Imagining the Middle East

The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967

Matthew F. Jacobs

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781469619095, 9780807834886
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869314
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

As its interests have become deeply tied to the Middle East, the United States has long sought to develop a usable understanding of the people, politics, and cultures of the region. In Imagining the Middle East, Matthew Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the region have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there.

Jacobs examines the ways in which an informal network of academic, business, government, and media specialists interpreted and shared their perceptions of the Middle East from the end of World War I through the late 1960s. During that period, Jacobs argues, members of this network imagined the Middle East as a region defined by certain common characteristics — religion, mass politics, underdevelopment, and an escalating Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and as a place that might be transformed through U.S. involvement. Thus, the ways in which specialists and policymakers imagined the Middle East of the past or present came to justify policies designed to create an imagined Middle East of the future. Jacobs demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

CHAPTER ONE
THE TASK … FALLS TO THE AREA SPECIALISTS

National Interests, Knowledge Production, and the Emergence of an Informal Network

In 1947, the University of Pennsylvania’s E. A. Speiser published a broad overview of the Middle East and U.S. interests there. In The United States and the Near East, Speiser argued that U.S. “policy towards the Near East should be based on a thorough understanding of the present social and political conditions of the region.” He sought to create space for a new group of participants in the policy process, claiming, “The task of furnishing the necessary information about the foreign scene falls to the area specialists. They contribute the basic intelligence—process it, to use the jargon of the recent war—and keep it up to date. In due time, this material is deposited within reach of those who frame foreign policy.” Speiser went on to recognize that “many intermediate stages” existed between the analysts and the policymakers, and policy might “not always reflect the best judgment of the specialists.” Nonetheless, according to Speiser, “the end result depends largely on the ability and competence of the analysts all along the way.”¹

Speiser called for regional experts to begin playing a critical role in the development of policy because he found Americans woefully ignorant of the Middle East. He averred that the United States lacked the “trained and experienced men and women to handle our growing commitment in the region… . In recent years, while our stake in the Near East has been steadily growing, the system under which the necessary area work has to be carried on has not been subjected to anything like a corresponding expansion and modernization.” Speiser was quick to absolve the State Department and any other specific organizations of blame for this state of affairs, claiming instead, “Fault lies with the system rather than with the individuals.” To his mind, prewar U.S. interests in the region had not demanded a highly qualified group of specialists, and even if they had, hard-to-learn Middle Eastern languages and the quick transfers of staff into and out of areas worked against the development of such a group.²

In calling for a new approach to Middle Eastern studies in the United States, Speiser criticized a type of specialist and system of knowledge production that he himself exemplified. Born in 1902 in what is now Ukraine, Ephraim Avigdor Speiser came to the United States in 1920 to study ancient Hebrew. After attending the University of Pennsylvania for his master’s degree and Dropsie College for his doctorate, Speiser joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and remained there for the rest of his career as an archaeologist, philologist, and scholar of Semitics. His defining academic achievement was his participation in and reporting on a series of excavations in Iraq in the 1930s. During World War II, he brought his expertise in the ancient Near East to Washington, D.C., where he worked as head of the Near East section of the Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) research and analysis branch. There he supervised and worked closely with J. C. Hurewitz, who later became a towering figure in postwar Middle Eastern studies, on wartime intelligence and planning matters. It was Speiser’s OSS work that led him to publish The United States and the Near East, one of the first postwar assessments of the new U.S. role in the region. In addition to calling for a new breed of area specialists, he urged the United States to accept its new global power and devote the necessary resources to developing a realistic yet regionally applicable policy independent of British or Soviet influence.³

