The Books: “Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite” (Robert Kaplan)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan.

Ah, Robert Kaplan. He’s a guy who pretty much launched a thousand ships in my life. He and Ryzsard Kapuscinski were the ones who started it all. I read Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History and Kapscinski’s marvelous Imperium in tandem and … fuggedaboutit. I was HOOKED. Not only do I find Kaplan’s world-weary pragmatism and sometimes rampant pessimism kind of invigorating (how can pessimism be invigorating? I have no idea. But read his books, if you haven’t already to see what I mean) – but I also think he’s one of the best writers out there, in terms of not only journalism, but human interest stories, travelogue pieces, book reviews. You know where he stands on certain issues, but it sure as hell doesn’t line up with any bullshit political party talking-points. He’s an environmentalist. He thinks military action is often the only way to bring about peace of any kind. He’s worried about overpopulation. He despises communism and totalitarianism. I am now making my way through his Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond – his huge book about the American military (first in an ongoing series) and I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have any other person as a guide. In my mind, he’s the best guide there is. He’s got his own way of looking at the world – the Kaplan filter – and you can take it or leave it, but you might as well know what the guy is saying, because he’s made correct predictions before. He’s scarily prescient. His book The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War should be required reading … I don’t know WHO should be required to read it but I feel like everyone should read it. That book scared the shit out of me. Kaplan’s books often scare the shit out of me. I’ve read them all, and he is one of the few authors where I literally wait with baited breath for his next book. He’s pretty much been a one-book-a-year kind of guy since the late 90s, so it’s been cool for me – I can get my Kaplan fix on a yearly basis. I like looking at the world through the Kaplan filter. I think my favorite of all of his books is The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. Kaplan is one of those guys, one of those few few guys, who takes the long long view. This is one of the reasons why I find him invigorating. If you’re a historian, if you study ancient empires rising and falling – as Kaplan does … then you’re going to look at the current struggle a little bit differently. Empires always end. His book An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future is his fascinating book about America itself – he travels through America and treats it as though it is a foreign country – He’s trying to figure out what is happening in America … It’s kind of a scary book – because – well – change scares me – but I feel comforted knowing that people like him are out there, thinking about this stuff, projecting into the future (good or bad).

His first book wasArabists: The Romance of an American Elite. I think Arabists had gone out of print and when Balkan Ghosts hit it so huge, they re-released it. It’s the story of basically the American diplomat class in the Middle East – how it began with these Protestant missionary types – who wanted to save the heathens … and then others came … and more and more … setting up universities, diplomatic missions from the US State Department blah blah blah … How were the US “Arabists” different from the “sand-mad Britons”? Kaplan looks at the differences. It’s an interesting book, a lot of the history I did not know – but having read every single one of Kaplan’s books, and feeling, at times, completely turned ON by his prose – I can feel that he’s new at this whole book-writing thing in this one. It feels like a first book. Or maybe a dissertation paper. VERY interesting, though.

Today’s excerpt is about Loy Henderson, Mr. still-controversial Cold War Foreign Service Man.

From Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan.

Unlike the missionaries, Henderson was no idealist. Nor did he, or anyone he was close to, have a vested interest — as the missionaries certainly did — in maintaining a personal relationship with the Arabs. Henderson was, however, both a gifted analyst and a quick study, one who was able immediately to place facts about a region previously unknown to him into a conceptual framework that interlocked with situations elsewhere in the world. And it didn’t take him long to figure out that after the war with Germany and Japan was over, the Middle East was bent on a cataclysm. He was absolutely certain by 1943 that the intercommunal situation in Palestine was explosive and nearly impossible to solve, and that its shock effects would fissure throughout the Middle East, distorting the region’s politics as it already was doing in Iraq. Because he was also certain that after Hitler was defeated, the Soviet Union would become America’s worldwide enemy, he thought that the United States had to look at the Palestine problem through the filter of a global struggle against Communism. This necessitated that the US support the side in Palestine that would better strengthen its hand in dealing with the Soviets. For Henderson there was no contest: the Arabs had oil, strategic locations, and numbers. And how many oil wells do the Jews have? Henderson seemed to ask himself. In 1943 this was sheer clairvoyance (even if, as some might assume, Henderson was also motivated by a lack of sympathy for Jews.) By 1947 Henderson would realize that recognition of the State of Israel would buy the United States decades of constant trouble and expense, as well as lead to “the rise of fanatic Mohammedanism” of a kind “not experienced for hundres of years.” Could anyone today argue with that?

Henderson would turn out to be wrong about one thing, however: the US could indeed have it both ways, friendship with the Arabs and with the Jews. But not for three decades, as a consequence of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy and reestablishment of relations with Egypt and Syria in the 1970s, would this become absolutely clear.

