Book review 263: Britain's Moment in the Middle East 1914-1956

BRITAIN'S MOMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST 1914-1956, by Elizabeth Monroe. 254 pages. Johns Hopkins

It was a short moment, just 42 years, less then 1% of the Middle East's history. Journalist Elizabeth Monroe's 1963 book also is brief, but concentrated in the way that some English writers have.

It holds up well, too, after half a century, which is more than most books written about the Middle East in the '60s do.

When Britain came in as a colonial power, the Moslems were weak, hungry, sick, ignorant, illiterate, politically incompetent and resentful. This was more true of the Arabs, somewhat less so of the Persians, with the Turks somewhere in the middle.

When Britain left, the Koran Belt was marginally better fed, healthier and literate. It remained resentful, ignorant and politically incompetent. The British were, and still are, blamed for this. This hardly seems fair to the Turks, who were colonial masters for hundreds of years.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor used to distinguish between governing and merely administering. The late Ottomans could barely even administer, and the British has no interest in governing, either.

By the mid-19^th century, England had more empire than it cared to look after and was loath to acquire more. Thus, its first acquisition in the Middle East, Aden, was a port that controlled the Red Sea. The British neither knew nor cared what happened in the medieval Yemen that lay outside the walls of Aden.

Their thinking was entirely strategic, and so is Monroe's analysis.

No one cared what the locals did or thought as long as they were quiet.

At first, Britain's strategic intent was to block the move of Russia on India. Russia was then gobbling up the khanates of the Caspian Area, people even more backward than most of the Arabs.

Britain preferred a barrier of independent but non-hostile states – Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. It wanted the French corralled in the western Mediterranean but had no interest in places like Egypt, Palestine or Syria for themselves.

Thus it opposed opening a canal at Suez. However, once the canal was opened, Britain, in the name of protecting India, had to start taking over the Middle East. Monroe explains clearly how that messy situation evolved and then goes on to marvel that Britain managed to ride out the vagaries of Moslem politics during the interwar years in a chapter called, without irony, “The Years of Good Management.”

While generally excellent, Monroe gives insufficient attention to the overriding concern of the British colonialists, which was not Russia but the prospect of what used to be blandly called communal disturbances.

The Moslems were not then, as they are not today, nationalist in spirit, except for a tiny film of western-influenced (and sporadically important) elites. They were Moslems.

Often Britain had a policy it would have liked to impose in India but did not for fear it would set off riots in Egypt, and vice versa. This vitiated whatever feeble intentions toward modernization British rulers may have felt.

As a result, the Middle East came out in the mid-1950s as backward politically as it had been in 1750.

Oil later became a complicating factor, and Monroe provides a brief overview.

After the war, Britain faced what she calls a “loss of nerve.” This is the imperialist viewpoint. More realistically, an impoverished England could not afford an empire any more, besides which the socialists running the government didn't want one on any terms.

It is by no means clear that even if the modern powers had wanted to assist the Moslems to modernize, they could have done so. They have made a complete hash of it on their own for the last half century.

Thus Monroe's imperialist assessment of the Balfour Declaration as “one of the greatest mistakes” makes sense only if you also believe that the Arabs are capable of self-government in a modern state.

That they are incapable of democracy is obvious. “Democratic systems were later to be discarded in country after country with a readiness that was tacit acknowledgment of their unsuitability for the less developed countries,” writes Monroe.

As we observed in 2012, the peoples of the Koran Belt are not even capable of operating modern despotisms.

Book Review 261: Power, Faith and Fantasy

POWER, FAITH AND FANTASY: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, by Michael B. Oren. 778 pages. Norton, $35

Michael Oren contends that the development of the United States has always been much more closely connected to the Middle East than anyone would think at first. While I think he overstates the case, it is true in both significant and insignificant ways that the two places have interacted more often than standard histories would suggest.

