Word: oren
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Oren argues that America cannot find a solution to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East because the tripartite mindset of power, faith, and fantasy is often self-contradictory...
...book, as its title suggests, tells the history of America’s relations with the Middle East from the nation’s birth to the War on Terror. Oren weaves the history together with three overlapping threads, which he argues are the factors that have most influenced America’s relations with the tumultuous region: power, particularly militaristic and political; faith, by which he means Christian evangelism, especially its relationship to Zionism; and fantasy, the depiction of the Middle East as a mystical, faraway land in popular culture from “Lawrence of Arabia?...
...Oren carefully connects America’s recent history to its early roots. President Bush’s pro-force policies can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson, who in 1790 recommended that the United States go to war with the Barbary pirates, and Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, who dispatched Marines to protect Americans living in Beirut, which was war-torn even at the turn of the 20th century. Bush’s support of American businesses in the region even calls to mind the value Andrew Jackson placed on Middle Eastern trade...
...though the intellectual threads have remained consistent, the policies they result in have not, Oren argues...
...same faith that deflected [Woodrow] Wilson from entering hostilities in the Middle East spurred Bush to decide in favor of the war,” Oren writes. While Wilson’s deep-felt Christianity caused him to adopt a pacifistic attitude, President Bush, partly inspired by the attacks on the World Trade Center, has followed what Oren sees as a “crusader” ideology...