Posted on 03/16/2003 6:49:54 AM PST by Pharmboy
JERUSALEM — Muslim militants, evoking a jihadist pretext and backed by rogue states, are attacking vital Western interests. The president of the United States fails to convince Europe to join a coalition to confront the aggressors.
No, this is not President Bush versus Saddam Hussein, but Thomas Jefferson versus the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who were plundering Western ships and enslaving their crews. When Jefferson proposed creating a multilateral force to stop the pirates, Europe went on bribing them.
"This is money thrown away," Jefferson concluded, before ordering the Navy into action. On Aug. 1, 1801, the first American shots in the Middle East were fired when the 36-gun frigate Enterprise defeated the pirate gunboat Tripoli near Malta.
In 1804, two naval officers and six marines led a small force of Greeks, Arabs and others 500 miles across the desert "to the shores of Tripoli," and an American armada bombarded Algiers before the pirates at last surrendered in 1815. To maintain the peace, the United States established a permanent Mediterranean squadron — the precursor of today's Sixth Fleet.
Europe, however, went on paying tribute, leading one American diplomat to comment, "It must be mortifying to some of the neighboring European powers to see how the Barbary States have been taught their first lessons of humiliation from the Western world."
The history of American involvement in the Middle East is long and complicated. From Colonial times, Americans felt a special attachment to the region, giving biblical names to a thousand of their towns and calling others Cairo, Mecca and Baghdad.
Americans came to the Middle East not only with bombs but with books. In 1819, the first American missionaries to the region, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, arrived with instructions to explore "what good can be done for the Jews, for the Mohammedans, for the Christians, for the people of Palestine, Egypt and Syria." Hundreds more followed, bringing with them printing presses that produced, in addition to Bibles, four million books — science and medical texts, dictionaries and school primers — in five Middle Eastern languages.
By century's end, Americans in Arab lands had established 300 schools, among them the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University in Beirut), introducing 20,000 students to American concepts of nationalism, social change and democracy.
Visiting the Middle East in 1880, the American Jewish author Simon Wolf contrasted these contributions with the avarice of Europe. "My pride, as an American, was greatly aroused when I saw our country, in contradistinction to others, dealing out elements of culture, instruction and civilization," he wrote. "We must war in the East not with cannon and shot but with schoolbooks, Bibles and constitutions."
The projection of power and the export of ideals — the twin themes of America's Middle East interaction — were often intertwined. In 1848, for example, Lt. Commodore William Francis Lynch, who described himself as "an earnest Christian and lover of adventure" and his party as "young, muscular native-born Americans, of sober habits," led a naval expedition the length of the Jordan River.
Lynch reveled in the fact that for the first time "the American flag has been raised in Palestine," not to claim territory but as a symbol of freedom: "May it be the harbinger of regeneration to a now hapless people!"
Twenty years later, William Wing Loring, a one-armed former frontiersman, state senator and second-in-command to Stonewall Jackson, led ex-Civil War officers in an effort to modernize the Egyptian Army. Loring, known as Old Blizzards, and his men also built schools for 2,000 Egyptian soldiers and their children.
The themes of power and idealism continued to be sounded by the United States in the Middle East as the 20th century opened. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt sent battleships to rescue an expatriate American, Ion Perdicaris, kidnapped by the Moroccan warlord Ahmad al-Raisuli. (The incident inspired the 1975 film "The Wind and the Lion," which transformed the middle-aged businessman Perdicaris into Candice Bergen.)
Roosevelt, like Jefferson, had tried and failed to enlist Europeans in an international response, before acting unilaterally under the proclamation "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!"
The pendulum then swung to idealism under Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points of 1918 promised Middle Easterners "an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development."
American forces returned to North Africa in November 1942 — Operation Torch — to defeat Nazi Germany and its French allies, but also to create the Middle East Supply Center, which furnished the region with roads, ports and factories, and fed much of its population.
The postwar period was marked by the gradual rise of American power in the region — a shift that testified to the increasing importance of oil, the establishment of the state of Israel and the determination to counter Soviet influence.
In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, offering legitimacy in return for a guaranteed supply of oil. Three years later, President Harry S. Truman, motivated by both domestic politics and moral considerations, ignored State Department warnings of an Arab oil cutoff and supported the creation of Israel.
Both events changed the tenor of American involvement in the Middle East and how it was perceived. Henceforth America found itself torn between strategic interests and moral commitments on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, while its actions were fated to be seen by many Arabs as motivated by a determination to control the oil reserves, or to assist Israel.
THE region's chronic instability made maintaining a balance between projecting American power and upholding American ideals increasingly difficult. Critics of President Bill Clinton, for example, have said that his gamble on attaining a final treaty between Israel and the Palestinians led him to neglect the fight against terror. Critics of the first President Bush, on the other hand, say he sidelined American ideals in favor of oil when he liberated Kuwait in 1991, only to restore its autocratic rulers.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which occurred almost 200 years to the day after the battle between the Enterprise and the Tripoli, intensified the relationship between America and the Middle East, but left its fundamental character unchanged. More than ever, the United States appears committed to pursuing its ideals, and to using its power, in the region, alone if need be. And that determination is likely only to heighten the suspicions of America's motives.
Michael B. Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of "Six Days of War" (Oxford, 2002).
Note to Mr. Buchanan: hard to blame the neocons for Mr. Jefferson's war on the Islamists back then, eh?
I could be wrong, but I don't recall President Jefferson having any significant dealings with the Middle East. Could someone please tell the provencial clods at the New York Times that Lybia, Algeria, and Morocco are not part of the Middle East? The last time I checked, Rabat was still west of London.
Read all about it: the New York Times accelerates continental drift!
By the way, do you work with transgenic animals? I know it's a wierd question, but your nom de Freep has always made me wonder.
I am a physician who works in the pharmaceutical industry. More on the clinical development/strategic/marketing side.
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity, Pharmboy. You've got a really cool job. I'd love to be doing something like that, if I had the schooling.
More than ever, the United States appears committed to pursuing its ideals, and to using its power, in the region, alone if need be. And that determination is likely only to heighten the suspicions of America's motives.Nope, dead wrong -- muzzies are suspicious of motives because they believe every crime they commit is justified.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.