The Middle East and the United States

History, Politics, and Ideologies

David W. Lesch, David W. Lesch, Mark L. Haas, David W. Lesch, Mark L. Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429950711
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Middle East and the United States brings together scholars and policy experts to provide an empirical and balanced assessment of US policy in the Middle East primarily from the end of World War I to the present. Carefully edited by David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, this text provides a broad and authoritative understanding of the United States' involvement in the Middle East.

The sixth edition is significantly revised throughout, including a new part structure and part introductions that provide students with greater context for understanding the history of the United States and the Middle East. The five parts cover the watershed moments and major challenges the United States faces in the Middle East, from the Cold War proxy wars and the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the Gulf wars and the upheaval in the region post-Arab uprisings. Three new chapters-on the Golan negotiations, US-Saudi relations, and the US fight against al-Qa'ida and ISIS-make this the most current and comprehensive book on the United States' involvement in the Middle East

PART I

The US Enters the Middle East

US involvement in the Middle East has spanned the breadth of this country’s existence, beginning most dramatically with President Thomas Jefferson’s administration, which tried to stop pirating by the North African (or Barbary) provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s. This was a war to ensure freedom of navigation on the high seas, which was essential for US trade, as the new republic no longer enjoyed British naval protection. Aside from this early encounter, US interaction with and interest in the Middle East during the nineteenth century was limited to the private activities of missionaries and merchants. In the twentieth century, however, World War I propelled the United States onto the world stage—and into European politics—in a role it had neither sought nor experienced before. As the war was winding down, the United States quickly developed an interest in the disposition of the Middle East provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The result was Washington’s first significant official foray into the region: the King-Crane Commission was sent to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Anatolia to inform American policy on the future of the region. Nonetheless, no US administration gave the region a high priority during the interwar years (1918–1939), although there was some interest in the growing involvement of multinational oil companies in the Middle East.

The strategic value of the region became clear in World War II, when, in 1942 and 1943, Anglo-American forces attacked and defeated German-Italian forces in the North African campaign. Soon the realization that the reconstruction of Europe and Japan—as well as the postwar economic boom in the United States—would become more and more dependent on Middle East oil (more than two-thirds of the world’s known reserves) boosted the policy significance of the region in the eyes of Washington’s policymakers. Moreover, the strategic value of the Middle East became linked to the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States came to believe that it was the only nation that could successfully prevent Moscow from extending its influence in the region in the wake of the weakened British and French imperial positions. As a result, the Middle East became a policy priority for post–World War II administrations. The emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 reinforced US interest in the Middle East, but this event also complicated Washington’s relations with, and objectives toward, the Arab world, as Arabs increasingly perceived US and Israeli interests as being one and the same. Complication and complexity came to define the US–Middle East relationship in the aftermath of World War II and the initial stages of the Cold War, especially as it became intertwined with the decolonization process, Arab nationalism and state building, and the emerging Arab-Israeli conflict.

Part I of this book, “The US Enters the Middle East,” examines some entry points into the region since the beginning of the republic. In Chapter 1, Robert Allison looks back at America’s views and interactions with the Middle East during the earliest years of the republic, showing how many Americans held a distorted image of the region and Islam and how these misperceptions contributed to the Tripolitan War. In the post–9/11 world in which we live, it seems, as Allison poignantly observes, that some perceptions have not changed all that much.

Next, James Gelvin examines the King-Crane Commission, which emanated from the idealistic intentions of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, enunciated near the end of World War I—particularly that of self-determination for subject peoples—and was ostensibly created to assess the wishes of the native population in Syria regarding postwar independence. The commission did not quite fit the reality of European politics—or, for that matter, American politics—and as Gelvin points out, it was not as idealistic as it seemed, since it simply reflected and transferred democratic elitism. After examining the King-Crane Commission from the Syrian perspective, Gelvin concludes that the commission actually established a pattern for subsequent US encounters with nationalism and state building in the Middle East that had unforeseen and often deleterious results for both the United States and the region.