This chapter provides the context necessary to evaluate Speiser’s claims regarding the production and consumption of knowledge about the Middle East in the United States. It examines how the region came to be defined as an important interest for the United States and the consequences that designation had for knowledge production and the nature of expertise on the region from the early twentieth century through the mid-1960s. It begins by recounting the emergence of a more “professional,” though still very limited, group of secular “experts” through the first four decades of the twentieth century. The established missionary and philanthropic community retained a powerful voice on Middle Eastern affairs, but academics, government officials, and journalists focused on international political and strategic concerns added their voices as well. The 1930s and 1940s in particular saw increased interest in the region, as the rising international oil industry and World War II drew more people and resources into the study of the Middle East. The heirs of the old missionary hands, ancient Near East specialists, and Orientalists from the United States and Europe originally attempted to meet this growing demand for knowledge about the contemporary Middle East. World War II and the early Cold War years then provided the context within which Speiser and others called for the “expansion and modernization” of the system of knowledge production about the Middle East. In response to those calls, there emerged an increasingly bureaucratized and institutionalized, though still quite informal, transnational network of modern Middle East specialists. These new specialists relied heavily on U.S. national security concerns to pursue funding and to explain the fundamental interest of the United States in the region. This chapter concludes by reflecting on the field of Middle Eastern studies and the government use of scholarly research from the vantage point of the 1960s, when assessments of the efforts of this network first appeared.

Strategists, Orientalists, and the Problem of Knowledge Supply and Demand

The Americans who imagined or visited the Orient in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did so in a rapidly changing international political context. A recently unified and rising Germany challenged British and French power in Europe, while the 1905 war between Russia and Japan revealed the former’s weakness and the latter’s growing strength. At the same time, the encroachment of European empires combined with a variety of internal problems to weaken the Ottoman Empire. The economy of the empire grew considerably through the nineteenth century, but that growth was predicated on increasing integration into European affairs. Indeed, by the 1880s both the Ottoman Empire and Egypt were bankrupt and at the mercy of European creditors. Growing nationalist forces challenged Ottoman rule from within, culminating in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After World War I the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by a much smaller Turkey, with Britain and France acquiring control over former Ottoman territory in Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon under the aegis of the League of Nations. Meanwhile, the United States was ascendant. As the Ottoman Empire fractured and disintegrated, the United States first built a transcontinental, and then a trans-Pacific and Caribbean, empire of its own. When the Ottomans and Egyptians were bankrupt, the U.S. economy, though subject to substantial downturns, grew at an unprecedented rate and became the world’s largest, surpassing Britain’s and Germany’s combined by the start of World War I. The war itself then demonstrated increasing U.S. economic power, as the country ended the war as the world’s largest creditor nation.⁴

The missionaries, travel writers, and ancient Near East specialists who dominated late nineteenth-century U.S. discussions of the Orient never dealt explicitly with the implications of these developments. That task fell to a new class of secular strategists, foreign policy intellectuals, journalists, and government bureaucrats who emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. World War I, its aftermath, and the pursuit of access to the region’s bountiful petroleum reserves revealed, however, that the supply of specialists qualified to comment on contemporary Middle Eastern affairs was not large enough to meet the increasing demand for such individuals. The heirs of the old missionary and Orientalist hands, who imagined the region through the sacred interpretive frameworks within which they had been trained and lived, stepped in to fill the void. Thus, by the beginning of World War II, new forms of authority and knowledge characterizing the newly named “Middle East” as an area of growing U.S. interest and concern had been layered into the existing sacred and secular academic, adventurer, missionary, and Orientalist narratives of the region.

Naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan was one of the first Americans to connect these new global developments through systematic thinking and writing about the political and strategic relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Mahan published numerous books and articles that emphasized the role of sea power in international affairs and was one of the primary intellectual forces driving U.S. overseas expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He believed strongly in Anglo-Saxon superiority, claiming that over time and through both missionary zeal and government action the benefits of the sacred and secular American project might be spread abroad, particularly to Asia.⁵

Mahan’s views regarding what he would soon term “the Middle East,” which he visited in 1867 and 1894, were central to new perceptions of the region that focused on secular, as opposed to sacred, concerns. Writing in The Problem of Asia in 1900, Mahan identified a place between thirty and forty degrees north latitude and running from the Mediterranean basin in the west to Korea in the east—an area he labeled “Middle Asia.” “Within these bounds,” Mahan contended, was “the debated and debatable ground,” an area of international competition for the foreseeable future. Middle Asia was composed of two crucial pieces: a resource-rich eastern half and a western half that contained the lines of communication and travel—the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf, as well as any potential overland railways—necessary to access the east. Mahan was not yet aware of the massive petroleum reserves that would make the western portion so important throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. He believed Russia and Britain were the primary contenders for control of the area, but also argued that the United States’ new presence in the Philippines, its expanding economy, and its increasing international power gave it a growing stake in the region. Fortunately, in Mahan’s view, the United States and Britain shared similar outlooks and interests, which for the time being Britain could defend. Nonetheless, Mahan cautioned that the United States needed to recognize its growing concern with which power controlled Middle Asia, particularly the access points and lines of communication contained in its western half, and prepare to defend that interest if necessary.⁶

