe, for instance, about how the Middle East ticks because we have [inaudible] while experience with Middle East [inaudible]. Michael Oren: Well, some of that legacy is not necessarily a positive legacy. The Puritans -- I mentioned the Puritans earlier -- when they came into the new world they brought a tremendous amount of prejudice, European bred prejudice against the Middle East and against Islam in particular. You can read the sermons of a Cotton Mather and a John Edwards, and you'll see what amounts to Islam bashing. John Quincy Adams in the 1820s writes a 40-page essay against Islam. He probably never met a Muslim in his life. Now a tremendous amount of anti-Islamic feeling, there's a whole literature of anti-Muslim polemics that are available in this Library from the 18th and 19th century, and some have persisted to the 20th-century, so it's a legacy that also America has to grapple with and overcome. There was some hubbub a while ago about the first Muslim member of Congress, Ellis, swearing in on the Quran found in Thomas Jefferson's library. And I think in the end, he didn't sign swear on the Quran, I may be mistaken but if he didn't, I think he didn't -- Male Speaker: He did. Michael Oren: Well, it was a mistake. I tell you why. Not by swearing in on the Quran but because that particular edition was a 1734 George Sale's translation. He was an English lawyer and the introduction to that edition says that I am translating the Quran so that Christians will better understand their Mohammad enemies and readily defeat them. [laughter] That was very typical of the literature of the time. So not everything we get from Europe or the Middle East is so good. Male Speaker: Did you consider business an option in addition to or in place of power, faith, and fantasy? Michael Oren: Like business, American business, just business? Power, Faith And Fantasy is a framework for understanding American involvement. You could substitute for power; you could choose strategic interests. For faith, you could choose missionizing. For fantasy, you could choose romanticism. There are many euphemism, many synonyms, I decided on these. Male Speaker: [Inaudible] 20 percent of American business going on American bottoms through the Mediterranean. Michael Oren: Yes. Male Speaker: That's a substantial bit of business being done in that part of the world. Michael Oren: Power, I said the pursuit of America's interest, which would include financial interests, of course. I'll tell you where business played a role in the title. The original title was fantasy, faith and power and the marketers at Norton said no man would ever buy a book that begins with the word fantasy. You've got to reverse the order and start it with power. [laughter] Yes ma'am. Female Speaker: Do you see anything unique in the current situation regarding terrorism or is this part of a trend that goes all the way back? Where would you place that? Michael Oren: The facile comparison would be between the Barbary Pirates and the Middle Eastern terrorists and how American Thomas Jefferson was right. You couldn't placate the terrorists, you had to stand up and fight them. And there are parallels to be drawn but I wouldn't take them too far. One thing we're dealing with the state economy is back in the 1780s, 1790s, of North African states. Today you're dealing with the morphous terrorist groups whose funding may not come from states but may come from individuals and charities elsewhere. It's far more complex and even morally nebulous today, and certainly strategically more complex. You just can't send your navy over somewhere and bomb a harbor and assure that your people and your commerce are going to be safe. But I certainly see continuous the Power, Faith And Fantasy framework enables me as an analyst of the Middle East, and I serve as, for example, the CBS Middle Eastern analyst to understand things more readily. I mentioned that Woodrow Wilson was proud of saying that he was the grandson and son of Presbyterian ministers, and that's one of the reasons he was so ardent in his desire to bring peace to the Middle East. Several weeks ago Condoleezza Rice was visiting the Middle East, she was visiting Bethlehem, and she came out and made a statement that she was the granddaughter and daughter of Presbyterian ministers, and therefore she felt impelled to help bring a peace to the Holy Land. Faith plays a continuing role in America's relationship with this region because this region is so significant for American faith, and fantasy continues to play a role. I see it all the time, and power, needless to say, an immense role. John Cole: [Unintelligible] more questions. Michael Oren: Let me start from the left lest I be accused. Female Speaker: I was very interested in seeing what you had to say about this because lately I've been trying to learn a lot more about the modern history of Israel and to become really knowledgeable of biblical prophesy, and I think that plays a huge role and more and more people are starting to really acknowledge that, you know, things are happening that we never dreamed would happen before, and they're beginning to talk about the prophecies of Ezekiel, for instance, and how Ahmadinejad, who is President of Iran, thinks he is going to be fulfilling Islamic prophecy by wiping Israel off the map, and I don't think we should second-guess this, and I think he intends to do that if at all possible. Michael Oren: One of the great benefits of being an historian is that you only have to predict the past. [laughter] But I would fully agree with you that Iran under its current regime poses a prohibitive threat, not only to Israel but to many states in the Middle East, and not only because you have a government that's sworn to