Book Review: Power, Faith and Fantasy -- America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present

Around the time of the War of Independence, America’s main contact with the Middle East consisted in trading Caribbean rum for Turkish opium. It’s hard not to wish, reading the epic story of this 230-year relationship, now usefully condensed into a single well-researched volume, that things could have remained as simple as the swapping of your recreational poison for mine.

But things never were quite so simple. Even then the potential for friction loomed as large as the possibility of mutual gain. Before the end of the Napoleonic wars, Christian sailors risked capture and enslavement by Muslim pirates from the Barbary ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Governments could either front protection money, cough up ransom or threaten force.

America tried all three approaches, and its erratic policy echoes with sad familiarity in the 21st century. We find the same wrangling in Washington between those who counsel appeasement (the cheaper, saner option) and those who demand armed action (the more glorious); bickering among Western capitals over whether to act singly or in concert (Thomas Jefferson tried to corral a coalition, but Congress balked); and daring strikes carried out with near-fatal clumsiness (an attempt to blockade Tripoli led to the capture, in 1803, of the U.S.S. Philadelphia and its 308-man crew, and a subsequent, heroically farcical attempt to free them by effecting regime change).

Read the rest at the NY Times