The U.S. government and all people of goodwill have struggled to understand the culture of the Middle East, the people of the Middle East and especially the violence erupting in and from the Middle East.

A new book may assist in developing an understanding of the Middle East. Michael B. Oren is the author of Power, Faith & Fantasy, America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. Rather than attempting to explain every event and every group’s motives, Oren simply places a certain subset of events in chronological order. The events are the interactions between the United States and the Middle East.

Context is incredibly conducive to understanding. In order to understand the Indian Wars of the United States, the history does not start in 1776. The Indian Wars on the North American continent had been a fact of life for over two hundred years prior to 1776. The Indian Wars had been a fact of life for another century by the time the U.S. government prosecuted the Indian Wars to finality during the last thirty years of the 19th century. Whether more than three hundred years of warfare justified how it ended is a moral question, but knowing how it started and progressed at least explains how it ended. The best history of the Indian Wars I’ve seen was co-authored by Robert M. Utley in 1977, Indian Wars.

Likewise, Oren’s theory was that understanding could be achieved, or at least made more likely, by reviewing the chronology of interactions between the U.S. and the people of the Middle East. Oren is an excellent writer and, if his facts are correct, is excellent at providing context for the selection of events and persons he discusses.

Oren admits that the events during the last thirty years cannot be explicated with declassified documents, because secret government documents have not been declassified. Older events can be explicated with secret government documents because many have been declassified.

Oren, just as he did in his book about the Six Day War, seemed to put the events he chose for his chronology together in a way that perspective becomes an obtainable position. There are some hard truths that Oren points to that make the perspective to be gained quite frightening.

– During the wars with the Barbary Pirates, at the time of war of independence, the Barbary Pirates described themselves as “mujahideen” and in 1785 declared:

It was …written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners…

– The first sovereign to recognize the new United States was Morocco — or at least Morocco, a Middle Eastern country, so claimed.

– The first country ever to declare war on the U.S. was Tripoli, in 1801, a Middle Eastern country.

– The first military engagement in the Middle East involving the U.S. was in the war against Tripoli, when the USS Enterprise captured a 14-gun ship of the same name, the Tripoli, which constituted the offensive naval capability of the nation of Tripoli. (The Enterprise pretended to be the ship of an ally to Tripoli until the Tripoli drew close and then the Enterprise raked her decks with canister blasts.)

– The second war declared on the U.S., in 1803, was declared by Morocco.

In other words, America’s engagement with the Middle East has been going on for as long as the country has existed. Those who claim “those people,” usually meaning the Arabs and the Jews, or the Palestinians and Jews, or the PLO and Israel, have been fighting for thousands of years, forget that the United States has been engaged since its own inception.