As discussed in the previous article of this series, 9.11 focused America’s attention on the wider Middle East, that is Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and to some extent, Turkey, in addition of course to the Arab world.

There is a widespread mistake that America came to the wider Middle East after the Second World War, determined to inherit the British empire’s possessions in the region, and with that, it entered into strategic transactions with key powers, such as the House of Saud, by which America offered protection in return for a highly privileged position for America, and its companies, in extracting and distributing Saudi oil. This is a part of the story. But America had come to the region much earlier than that.

Since the early nineteenth century, and for at least three decades, America was closely watching the southern and eastern Mediterranean because the of the threat that the then called the Barbary regimes (in today’s Maghreb region) had posed to American commercial shipping in the southern Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. Indeed, it was in the southern Mediterranean that America’s navy had its very first real operations, trying to destroy the pirating fleets of several of the semi-city states in today’s Maghreb. These successive American expeditions in the Mediterranean were of crucial importance to America’s, then, nascent military power, and to its then expanding maritime commercial presence in the world, that it had commanded the attention of its highest executives, including Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Religion also brought America to the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, in the first third of the nineteenth century, American pastors – primarily from Episcopalian and Presbyterian backgrounds – found immense success in New England states in raising funds for organising missionary expeditions to go to the Middle East, especially to the Levant. The incentive was largely to propagate Christianity, to fulfil America’s vision of itself as the “city on the hill”, ‘the light of the nations” that would bring goodness to the world, especially to nations that, in a certain American perception, had been lurking for ages in a moral and intellectual darkness. Indeed, these missionary campaigns were the foundational work upon which key American institutions in the region, such as the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo, were later created.

America’s internal problems, from the war with Britain in the early nineteenth century, to the expansion of the Republic towards the West, then the Civil War, the reconstruction of the south after that, and a wave of booms and busts in the last third of the nineteenth century, consumed American attention and channelled the country’s efforts internally. America, often by design, often by default, isolated itself behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for almost seven decades, until the first quarter of the twentieth century. But whenever America ventured seriously abroad, going beyond savouring the luxuries of London, Paris, Vienna, and Rome, America was almost always drawn to the Middle East. And so, America’s return to the Arab world and the Middle East after the Second World War, was far from exploring an unknown.

Indeed, America came to the wider Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s with quite strongly formed views on the region. These views ranged between two opposites. The first were largely negative, seeing the Arab world and the wider Middle East as having a false religious and moral frame of reference, an important theme in a country (America) in which Christianity – and quite a conservative, and often assertive form of the religion at that – has always had a strong shaping power. And so, from this perspective, America came to the region aiming to, in the American understanding, enlighten it.

The second set of views were quite romantic. Interestingly, these views were largely held by officers of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), America’s first field operatives in the region, and who, to a large extent, shaped America’s presence in the region in the 1950s and 1960s. Although most of those OSS and CIA officers drew on English and Orientalist perceptions of the East and had firsthand experiences that were often reminiscent of those of medieval European travellers in the orient, the most influential of them saw the region through idealised lenses. Even when these officers organised coups and tried to overthrow regimes, their thinking was often rooted on beliefs that the Arab world and the wider Middle East entailed immense goodness and potential that they only needed to steer towards, what they believed were, the right courses (which of course, in their thinking, aligned with the interests of the US in the region).

These old frames of reference were vividly present in the thinking that prevailed at the key power circles in America, which designed te country’s strategy in and for the wider Middle East after 9.11. As the next article of this series will show, the results were some of the most ambitious and problematic socio-political projects the region has ever witnessed in its modern history.