Mahan refined his ideas regarding this large and ambiguous area of Middle Asia in his 1902 National Review article “The Persian Gulf in International Politics.” In Mahan’s assessment, the Persian Gulf emerged as “one terminus of a prospective interoceanic railroad” that would become “one link … in a chain of communication between East and West, alternative to the all-water route by the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.” It was also here that Mahan renamed the region, referring to “the Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen.” As in his earlier writing, Mahan identified the British and the Russians as the main contestants in the area, but noted that all commercially oriented countries had an interest in maintaining secure and stable access to it. Moreover, because Russia had direct access to Asia and the Pacific through its own Siberian railroad and because Britain held such crucial interests in India and Egypt, as well as in Asia more generally, Mahan deemed it necessary and appropriate for Britain to assert its control in the area. On the horizon, however, loomed a rising Germany, which was building its own Mesopotamian railroad and might have threatened British naval mastery. Britain, Mahan declared, “must maintain continuously supreme the navy upon which her all depends,” and Americans should support British power deployed “in the general lines of our own advantage” in the Middle East. Thus, although Mahan did not assert a direct U.S. claim in the Middle East, he did tie U.S. fortunes there and in Asia more generally to the maintenance of British dominance in the region.⁷

Placed in the context of Mahan’s other writings, “The Persian Gulf in International Politics” reinforced existing ways of imagining the Orient while also adding another layer to those imaginings. Combined with his previously stated and well-known beliefs regarding the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization, the essay buttressed the sacred missionary and Orientalist framework of decline and redemption by defining the region as a site for future American expansion. Yet renaming the region the Middle East and focusing on its political and economic value to the United States, rather than on the people and cultures in the area, also immediately conferred a geographical and political designation that fit within emerging U.S. views of the world as a whole. Moreover, Mahan advanced the process first begun by the academic ancient Near East specialists of claiming expertise and authority by presenting his material in a secular, scholarly manner that presumed detached observation and objectivity.

Shortly after Mahan wrote of the growing importance of the Middle East, an increasingly bureaucratic and professional State Department undertook its own reimagining of the region as a growing economic and strategic interest of the United States. Since the signing of a commercial treaty with the Ottomans in 1830 led to the creation of a U.S. legation in Constantinople, several other consular offices appeared across the empire, in Cairo and in Persia over the ensuing decades. But ill-prepared and underpaid Foreign Service officers expressed growing discontent over their inability to protect expanding U.S. interests across the world. As a consequence, the department implemented more professional training and compensation, as well as a more systematic organizational structure. It created a division of Near Eastern affairs in 1909, though the area for which the branch had responsibility remained quite large. According to historian Phillip Baram, it handled U.S. concerns in “the Ottoman, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires, as well as Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Abyssinia, Persia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean colonies of Britain and France.” Subsequent reorganizations over the next thirty-five years ultimately resulted by 1944 in the creation of an office of Near Eastern and African affairs broken into three divisions: Near Eastern affairs, Middle Eastern affairs, and African affairs. Near Eastern affairs dealt with Turkey, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula plus Greece. Middle Eastern affairs handled Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon, India, and Iran. And as the United States became more deeply involved in World War II, it relied on Britain’s Middle East Supply Center in Cairo to get men and material into North Africa, southern Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, and the rest of what previously had been known as the Near East. Thus, “Near East” and “Middle East” became essentially interchangeable terms in emerging specialist and popular imaginings of the region.⁸

Though the first State Department reorganization had taken place a few years earlier, it was really during and immediately after World War I that American “experts” undertook sustained analysis of the area that was becoming known as the Middle East. Questions regarding what to do with the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, the growing need for oil and its likely abundance in the Middle East, and tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine drew increasing attention. The problem, however, was that the United States lacked a group of specialists qualified to comment on contemporary affairs in the region. Thus, it was left to the ancient Near East specialists, the missionary hands, the Orientalists, and specialists from other areas to recast themselves as experts in the contemporary Middle East.

