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| ISBN-13: | 9781783085095 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Series: | Anthem Companions to Sociology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 286 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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American Arabists in the Cold War Middle East, 1946â?"75
From Orientalism to Professionalism
By Teresa Fava Thomas
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Teresa Fava ThomasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-509-5
CHAPTER 1
THE ORIENTALISTS FADE AWAY
American diplomats of the interwar era, referred to here as Orientalists, were the staff of the former Bureau of Near East Affairs (NEA). The hallmark of the group was that they possessed some kind of so-called area experience. Most often this meant they had lived in the region and knew some Arabic. The only Americans with such experience were usually the children of missionaries or oil company employees.
The Orientalists held deep convictions about American policy, its relationship to the people of the Arab world and, as British and French colonialism faded, the region's potential as an American partner. The Orientalists worked to retain good relations between the Arab world and the United States and took a vocal, high-profile role in advocating their foreign policy views. Their claims to expertise were often based on having lived or worked in the Middle East and their personal contacts with the political elite. Most Orientalists began their work during World War I and then rose to prominence in the interwar period. A few were drafted into the State Department late in life to serve as area experts during World War II.
Evan Wilson joined the NEA as the Orientalist era ended and recalled it was still "a sine qua non that its personnel should have experience in the area." This began in 1909, and Wilson recalled that "it was made a departmental requirement that the division be staffed by officers who had served in the Near East. This policy was still being generally followed when I joined the division in 1943." The requirement was not academic study, but personal life experience.
In the interwar era there were no courses on modern Middle East politics and very few books on contemporary social issues or history. The study of the Near East was solely undertaken by the realm of anthropologists who often approached the region from an archeological perspective.
There were no schools in which to learn modern Arabic in the United States during the interwar period. The first professional organization for area experts, the Middle East Institute, was established in 1947, and the first organization for academic specialists, the Middle East Studies Association, was founded nearly two decades later in 1966. University-level courses in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), rather than ancient forms of the language, only emerged in the United States after the instructors of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) moved into academia. FSI's Dr. Charles Ferguson brought MSA to Harvard in 1955 and then to Stanford University in 1966. The first MSA textbook, written by two FSI instructors, was released in 1968.
When Orientalists raised their voices to protest America's approach to dealing with British Mandate Palestine, they were drawn into a bureaucratic battle with President Truman. They tried to maintain support for a United Nations plan to resolve the conflict and opposed Truman's decision to recognize the new state of Israel. Even as they presented their arguments, their diplomatic replacements were being trained by the US FSI.
Truman forced the Orientalists out, and, like General MacArthur, most faded away before Truman left office in 1953. Of the very few who held on, most were transferred out of the NEA. The consequences of opposing Truman's policy and the ousting of the Orientalists, as well as Senator McCarthy's harsh attacks on the State Department's other controversial area experts, the China Hands, were vivid examples of the fate diplomats faced in Washington's treacherous political currents. Those who succeeded them learned from their experience.
What made Near East Orientalists different from others in the State Department? Evan Wilson joined the State Department in 1937 and was told that the NEA dealt with "questions that often have little or no resemblance to the problems of Western nations." Wilson felt this left them open to criticism: "It gave rise to accusations that the officers dealing with the Palestine problem tended to side with the Arabs against the Jews [...] and allegations that some of the officers in question were anti-Semitic." The NEA was a small, inbred world, populated exclusively by men who felt that they possessed a special understanding of the Arab world and wanted to retain good US ties to it. Moreover, the area experience requirement almost guaranteed that they brought along some political or religious baggage. And, since the staff was so small, it was easy to become a big fish in that small pond.
In 1937 Harper's Magazine examined the various State Department area desks and concluded the Near East Division "is not often marked with excitement [...] our relations with these people are not important." Wilson referred to another comment made with "an attitude of condescension"; after he was posted to Cairo in 1938, a friend said: "The Near East! Nothing ever happens there."
In the 1930s, American oil exploration and investment increasingly focused on the region. Historian John DeNovo observed that Americans firms began to challenge the British throughout the Gulf: "By 1939 increasing numbers of Americans were coming to work in the oil regions and the companies were making huge capital outlays." By 1940 America had dispatched its first minister to Saudi Arabia and an ambassador in 1946. By 1944 the argument over Palestine in Congress had begun in earnest, and the Near East staff joined in the highly charged debate. Wilson found himself at the center of a maelstrom.
