To the Shores of Triploi

BY MICHAEL OREN Saturday, June 2, 2007 12:01 a.m.

1. "An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania" by Peter Markoe (1787).

   "An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania" appeared in Philadelphia at the time of the Constitutional Convention and as America faced its first hostage crisis in the Middle East. Pirates from the so-called Barbary States--Morocco, Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers--had waylaid American merchant ships in the Mediterranean and enslaved 127 sailors. The attacks posed a mortal threat to America's fragile economy, yet the country was powerless to repel them. Loosely confederated, the U.S. had no central government and no mechanism for creating a navy. Enter Peter the Poet, as Peter Markoe was known, the Bard of Philadelphia. Supposedly a collection of letters written by "Mehmet," an Algerian agent operating in the U.S., Markoe's book predicted that the pigheaded Americans would never federate. "Totally ruined by disunion," he gloated, "they may be plundered without risque and their young men and maidens triumphantly carried into captivity." Markoe's satirical provocation helped tip the bitterly contested debate over the Constitution in 1789. Five years later, Congress authorized the construction of a navy "for the protection . . . of the United States against Algerian corsairs." The country subsequently dispatched Marines "to the shores of Tripoli" and a fleet under Stephen Decatur to vanquish the pirates. Americans had formed a truly United States, had created naval power and had projected it thousands of miles--thanks, in part, to Peter Markoe.

2. "Sufferings in Africa" by James Riley (1817).
   A 38-year-old Connecticut sea captain, James Riley, was shipwrecked off the Spanish Saharan coast in 1815 and captured by Arabs, who starved and tortured him. He nevertheless escaped and returned to write his memoirs, the final chapter of which contains an impassioned plea to outlaw the enslavement of Africans in America. The book became a national sensation and was especially popular among slavery's Abolitionist opponents. One of its most enthusiastic admirers was a young Indiana farm boy named Abraham Lincoln. Later, as president, Lincoln listed "Sufferings in Africa," along with the Bible and "The Pilgrim's Progress," as the books that most influenced his political thinking.
3. "The Valley of Vision" by George Bush (1847).
   The Puritans viewed themselves as the New Israel and America as the New Promised Land. Accordingly they felt a sense of kinship with the Old Israel--the Jews--and the old Promised Land, then known as Palestine, a part of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Puritans' descendants regarded it as their Christian and American duty to help restore the Jews to Palestine. "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," wrote President John Adams, and Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that "restoring the Jews to their national home in Palestine . . . is a noble dream and one shared by many Americans." But few restorationists were more outspoken than George Bush, a distinguished professor of Hebrew at New York University. His "The Valley of Vision," which became an antebellum best seller, called on the U.S. government to militarily wrench Palestine from the Turks and return it to the Jews. The Jewish state "will blaze in notoriety . . . and flash a splendid demonstration," declared Bush, a direct forebear of two presidents of the same name, revealing the centuries-old roots of American support for Israel.
4. "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain (1869).
   Commissioned by two U.S. newspapers to report on the voyage of the steamship Quaker City in 1867, the relatively unknown humorist Samuel Clemens sailed for the Middle East. The realities he encountered there bore little resemblance to the romantic fantasies that he and millions of Americans had imbibed in "A Thousand and One Arabian Nights." Middle Eastern men, Clemens concluded, were "filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, and superstitious," and the women so ugly that "they couldn't smile after ten o'clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath." These caustic observations and a wealth of others were published in a single volume under Clemens's new pen name, Mark Twain. The Middle East made him: "The Innocents Abroad" earned $300,000, a fortune for the time. Yet pre-"Innocents" myths about the Middle East remained deeply ingrained in the American imagination, later inspiring a cavalcade of fanciful movies, from "The Sheik of Araby" to "Aladdin," from "The Wind and the Lion" to "Indiana Jones." America's romance with the region continued until 9/11, the day the fantasy died.
5. "The Arabists" by Robert D. Kaplan (The Free Press, 1993).
   From 1813, with the appointment of Mordechai Emanuel Noah as U.S. consul for Tunis in north Africa, until World War I, American Jews served as U.S. diplomats in the region. The State Department believed that these Jews, though most of them German-born, formed a natural bridge between Christian America and the Muslim world. But beginning in the 1920s--as Robert D. Kaplan charts in his riveting "The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite"--Jews were gradually pushed out of the State Department, replaced by a generation of diplomats who encouraged Arab nationalism and who were unabashed in their anti-Zionist, indeed anti-Semitic, worldview. Deeply identifying with Arab autocrats, the Arabists served as the architects of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, represented oil interests in Washington and convinced politicians that the Middle East had far more to fear from America than vice versa. Though their monopoly began to dissolve in the 1970s--when another German-born American Jew, Henry Kissinger, assumed control of policy making in the Middle East--the Arabists continued to exert a disproportionate and generally deleterious influence in Washington. Kaplan's book, published in the aftermath of the first Islamist attack on the World Trade Center, acquired a greater poignancy after the second. Above all, it exposed the danger of the Arabists' illusions of a romantic, congenial Middle East.