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A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite.
From the 9/11 attacks to waterboarding to drone strikes, relations between the United States and the Middle East seem caught in a downward spiral. And all too often, the Central Intelligence Agency has made the situation worse. But this crisis was not a historical inevitability—far from it. Indeed, the earliest generation of CIA operatives was actually the region’s staunchest western ally. In America’s Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA’s pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency’s three most influential—and colorful—officers in the Middle East. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station. The two Roosevelts joined combined forces with Miles Copeland, a maverick covert operations specialist who had joined the American intelligence establishment during World War II. With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet they were also fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the “Great Game,” the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these “Arabists” propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades to come. Based on a vast array of declassified government records, private papers, and personal interviews, America’s Great Game tells the riveting story of the merry band of CIA officers whose spy games forever changed U.S. foreign policy.
A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite.
This study examines America's Middle East area specialists and their experience over three critical decades of foreign policy, aiming to understand how they were trained, what they learned, what was their foreign policy perspective, as well as to evaluate their influence. The book examines the post-1946 group and their role in the formulation and implementation of Middle East policy, and how this has shaped events in the relationship between American and the Middle East. The book examines the worldview of these modern "Arabists" or Middle East hands. It also examines their interactions with the peoples of the region and with American presidents through a series of case studies spanning the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations. Case studies shed light on Washington's perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. The Middle East Area Program (MEAP) was established at Beirut to train US Foreign Service Officers to communicate in Arabic and to understand the region and all its peoples. Middle East hands replaced the old East Coast elite who had staffed the interwar Near East Bureau. The program promised rapid advancement, but required them to invest two years at the American University of Beirut in order to immerse themselves in language training and area studies. Over three decades, the program recruited, selected and trained a corps of approximately fifty-three diplomats, who were a much more diverse, middle-class group than their predecessors. They were ambitious careerists who sought the fast track to the top, ultimately serving throughout the Arab world and in Israel, staffing the State Department's area desks and advising presidents. Many were skilled political reporting officers; and almost all of them became ambassadors as America expanded its presence in the region during the period of waning British influence. The program transformed the core of the State Department staff, replacing the old network of Orientalists with this small corps of highly-trained professionals. Ultimately, despite their expertise and a realistic view of American interests, their advice was often overridden by external political concerns.
Arabs and Arabists contains nineteen selected articles by Alastair Hamilton on the Western acquisition of knowledge of the Arab and Ottoman world in the early modern period. The first essays are on Arabs who visited Europe and gave instruction to Western Arabists, and on Europeans who either visited the Arab (or the Ottoman) world in search of manuscripts and information or who, like Franciscus Raphelengius, Isaac Casaubon and Adriaen Reland, studied it at a distance and remained in the West. These are followed by a section on the actual study of the Arabic language in Europe, and above all the creation of the first Arabic-Latin dictionaries, and another on the European study of Islam and Western translations of the Qur’an.
This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.
Pascual de Gayangos (1809-97) celebrated Spanish Orientalist and polymath, is recognised as the father of the modern school of Arabic studies in Spain. He gave Islamic Spain its own voice, for the first time representing Spain's 'other' from 'within' not from without. This collection, the first major study of Gayangos, celebrates the 200th anniversary of his birth.Covering a wide range of subjects, it reflects the multiple fields in which Gayangos was involved: scholarship on the culture of Islamic and Christian Spain; history, literature, art; conservation and preservation of national heritage; formation of archives and collections; education; tourism; diplomacy and politics. Amalgamating and understanding Gayangos's multiple identities, it reinstates his importance for cultural life in nineteenth-century Spain, Britain and North America.It is also argued that Gayangos's scholarly achievements and his influence have a political dimension. His work must be seen in relation to the quest for a national identity which marked the nineteenth century: what was the significance of Spain's Islamic past, and the Imperial Golden Age to the culture of modern Spain? The chapters, informed by post-colonial theory, reception theory and theories of national identity, uncover some of the complexities of the process that shaped Spain's national identity. In the course of this book, Gayangos is shown to be a figure with many facets and several intellectual lives: Arabist, historian, liberal, researcher, editor, numismatist, traveller, translator, diplomat, perhaps a spy, a generous collaborator and one of Spain's greatest bibliophiles.
While critics claim that a nefarious Israel Lobby dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, the Arab Lobby in this country is older, richer, and more powerful than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The Arab Lobby is the first book in more than 25 years to investigate the scope and activities of this diffuse yet powerful network. Author Mitchell Bard courageously explores the invisible alliance that threatens Israel and undermines America’s interests in the Middle East.