April 14, 2007	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25, 1428

LOS ANGELES: It may be small solace for George W. Bush as he tries to salvage anything more than disaster from his misadventure in Iraq, but he is far from the first president who has found the Middle East a cemetery for his vanities.

From the first confrontations with Islamic Barbary pirates in the late 18th century through the struggle today to pacify and stabilise Iraq, the most common result of American engagement with the Middle East has been disappointment. Miscalculation and confusion rank close behind. Rare has been the American president — or for that matter, the American missionary or diplomat —who has not seen his plans for the region frustrated and his hopes dashed. Learning a lesson of modesty from that history is the first step toward placing America’s Middle East policy on a more productive path after the debacle in Iraq.

Michael B. Oren, an American born mid-east scholar who has spent much of the past three decades living and working in Israel, chronicles this story to compelling effect in his panoramic recent book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. Oren has produced the most comprehensive history yet written of the religious, economic and security interests that have drawn Americans to the Middle East for more than 220 years — and routinely sent them home disillusioned. It ought to be required reading for each of the men and women running to succeed Bush.

Oren identifies in his title the three themes he believes have driven American interaction with the Middle East: power, as in the use of American military, diplomatic and economic might to pursue tangible interests in the region, like access to oil; faith, by which he means the impact of religion in shaping American attitudes and policies there; and fantasy, the tendency of Americans, generation after generation, to harbour unrealistic beliefs about these places and their people. (We might call that latter habit the Cheney syndrome, in honour of Vice President Dick Cheney’s one-for-the-ages prediction that Americans “would be welcomed as liberators” in Iraq.)

Oren ably tracks the interplay of these three threads over the decades. But another strand — the repeated frustration of American plans for the Middle East — may be even more relevant to the choices facing the next president.

On occasion, along this long, tangled road, Americans have achieved their goals in the region. Under James Madison, the young American navy humbled the Barbary pirates in 1815 and ended more than three decades of attacks against American ships in the Mediterranean. More than a century later, the Standard Oil Company of California (and Franklin Roosevelt) cemented American access to Saudi Arabian oil. Harry Truman midwifed the birth of Israel in 1948 while maintaining generally good relations with Arabs by supporting independence and de-colonisation in Syria, Iran and Libya.

Mostly, though, Americans have seen their Middle Eastern dreams turn to dust. In the 19th century, America’s principal contact with the region came through waves of missionaries, generations of whom failed almost entirely at converting Muslims to Christianity.

In the 20th century, presidents took centre stage, but fared little better. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson hoped to lead the Arab lands of the decomposing Ottoman Empire into self-determination, but instead accepted an international mandate system that perpetuated European colonization (with all of its distorting effects) for decades. In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower hoped to speed decolonization and enlist the Arab world in an anti-Soviet alliance but improbably found himself working with the British to resist pan-Arab nationalism that he feared would increase Soviet influence. John F. Kennedy sought to reconcile with Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser and prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons and failed at both. Jimmy Carter was humiliated by Iran and Ronald Reagan bewildered by Lebanon. Bill Clinton could not bring Israel and the Palestinians to peace nor Osama bin Laden to justice.

Even against that backdrop, Bush’s war in Iraq now looms as a miscalculation of historic proportions. In Iraq, Bush wanted to build a stage to celebrate democracy, but instead constructed a Petri dish for cultivating sectarian hatreds. Oren hasn’t abandoned hope of a relatively acceptable outcome in Iraq, but the history he presents makes clear that the fundamental flaw in Bush’s conception was his belief that US power, as vast as it is, could reconstruct a region that has unwaveringly resisted America’s attempts to remake it for more than two centuries.

The desire for democracy may indeed be universal, as Bush asserts, but Iraq has reminded us that it cannot be built without a foundation of law, religious tolerance and civil society. And while outsiders can support that process, they can never impose it. Even if Iraq avoids complete disintegration, the bloodshed and chaos that has surrounded the attempt to build a new government there has rendered radioactive, probably for many years, the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East from the barrel of an American gun.

The erosion of America’s influence and image in the Middle East virtually ensures that the next president will execute another course correction. And as he (or she) does, no compass will be more valuable than Oren’s compilation of misguided assumptions and unanticipated consequences in America’s dealings with the Arab world. That history doesn’t tell America to renounce the use of force to protect its Mideast interests, but it does counsel the next president to define our interests more circumspectly and to lean more on diplomacy to pursue them. An America that recognises its limits can better shoulder its genuine responsibilities — from serving as a broker between Israel and the Palestinians to supporting an international campaign of pressure against Iran’s nuclear programme to nudging neighbouring Arab nations toward participating more directly in stabilising Iraq. It might also learn that it is sometimes easier to move forward by allowing others to take the lead.

Whatever Iraq’s condition when Bush leaves office, the Mideast strategy for the next president is likely to begin with “more modest goals and a more prudent application of power,” as Oren puts it. Operating with great power, and an even greater faith, Bush has displayed the fervour (what Oren calls the “benevolent arrogance”) of the 19th century missionaries who thought America was fated “to penetrate the darkness that overshadows this heathen land” and reconstruct the Middle East to our design. But the overwhelming lesson of Oren’s book, reaffirmed so painfully in Iraq, is that no amount of faith or power can breathe life into such an implausible fantasy. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service