The great divide of World War II awakened policymakers to the necessity of a more active and goal-oriented foreign policy commensurate with the onset of the Cold War and related regional issues. Yet there was a strong desire rooted in the American heritage to portray the United States as anything but a second-generation imperialist trying to trade places with the Europeans. This schizophrenia in US diplomacy toward what was then called the Third World in the immediate post–World War II period can particularly be seen in the Muhammad Mussadiq crisis of 1953, when covert efforts primarily engineered by the United States succeeded in overthrowing the popularly elected Iranian prime minister. At the time, Washington and London thought Mussadiq would tilt Iran toward the Soviet Union, which was viewed as an unacceptable strategic setback that could lead to a potentially disastrous superpower confrontation. The Mussadiq crisis reveals how the United States began almost instinctively to follow in the footsteps of British imperialism, demonstrating a preference for the status quo rather than the forces of change. This episode is examined in Chapter 3 by Mark Gasiorowski, who details—and is critical of—US policy in the matter. In an insert in the Gasiorowski chapter, Sir Sam Falle, a high-level official in the British embassy in Tehran at the time of the crisis, provides an on-the-ground viewpoint, and he maintains that US and British actions were correct, illuminating the at-times differing perspectives of historians looking backward and diplomats living forward.

Peter Hahn closes this section by offering a description of this transitional stage in US diplomacy toward the Middle East as strategic necessities of the Cold War became the paramount consideration. In Chapter 4, he examines Washington’s relationship with Egypt from the last stage of the King Farouk regime to the early Nasserist period, ending with the Suez crisis and war in 1956.

CHAPTER 1

AMERICANS AND THE MUSLIM WORLD

First Encounters

Robert J. Allison

Before the geographic area we now call the Middle East was called the Middle East, before the British colonies on the North American mainland became the United States, and before petroleum powered the world’s economy, Americans and Muslims had a strange and profound encounter. This encounter was part of the long afterglow of the Crusades, as when English mercenary John Smith, fighting for the Austrians against the Ottoman Turks, was captured in Transylvania. Smith killed his Muslim captor and escaped, returning by way of Russia to England, which he left again, this time to sail west and found the colony of Jamestown. In 1645, as novelist and naval historian James Fenimore Cooper tells us, a ship built in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fought an Algerian ship in the Atlantic, in what Cooper called the first American naval battle. In the 1680s, New Yorkers raised money to redeem sailors captured in North Africa, and in 1700, an American sailor returned to Boston from captivity in Algiers. The Puritan clergy used his story of captivity and resistance to Islam to bolster the faith of their flocks.

THE MUSLIM WORLD AS COUNTERPOINT TO AMERICAN VALUES

Eighteenth-century American and European literature made the Muslim world a counterpoint to the idea of individual autonomy, the central feature of the emerging American ideology. Political writers, such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in England, the authors of Cato’s Letters, and Montesquieu in France, author of the Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws, used Muslim states such as Morocco, Turkey, and Algiers as examples of how not to construct political societies. The American colonists who rebelled against England in 1776 and then set to forming their own political society had not only read these books but incorporated them into their way of thinking. In the Barbary states of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, at least as it was presented to them by European writers, Americans saw an example of the kind of political society they did not want to create.

Travelers and other observers saw signs of decay in Muslim societies, and Americans were determined to avoid the causes and thus prevent the symptoms. The most influential book on the subject was Constantin-François Volney’s The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolution of Empires (1792), a meditative reflection drawn from his travels in Egypt and Syria. The Ruins speculated on how the great Mesopotamian civilization came to collapse, and Volney found the answer in political intolerance fed by religious fanaticism. President Thomas Jefferson found Volney’s Ruins so important that he undertook to translate it, enlisting the help of American diplomat and poet Joel Barlow.

