INTERVIEW-U.S. should see Middle East for itself- historian
18 Jan 2007 00:15:38 GMT Source: Reuters
(Adding dropped first name and initial in second paragraph) By Michelle Nichols NEW YORK, Jan 17 (Reuters) - A best-selling author on the Middle East said on Wednesday the United States had to accept there were limits to what it could achieve in the region and that it should not view it as a potential mirror of itself. Michael B. Oren wrote "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," an award-winning New York Times bestseller, and this week released another book: "Power, Faith and Fantasy, America in the Middle East 1776 to present." "We're looking at the Middle East as a mirror and not looking at it in its face, as it were," said Oren, who was born in the United States but migrated to Israel in 1979 and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces. "They see Americans, they don't actually see this region for what it is. They don't see it for its own civilization, its own cultures," he told Reuters before an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York later on Wednesday. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a research and educational institute in Jerusalem, said America should not get "bogged down" in the state-making process in the Middle East, referring to the current situation in Iraq. But Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Steven Cook described Oren's comments as an exaggeration of America's view on the Middle East. "The problem is (America) saw the region as a variety of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian systems that they wanted to change and they felt that better than authoritarian stability would be democratic stability," Cook said. "I don't know anybody who has supported or thought about democracy promotion in the region, who ever saw the region as a mirror image," he said. Oren's new book, published by W.W. Norton, is a history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East stretching from the country's first president, George Washington, to its 43rd and current leader, George W. Bush. "The main message of the book is that America has been involved substantively and extensively in the Middle East for the past 230 years -- a fact that is not well known in America," Oren said. Oren said the United States needed to approach the Middle East with greater humility and respect as well as vigilance. "At the end of the day there is a limit to what America can do in this region. At the end of the day it's up to the people of the Middle East, not to us," Oren said.