Their first opportunity to do so came with the creation of “the Inquiry,” a clandestine group of academics, policymakers, and other individuals tasked with postwar planning. The Inquiry emerged out of several different proposals for planning for a postwar peace agreement that circulated within the government in 1917. President Wilson ordered his closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, to assemble experts to begin the planning process in September of that year, and House put his brother-in-law Sydney Mezes in charge. The choice of Mezes, who was a philosopher of religion and had no training in international politics, to lead the group indicated how the entire organization would be handled and made clear the limited supply of real specialists trained to work on international political issues in early twentieth-century America. House presumed Mezes would be able to manage the academic, departmental structure the Inquiry would assume because he had been a dean and president of the University of Texas. The other key administrative figure was Walter Lippmann, whom Wilson himself identified to be the secretary to run the day-to-day operations of the organization. The Inquiry pulled individuals from various academic institutions, particularly elite northeastern universities, as well as other research-oriented organizations such as the Carnegie Institution. It also relied heavily on various professional academic associations like the American Economic Association and the National Board for Historical Services, an affiliate of the American Historical Association created in April 1917 for historians offering their services to the government during the war. The Inquiry was initially housed at the New York Public Library, but eventually moved to the American Geographical Society when it became too large to continue meeting at the library.⁹

The Inquiry’s staff was divided between various geographical and topical assignments, one of which was Western Asia. Though the numbers changed from time to time, there were roughly ten paid employees working on the area from the Mediterranean to Tibet and Mongolia. Of these individuals, a generous count suggests that no more than half had any previous exposure to the area they were studying, and most of these scholars worked on ancient, classical, or medieval history. One member of the group specialized in Latin American history, another in Native American anthropology, and a third possessed a general interest in the societal impact of geography. There were, of course, other scholars, such as the historian of colonialism and imperialism George Louis Beer, who were placed in other sections (Africa, in Beer’s case) but worked on issues that led them to deal with the Middle East. Finally, there were numerous unpaid research assistants, some of whom were academics, while others came from missionary or ministerial backgrounds. Overall, only a very limited number of individuals who worked for the Inquiry could be classified as experts on contemporary international politics, and no more than a handful of them had dealt with the Middle East in any meaningful manner.¹⁰

The Inquiry’s work thus reflected both the increasing importance of the Middle East in the minds of American policymakers and advisors, and the largely inadequate training those individuals possessed for the task they were undertaking. According to historian Lawrence Gelfand, approximately half of all reports on African, Asian, or Pacific issues focused on the Middle East. But few of these reports contained serious analysis useful in preparations for what would be some of history’s most significant peace negotiations. Gelfand notes that “most frequently the sources were encyclopedias, missionary materials, handbooks, foreign trade statistics, and information derived through personal conversations and hearsay,” and rarely did the authors of these reports take the time or effort to critique their sources.¹¹

Given the background and training of members of the Western Asia group, it is not surprising that they adhered to the dominant narrative through which Americans had imagined the region throughout the nineteenth century. Negative comments about the people, the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• IMAGINING THE MIDDLE EAST
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE THE TASK … FALLS TO THE AREA SPECIALISTS
• CHAPTER TWO THE ALL-PERVADING INFLUENCE OF THE MUSLIM FAITH
• CHAPTER THREE A NEW AMALGAM OF INTERESTS, RELIGION, PROPAGANDA, AND MOBS
• CHAPTER FOUR WHAT MODERNIZATION REQUIRES OF THE ARABS … IS THEIR DE-ARABIZATION
• CHAPTER FIVE A PROFOUND AND GROWING DISTURBANCE … WHICH MAY LAST FOR DECADES
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX