In the self-hating narrative all too popular and which serves as a substitute for thoughtful historical analysis, the West deserves recent Islamic-based terrorism – or at least – should expect nothing less. We bring such atrocities upon our own heads given our collective history of imposed colonialism, insensitivity to other cultures and willingness to sacrifice all others and our own principles. We do this for black gold to heat our gargantuan homes and fuel our obscene SUVs. This is the bleating apologia from everyone from Michael Moore to the late Edward Said, from New Democrats to the ever-pacifist Bloc Quebecois, from critics at home and abroad.

The double standard, where the West Inc. is eternally responsible not only for own our decisions dating back decades if not hundreds of years but for the actions – the assumed reactions, of non-Western states, is easily spotted in CBC reports or in the Toronto Star. It is present in letters to almost any newspaper where it is assumed that if Israel was not in the West Bank, if Canada was not in Afghanistan, and the U.S. was not in Iraq, and if none of us bought oil from the Middle East, all would be well.

Such a narrative ignores the reality of multiple occasions where the West has helped out Muslims: the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Kosovo Muslims against Christian Orthodox Serbs, Kuwaitis against the tyrannical Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The West-is-never-best refrain also ignores an obvious question regarding such help and as regards oil: Imagine if the West hadn’t helped out Muslims in such circumstances or never bought Middle Eastern crude.

Had Western powers not helped out Muslims in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in Kuwait in the 1990s, we then would have been blamed for not acting when our diplomats, arms, and armies could have made a difference to those in need of our help. If Western nations had not bought Middle East oil over the decades, we would now be accused of not allowing our trade dollars to help impoverished countries. To wit, a person or culture with a grudge can find reasons to blame someone else, even if the actions performed had been the opposite of those now decried.

Which might be why digging up historical gems goes a long way to curing fanciful notions that everything errant in the East is blameable on the West. Into this gap steps Michael Oren, author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present.

Oren, New Jersey-born, Columbia and Princeton-educated, an Israeli paratrooper in the first Lebanese war in the early 1980s, a former advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, and now a scholar at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, has been well-placed to understand both the politics and fantasies of his birth country and the West in general. He also gets the power collisions inevitable in the Middle East, based on more than one set of actions from one entry, i.e., more than just “ours.”

So, to use the example which alerted most of us in North America to a war that had raged for centuries and which most had forgotten, the four American airplanes hijacked by Islamic terrorists on 9/11 were only the latest salvos in a war by some – I emphasize, some – in Islam who had never stopped being hostile to Western nations and citizens.

For example, Oren notes attacks on North Americans date back at least as far as 1625. That year, long before oil was of any use for transportation or as a rhetorical weapon to simplify international affairs (“No blood for oil!”), Moroccan corsairs captured a merchant ship sailing from the North American colonies. Twenty years later, i.e., over two and half centuries before the Bush dynasty and Big Oil could be blamed for all our ills, seamen from Cambridge, Massachusetts, fought off an assault by Algerians. Then, in 1678, Algiers seized one ship from Massachusetts and 13 from Virginia. Two years later, 390 English captives were ransomed back to their home countries, including 11 residents of New York and New England.

And as the Jerusalem-based scholar points out, this high seas piracy was Europe’s nightmare from the twelfth century up until the 18th century. And while some captured human prey was ransomed, many were not. Slavery was practiced on white Europeans by Barbary nations just as whites in Europe and the United States traded in the flesh of black Africans.

Men were often sold into slavery for deadly work in mines and galleys. European women fetched high prices as they were prized for their fair complexions. Oren notes the story of Mrs. Maria Martin, a British citizen captured by Algerians. Martin “told of being stripped, extensively inspected and chained in a lightless cell for over two years, merely for refusing to serve as a concubine.”

It’s doubtful many in many in the West knew about Islamic-based pirates and their harassment and enslavement of Western ships and peoples, or how often American, British and continental European foreign policy has swung between appeasement and military intervention. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the English government regularly paid “tribute” money to Barbary states so as to ensure British vessels were left alone. Intervention was demonstrated by Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, when an American businessman, Ion Perdicaris was kidnapped in Tangier along with his stepson by two hundred armed tribesmen, tribesmen in the employ of a charismatic Berber chief, Ahmad ben Muhammad al Rasul li-llah, or “Raisuli” to the Americans.

Raisuli’s argument was not, he said, with the United States, but with Morocco’s sultan who had long oppressed the Riffian Berbers. Initially, Raisuli demanded a ransom from the sultan in exchange for Perdicaris; after that was ignored, Raisuli demanded the same from the Americans.

President Roosevelt, of walk-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick fame, and who had seen previous hostages in the region released only after private bribes were paid, was in no mood to bargain. The American president sent seven warships to the Moroccan coast, deployed a squad or marines to guard the U.S. consulate in Tangier, and prepared to deploy another 1,200 marines to occupy the city if necessary. Roosevelt then sent this telegram to the sultan:

PRESIDENT WISHES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE DONE TO SECURE THE RELEASE OF PERDICARIS. HE WISHES IT CLEARLY UNERSTOOD THAT IF PERDICARIS IS MURDERED, THIS GOVERNMENT WILL DEMAND THE LIFE OF THE MURDERER.