This ideological picture of the Muslim world was colored by the experiences of American sailors held captive in Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco. Between 1785 and 1815, a dozen American ships were captured by the North African states, which held the sailors hostage. This captivity forced American leaders to grapple with a variety of problems: What was the responsibility of the US government to its citizens? Should the United States pay ransom for citizens held captive? Should the United States pay tribute to foreign powers in order to protect its citizens? Different American leaders had different responses to these questions. John Adams calculated that paying tribute to Algiers would be less expensive than fighting a war, that Americans were the most reluctant people on earth to pay the kind of taxes that would be required to build a navy, and since Britain and France paid tribute to Algiers, there was no harm in Americans emulating their example. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, believed it would be essential to American liberty to fight Algiers and Tripoli, not only to protect American citizens but to demonstrate to England and France that Americans were a different sort of people and would not engage in the kind of corrupt diplomacy of Europe. Jefferson’s assertion of America’s “difference” won the day, and one of his administration’s first acts in 1801 was to send an American fleet to the Mediterranean to blockade Tripoli. The pope praised the American navy for subduing Tripoli, accomplishing what the Christian nations of Europe had been unable, or unwilling, to do.

The captivity of American sailors in Algiers raised another issue, one directly related to the idea that Americans were less corrupt and more noble than Europeans and that Americans had created a political society whose virtue would endure forever. The Americans who wrote about their captivity in Algiers called the experience slavery. The irony of Americans being held as “slaves” in Africa was lost on very few. Benjamin Franklin’s last published work was a parody of a Georgia congressman’s defense of African slavery in America, putting the Georgian’s words in the mouth of a Muslim official justifying the enslavement of Christians in Algiers. Royall Tyler, author of the first American play, wrote a novel entitled The Algerine Captive, connecting American captivity in Algiers to American complicity in the African slave trade.¹

American misunderstanding of the Muslim world rested on a profound ignorance of the Islamic religion, Muslim society, and the wild misinterpretations of the prophet Muhammad, who was known to eighteenth-century European and American writers as “Mahomet.” Puritan minister Cotton Mather contrasted the liberty with which Europeans and Americans could reason with the tyranny of Muslim society. Heaven shone on “our Parts of the Earth” in allowing “Improvements of our modern Philosophy,” while no follower of the “thick-skull’d Prophet” was permitted to question the scientific truths revealed to Muhammad.²

We do not know where Mather learned about Muhammad, but the only English-language biography of Muhammad had been written in 1697 by Anglican clergyman Humphrey Prideaux. Prideaux’s interest in Muhammad was only coincidental to his real purpose, which was to expose the folly of religious indifference. Prideaux had planned to write a major work on Constantinople’s fall to the Muslims in 1453. But his growing alarm at the state of English society, the “giddy humour” with which too many young people embraced “fashion and vogue” rather than religion, and the ease with which men and women criticized the church alarmed Prideaux, and he wrote his book on Muhammad as a sober warning. Mecca had been a prosperous trading town, the people had been more attentive to their commercial interests than to their spiritual needs, they had allowed the faith of their fathers to degenerate, and Muhammad had exploited their religious laxity to impose his own religious and political agenda. The Muhammad emerging from Prideaux’s work, and from the other English-language tracts on Islam, was an ambitious man. His ambition found a religious outlet, and the Meccan merchants’ religious indifference allowed him to secure his religious tyranny.³

Prideaux’s “Mahomet” was a warning sign in the young American republic of the 1790s. Many Americans welcomed the French revolution, which enshrined liberty and reason in the place of monarchy and tradition. But others worried about its consequences, and in France’s revolution they saw anarchy that would ultimately be replaced by tyranny. Vice President John Adams reached back into French history, writing a series of essays warning about the consequences of anarchy and disorder. In England, Edmund Burke warned in Reflections on the Revolution in France that liberty would be the victim of equality. Thomas Paine responded to Burke with his The Rights of Man, which seemed, on its arrival in America, to be as much an answer to Adams as to Burke. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had an advance copy of Paine’s pamphlet and sent it to the printer with a note praising Paine’s attack on “the political heresies” that had lately sprung up, confident that “our citizens would rally again round the standard of common sense.” Paine’s book was printed in America with Jefferson’s endorsement on the cover. American readers took Jefferson’s jab at “political heresies” as a reference to Vice President Adams. In response to this perceived attack on Adams, his son, John Quincy, writing under the name Publicola, compared Jefferson to “the Arabian prophet” who called on “all true believe...