The typical desk officer at the NEA was much older and more seasoned than Wilson. Most had been born in the nineteenth century and had worked for the State Department since the Wilson administration. They saw the United States as different from the colonial powers in the region, as a disinterested arbiter with no colonial ambitions. That philosophy fit perfectly with the obligation of public service inherent in the missionary community and their sense of noblesse oblige.
Historian Philip Baram examined the 1919–45 NEA staff and found it was dominated by people he termed "middle managers," who inculcated their policy viewpoint in their subordinates. Baram concluded this was a male world of officers who were "insulated and inbred, elitist" and who hired like-minded associates and then apprenticed them to the system. Baram found most were "white Protestant males [who] shared a remarkable homogeneity and common mindset [...] most had a private school background, and many were from the south." Between 1919 and 1945 Orientalists stamped their policy views on their juniors, as Baram found that there was power in that core group and "the same very small group of middle managers held sway" Why? Many missionary families had literally invested their lives in the Arab world, and their sons joined the State Department to protect the links forged by their ancestors. They knew of the area's commercial potential and the value of its oil reserves. Moreover, Orientalists wanted the United States to tap the reservoir of goodwill established earlier by generations of American missionaries.
The first generation had been Christian proselytizers who concentrated on religious conversion, but their successors focused on educational endeavors in the hope of establishing pro-American capitalistic and democratic values. They built universities to inculcate the Wilsonian values that they held dear and to establish a pro-American sympathy among the new Arab elite. These efforts led to the founding of US-sponsored institutions like the American University of Beirut, the American University of Cairo and other higher education institutions in the Middle East. Many graduates went on to study in America and returned to the region as the first generation of Western-educated professionals in medicine, the sciences and technology.
Since few Americans knew anything about the Middle East, those who knew the languages and had lived in the area derived a certain power from their knowledge. Edward Said, in his landmark book Orientalism, argued that Orientalists in the European foreign ministries built up an entrenched power that "translated" the Arabs and the mysterious "Orient" to their governments. The term "Orientalism" refers to the set of beliefs and the attitude toward the region that adopted them. In essence Orientalists, whether European or American, saw themselves as the only persons who could translate the remote and mysterious region.
Furthermore, Said criticized the power imbalance inherent when Orientalists traveled abroad and used their knowledge of Arabic and the region to rise to power in Britain's Foreign Office. British Orientalists were part of the institutionalized powers-that-be, or rather powers-that-were. People like T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dominated the British government's Arab Bureau. Bell's dramatic career, related in Janet Wallach's biography Desert Queen, describes how she literally drew the borders of Iraq and Kuwait and had the power of the British Empire to establish and maintain them. Often these Orientalists lived as expatriates and wrote memoirs vividly relating their adventures in asserting colonial control over the region's peoples and assets.
When Britain did begin to professionalize its Orientalists, it was too late to rescue their waning power in the British Mandate or the larger region. The British Empire was shrinking after World War II, British Mandate Palestine was in crisis and London's confidence was shaken. A modern Arabist training school was established in the region in 1944, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan, Lebanon, in an old missionary outpost. In a history of British Arabists, historian Leslie McLoughlin observed that the training school began with "the deterioration of Britain's position in the Arab world" and that the new rivals were the Soviets and the Americans. He noted, "For the British there began a period of adjusting to the vastly enhanced power of the United States to intervene in Arab-world affairs." Furthermore, MECAS became known as "the school for spies" among Arabs. The first director of the school appointed Aubrey Eban, a brilliant student of Hebrew and Arabic, as chief instructor in 1944. He later took the name Abba Eban and became the first foreign minister of the new state of Israel. The school remained in the hills above Beirut until it closed in 1978.
In the United States a lack of knowledge, not just among diplomats but throughout the larger society, affected policy. In 1979 John King Fairbank, dean of America's China Hands and a renowned linguist and historian, argued that Americans had little or no understanding of some geographical regions and this complicated the process of making foreign policy. Fairbank complained that since America did not have "England experts," therefore "[i]t is rather primitive to have a China expert [...] the so-called experts are merely people who have spent some time specializing, and they can begin to give approximate answers. But that mere fact indicates how ignorant everybody else is, which is a serious problem." Thus, for Fairbank, it was ignorance of these areas among the general populace that led to complications.
Fairbank's comments illustrate the key problem that faced State Department area experts, whether Orientalists or Middle East hands. While they worked to understand the region, they had to explain it to politicians and policy makers who knew nothing of the historical, political or religious forces at work in the region. American Orientalists were neither well known nor given the kind of authority that was inherent in the British imperial system. Instead American ignorance of the Middle East was used to great advantage by those who opposed State Department initiatives. Opponents could translate events to create a conventional wisdom that area experts found difficult to oppose.