WE WANT PEDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD.

Roosevelt’s 1904 action would fit modern assumptions about the United States – it is always apt to intervene. But the historical reality is that the U.S. always swings between isolationism (including occasional appeasement) and interventionism, be the president Teddy Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. Oren notes that in addition to the earliest American encounters with the Middle East noted previously, post-Revolution, i.e., when America lost the protection of the British Navy, U.S. ships were regularly raided in the region. In one three-month span in late 1784 and early 1785, the 300-ton Boston-based brig, the Betsy, was captured one hundred miles from North Africa’s coast, and the Dauphin and Maria were also subsequently abducted, this time by Algiers.

At the time, nothing much could be done. America’s Articles of Confederation prevented a peacetime navy from being raised. This frustrated Thomas Jefferson, then America’s “minister” to France (the term ambassador was not yet used by America given its monarchical sound to American ears). Jefferson wanted $2 million to build a fleet with 150 guns. Congress turned him down, choosing instead to raise $70,000 for “influence,” i.e., bribe money which could be used to secure the release of Americans captured by Barbary states; $20,000 of that was later used to secure the release of the Betsy and her crew and a peace agreement with Morocco.

Not that it did much good. Other Barbary states smelt American weakness and began to emulate Morocco’s action. Thus, shortly after the Betsy was released, it was once again captured, this time by Tunis.

“These ignominies weighed not only on Jefferson but also on George Washington, the most revered American of the time,” writes Oren in his description of how isolationist pacifism of the type Washington was famous for, mutated into a willingness to rewrite confederation’s articles and to construct a national navy which meant, heretofore disdained by the states, a national government. This led, Oren points out, to Philadelphia in 1787, where twelve of the thirteen states gathered to consider “[r]eplacing the Articles of Confederation with a more centralized national charter- to rectify the very weakness that had humbled the United States before Barbary.”

While the connection between the Middle East and the American federation was downplayed during the Constitutional Convention, Oren reminds readers that the connection “figured prominently in impassioned state-level debates on ratifying the proposed Constitution.” Americans of all varieties noted the link between Barbary terror and the need for a national government and standing navy. A Massachusetts preacher testified to that state’s convention that “our sailors…in Algiers is enough to convince the most skeptical among us, of the want of general government.”

But scepticism remained strong, and it took James Madison and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton and what later became known as The Federalist Papers to push the link between American commerce and a federal America along with a navy. “If we mean to be a commercial people…we must endeavour as soon as possible to have a navy,” argued Hamilton in The Federalist No. 24.

The rest may be American constitutional history but the usefulness of Oren’s Power Faith and Fantasy, is that such history is finally put in context for a 21st century audience; one might say the Barbary states were present at the creation of the American Constitution. Moreover, Oren’s project fills in numerous other historical gaps which pre-date the ramped-up importance of oil in the mid-20th century.

It includes a useful history of the constant Christianity missionary activity in the Middle East, many of whom established the best schools, colleges and hospitals in the region. Such sections also help inform modern readers on why so many of the later diplomats, who were sons and daughters of those with a religious vocation, were anti-Zionist and convinced Arabists, i.e., why they opposed the creation of the state of Israel; they saw it as fundamentally unsettling to the region, to their projects, and often to their own safety. In that sense, for better or worse and correct or incorrect in their approach, they saw themselves as “realists,” a term that can be used positively or pejoratively, but one which always conflicts with another constant American impulse: idealism of the sort that means American would also like to see nations in the region turned into liberal democracies.

Oren spills a large amount of ink – 604 pages of text and 129 pages of footnotes and bibliography – in an attempt to educate readers about the intractable and Byzantine nature of Middle Eastern politics and does so more or less successfully. From detailing and somewhat candidly critiquing the romanticism of religious believers and others about the region to describing the chronic failures of American presidents as different as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the two George Bushes. It should at the very least disabuse readers not ideologically committed to the West-is-eternally-guilty-of-every-action-and-reaction shtick of the notion that our relations with the Middle East are ever only about oil, or about a simple Disney-like choice between evil and good, between power and principles, between commerce and human rights.

Oddly though, after spending much time illustrating the complexities of the region and America’s relationship to it over two-and-half centuries, Oren himself ends the book with what amounts to almost a prayer that the U.S. “might yet transform its vision of peaceful, fruitful relations with the Middle east from fantasy into reality.”

Perhaps, but given the author’s 600-plus pages of cold water reality which regularly reminds the reader of how difficult it is to “manage” the region, and his own close-up experience of seeing the disaster of giving the West Bank to Yasser Arafat, one has to wonder if Oren’s hopeful conclusion isn’t an example of wandering into the realm of faith and hope over a more pedestrian and depressing reality.