A significant way was the early American crisis with the Barbary pirates. Oren contends that it was the inability of the associated government under the Articles of Confederation to deal with the pirates that largely motivated the change to the Constitution. Even after signing the Constitution, the US was so weak that, despite the misgivings of Washington, the country spent 10 percent of its national budget on tribute.

While the irritation of the pirates was significant and meaningful, there were plenty of other reasons to dispose of the Confederation, from Indian relations to state debts.

An insignificant, but amusing, example was the origin of the Statue of Liberty. The original proposal, linked to the Suez Canal, was for a statue of a somewhat zaftig feminine Egypt "bringing light to Asia." Only the bankruptcy of the khedive repurposed the sculptor's vision to the more svelte Lady Liberty facing Europe.

In Oren's view, the relationship of America and what he does not call the Koran Belt was always more fraught than we think, composed of three usually antagonistic elements: government power (not originally in favor of America), religious outreach (always one way) and fantasy (an image derived mostly from the "Thousand and One Nights" which isn't even Arab or Turkish, although most of America's interactions were with Arabs or Turks).

The religious component is the most typically American, bizarre and muttonheaded. At the same time that missionaries were landing in Hawaii, where they remade a traditional society, other American missionaries were landing in Syria, where they were complete failures as far as faith goes.

Given the one-way attitude of Muslims toward missionizing, this was predictable. Stubbornly refusing to give up, the Americans turned from gathering souls to opening schools and hospitals. Oren attributes to them the infection of modernism in the Koran Belt.

True, many of the opponents of the Ottomans were exposed to western ideas in missionary schools, but the Ottomans themselves sent their promising young men to France, and well before the Americans arrived. Oren overstates this aspect in two ways. First, he makes the infection seem exclusively American, which it was not; and, second, he makes it seem important, which it never became.

As we see now ("Power, Faith and Fantasy" was published in 2007) with the reversion of the misnamed Arab Spring to atavistic social and political norms, the infection of modernism never caused more than a temporary rash in the Koran Belt.

The book is fun to read, with caution. Oren tends to underplay the immiseration of Muslim society and overplay its openness to change. The influx of Americans to the region in the 19th century was tiny, even if it included names we know, like Mark Twain; and not happy for the Americans.

It seems that the usual fate of these sojourners was to die of disease, or if not that, to be murdered; or if they ever got out, to end their days in poverty and obscurity.

But enough did get back alive to infect America with a continuing hankering to do good or do well in the region. Most of this infection was centered on Princeton University. Oren does not tell (though it is no secret) that he, too, holds a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from Princeton.

He is an Israeli of American origin (since publication of this book, his country's ambassador to Washington), and the names of his collaborators as given in the acknowledgements are almost entirely Jewish.

Despite his militant Zionism as a political actor, he is scrupulously even-handed as a historian in his books (also his history of "The Six-day War"). You would hardly guess, from the texts, that he has been an active player in the latest uproars in the Middle East.

This fairmindedness, which ought to be a virtue, is in the end a flaw. By treating all players -- Americans, Turks, Muslim Arabs, Jews, Arab Christians, Persians etc. -- as equally free actors in history he leaves a misleading impression.

His short history of US government policy since 1945 is scathing, but does not acknowledge the big fact that led to failure: In an interaction between one side that is (however imperfectly) motivated by democratic principles; and another that is (perfectly) constitutionally impervious to democratic principles, the first side can never hope to prevail.

It sometimes seems as if Oren has read everything. (He hasn't really; a platoon of graduate students in New Haven, Cambridge, Washington, Princeton and Jerusalem ransacked the libraries for him.) Among the authors he cites is the Syrian political scientist Bassam Tibi. He misses Tibi's masterful insight.

Tibi wrote that Arabs are not interested in democracy. This is obviously the case. Any book, no matter how judiciously intended, that assumes a different possibility is going to be fundamentally misleading, and in that sense, "Power, Faith and Fantasy" is misleading.

It is, nevertheless, required reading. Oren says, I think correctly, that no one had tried to write the story of America in the Middle East (a term invented by an American, Alfred Mahan) before.