Perhaps the most effective lobbyist for Israel as the British mandate collapsed was President Truman's former haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, who convinced Truman to meet with Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Truman resented the arguments made by the State Department and called the Near East staff "striped pants conspirators." He told his sister in March 1948: "Someday I hope I'll get a chance to clean them out." He did. Before he left office Truman had removed or forced most of the Orientalists to leave.
Who were these Orientalists, and how much did they resemble Britain's? The most famous, William Eddy, was a dramatic figure. Born the son and grandson of missionaries in Lebanon in 1896, he became a hero during World War I and served in American intelligence during World War II. Eddy was fluent enough in Arabic to serve as Franklin Roosevelt's translator with the Saudis and was later made America's first minister to Saudi Arabia. Eddy's career began early. He first learned Arabic as a child in Lebanon, then went to Princeton University until World War I interrupted his studies. He joined the Marine Corps, fought at Belleau Woods (where he was gassed by the Germans) and returned as a decorated war hero. He completed his doctorate at Princeton in 1922 and, still barely in his twenties, became head of the English department at the American University of Cairo; he then left for a series of college presidencies in America.
In 1941, already 45 years old, he again volunteered for the Marine Corps and served as chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in North Africa (1942–43), where he plotted an uprising of North African Arabs and Berbers. Eddy only reluctantly gave up the plan after the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed it. He won the Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts and the Legion of Merit. His heroic role and his fluency in Arabic were recognized by Roosevelt, who made him his personal adviser and interpreter for negotiations with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in 1944. Baram observed that Eddy was "probably the nearest thing the United States had to a Lawrence of Arabia." One MECAS veteran wrote, "His practically native Arabic was invaluable in his work with OSS [...] it made him a very rare bird indeed, able to press his case directly with officials who knew not a word of English." After Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, the British Arabist Mr. Grafftey-Smith arrived to speak with him and found Ibn Saud's speech "was not easy for me to understand, being a mixture of the classical [...] and the beduin locutions."
Eddy built his career at a time when very few Americans had ever visited the region, and even fewer had ever lived there. He acknowledged the sacrifices made by generations of his own family, which bound him to the region. "Our parents and our grandparents are buried there [Lebanon]; many uncles and aunts gave their lives in missionary educational work." In a 1950 speech, he pointed to the work of missionary families building goodwill for America in Lebanon and concluded: "I'm proud of that kind of American effort."
Eddy, then a consultant on TAPline (trans-Arabian pipeline project), which built oil pipelines across the region, praised "American commercial companies" and the State Department who together "labored unstintingly and unselfishly to promote mutual interest and goodwill in the Near East." He viewed these three spheres as linked: the missionary community, American commercial interests and the State Department. Eddy highlighted the difference between the Europeans and the Americans. Americans came not as colonialists, but for "the mutual benefit and development of the resources in a partnership."
In contrast, British Arabists of this era were employed by a government that was busy administering an empire in the Middle East, including British Mandate Palestine and substantial responsibilities in Egypt and the Gulf region. According to McLoughlin, London's Foreign Office began a training program in 1943 that supported the British military and imperial responsibilities. The demands of the empire shaped how Britain trained their Arabists and how they viewed the Americans. Diplomats like William Eddy were on the other side of what McLoughlin termed "a bitter struggle for influence in the region within Saudi Arabia between Britain and the United States," and "Britain's diplomatic Arabists [were] locked in mortal (but invariably polite) combat with their American colleagues, and increasingly against American Arabists."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Arabists in the Cold War Middle East, 1946â?"75 by Teresa Fava Thomas. Copyright © 2016 Teresa Fava Thomas. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii,Introduction: America's Middle East Area Experts, 1,
Chapter One The Orientalists Fade Away, 19,
Chapter Two The Middle East Hands Emerge, 33,
Chapter Three Landfall: Language Training in Beirut, 1946, 47,
Chapter Four Filling the Cold War Linguist Gap: The Middle East Area Program in Beirut, 65,
Chapter Five "The Departure of Kings, Old Men, and Christians": The Eisenhower Years, 85,
Chapter Six Quiet Diplomacy in Action: The Kennedy and Johnson Years, 109,
Chapter Seven Kissinger's Arabesque: The Nixon and Ford Years, 135,
Epilogue: Beirut Axioms; Lessons Learned by the Middle East Hands, 169,
Appendix: Brief Biographies, 191,
Notes, 197,
Bibliography, 231,
Index, 241,