wipe Israel off the map that by many estimates is willing to give up 50 percent of its population to destroy Israel, but also because once Iran gets a bomb, it'll be almost impossible for Israel or any other state in the area including the United States to effectively combat terror. Iran will go on a nuclear alert, and the entire area will be pitched into panic, and once Iran gets a bomb, other Middle Eastern states have gone on record saying they will get a bomb. So the entire region is going to become a nuclear neighborhood, and basically once Iran gets the bomb, you can basically say goodbye to nuclear non-proliferation globally so Venezuela can get a bomb. So your reality in America is liable to change once and if Iran acquires nuclear weapons. We have one more, and we have two people. [Unintelligible]. John Cole: We have two more. Michael Oren: Two more, good, thank you. Male Speaker: How did those 500 soldiers happen to get involved in the U.S. Civil War [unintelligible]? Michael Oren: Ah, you missed my verbal [French]. I said they fought on North American soil during the Civil War. They were actually sent -- they were contributed, donated by the Egyptian pasha to the French army when it invaded Veracruz in 1863, and it's an extraordinary story. The French wanted the Egyptians because the French were deathly afraid of the Yellow Fever, and they thought these sort of paler Europeans couldn't stand up to Yellow Fever, they thought it was climatically inflicted, and they thought that the darker Egyptians would stand up to it better so they came to the Egyptians and asked for 500 soldiers. They got the 500 soldiers, they got to Egypt, and they contracted Yellow Fever, but they remained and they were replenished. And at the end of the civil war there is an extraordinary document of a conversation between the Egyptian Foreign Minister and America's Consul in Alexandria Charles Hale. It's actually reproduced in the book. Charles Hale says to the Egyptian foreign minister, "Well, we understand that you have 500 black soldiers in North America. That violates our Monroe Doctrine, and we want you to know that if you don't get those 500 black soldiers out of North America, we have a 100,000 black soldiers who may have to intervene in Egypt." It's in the book. And the Egyptian Foreign Minister said okay, and they withdrew the forces immediately. An interesting use of racist threat against the Egyptians. Male Speaker: Would you comment on this idea that our allegiance is first to our country? In that part of the world, I thought that [unintelligible] allegiance is not to these artificial boundaries -- Michael Oren: Right. Male Speaker: -- but rather to the tribe, the [unintelligible], the religion -- Michael Oren: Yes -- Male Speaker: -- it is so complex that it's almost a fantasy for us to think we can ever understand that and pull the strings and have the dominoes, you know, fall the way we want them to. Michael Oren: Right -- Male Speaker: You just put your finger on the central problem. I'm asked to repeat the question, but I think it's a problem, the fact that societies in the Middle East do not necessarily organize themselves along state lines. They organize themselves along tribal lines, and yet we in our foreign policy, because we are state-oriented in our allegiance and our worldview, are we acting according to fantasy in assuming that they can be like us? One of the wisest words ever spoken about the Middle East was spoken by George McClellan, the less-than-successful Civil War general and presidential hopeful. He traveled to the Middle East in 1872, and he wrote a series of articles for Harper's Magazine, which are wonderful articles, great writer, George McClellan, and he noticed that Americans look at the Middle East as you would a mirror. Americans look at the Middle East and say, "Well, these people are basically like us. The mirror's a little cracked, it's a little tarnished but if we put enough effort into it, we can make it look like us. There will be a United States of the Middle East. All we have to do is find a Middle Eastern George Washington." They actually used to say that. McClellan says that as long as Americans persist in this fantasy, and not recognize that the Middle East has its own cultures, its own civilizations, then Americans will be doomed to misunderstand this region. The fact of the matter is most of the states in the Middle East, their borders have been imposed by outside powers, most of them are families with armies, and if you take away the family, with the army, the tape begins to unravel. This is precisely what is happening in Iraq. It's one of the difficulties we have in creating a Palestinian state is finding something that binds together the disparate tribes. This is not to put a value judgment on tribally organized societies above state organized societies. Frankly, if I break my leg, I'd rather be treated by my tribe than by my state, but that is the reality, and it is a reality in the Middle East which consistently confounds American policy makers and is the reason for so much of American misunderstanding, and the tragedy in the Middle East whether it be in the Palestine situation or the Iraq situation or elsewhere. Male Speaker: Thank you. John Cole: Thank you. [applause] John Cole: We need to move to the book signing in order to squeeze it in and then an interview following that for the press, but I just want to once again -- Michael will sign at the table in the back behind this forum, and we have lots of books including his novel The Sand Devil, only 12 copies available. Thank you again, Michael. You not only know it well, but you tell it very well. We appreciate it. [applause] [end of transcript] LOC - 080207ctb1200 21 5/28/08