In the end, one’s attitude towards Henderson is driven by one’s perception of how cold-blooded American police needed to be back then. Because Henderson had personally experienced Stalinism to a degree that few of his countrymen had, he had no illusions about the enemy they faced and what he thought it would take to eventually defeat that enemy. Henderson was about as different from the missionaries as one could get. He had no special interest in the Arabs, their language, their culture, or their educational and national aspirations. But he did have strong opinions about where the US national interest in the Middle East lay, and these opinions happened to dovetail perfectly with those of the missionaries. This alignment of goals provided the template for the hybrid Arabist culture that would emerge in the 1950s.

Henderson’s analytical skills, his determination and energy, and his willingness — with the support of his wife, Elise — to sacrifice much of his personal life on the altar of work and duty resulted in his promotion in 1945. He became the director of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs office. Henderson’s force was felt immediately. When the French government, now controlled by the Free French leader, Charles De Gaulle, began bombing Damascus and other Arab population centers in Syria as a means of retaining control over the Syrian mandate, Henderson went directly to Truman, advising him to force the French to withdraw. Not only, Henderson thought, did French actions mock the spirit of the new United Nations charter, but they threatened to derail the West’s relations with Arabs and other Moslems. As Henderson explained to his superiors, Arab hatred of the French would eventually be directed at the entire West and would one day permit the Soviet Union to fill the Great Power void in Syria. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

In early 1946 Soviet troops advanced south to the outskirts of Tabriz in northwestern Iran and were poised to take the city. It was the first crisis in what was to be called the Cold War, and Loy Henderson was ready. It was Henderson who marched into the offices of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of State James Byrnes, armed with maps to explain how the Soviet troop deployment threatened Turkey, Iraq, and the Iranian oil fields, and prevailed upon the Truman administration to issue a stiff warning to Stalin. Stalin soon pulled back his troops. It was Henderson who, responding to political chaos in Greece later that same year, agitated for a strong US response to prevent a Communist victory there. “The Truman doctrine, which more than any other document served as the blueprint of America’s anticommunist empire, took shape in Henderson’s office and under his careful direction” as a response to the Greek civil war.

It was in such an atmosphere, with Stalin banging down Greece’s door and threatening the northern extremities of Iran, that Henderson confronted the Palestine issue in 1947 and 1948. Henderson, who by now ran NEA in autocratic style and was utterly consumed by the Soviet threat, did everything he could to thwart partition and afterward to thwart US recognition of the part of Palestine awarded to the Jews. Though Marshall and others outside the State Department supported Henderson in this policy, American Jews concentrated their wrath on Henderson alone. “Perhaps Palestine is a new subject for Mr. Marshall. Perhaps he is being briefed by Loy Henderson, the Arabphile [and] striped-trousered underling saboteur,” declared Emanuel Celler, a Democratic congressman from a heavily Jewish area of New York City. By the middle of 1948, with Truman fighting for election, Henderson was a political liability that the Democratic presidential candidate could no longer afford. And so for the crime of challenging the conventional wisdom, Henderson was once again exiled, this time to India as US ambassador.

Henderson regretted nothing. He was willing to be publicly branded an anti-Semite if that was the price he had to pay for fulfilling his responsibilities as a Foreign Service officer. Without missing a beat, he immersed himself in India matters. As he had in the Middle East, Henderson arrived in New Delhi soon after India became a major issue. Again Henderson disrupted both conventional wisdom and political correctness by daring to criticize the new nation of India’s celebrated leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. Henderson found Nehru “vain, sensitive, emotional and complicated,” as well as ungrateful for America’s friendship. Even worse, according to Henderson, Nehru’s dislike of America had little to do with policy differences but was driven by his British schoolboy-like snobbery regarding America’s commercialism and middle-class culture. Henderson also found Indian neutralism dangerous and intellectually dishonest. Such realizations later became commonplace, but Henderson was the first to point them out.

In 1951 Henderson left India to become Ambassador to Iran just as Mohammed Mosadeq was named prime minister, promising to kick the British and their oil interstes out of the country. For almost the next three years Henderson put on a stellar one-man performance in directing US policy toward greater engagement in Iranian affairs and eventually toward overthrowing Mosadeq when his flirtations with the Soviet Union became overt. The Shah’s reassertions of power with a strong US presence was thus assured for the next quarter-century, thanks to Henderson, though he took no pleasure in the outcome. He predicted that one day the Iranian people would come to hate America as they did Britain.

The overthrow of Mosadeq led to the creation of the Baghdad Pact, an anticommunist alliance of Near Eastern states to which Henderson was named ambassador in 1955. Henderson was also involved in the Suez, Congo, and other crises. Henderson’s last important task in the State Department, as deputy undersecretary of state, was to oversee the reorganization of the Foreign Service in the 1950s, a reorganization that made the service at once more professional and less elite, while laying the groundwork for the true middle-class democratization of the State Department that would occur in the 1980s.

By the end of his career, writes Brands, “peers judged” Henderson “the consummate career officer, a man who did not allow political considerations to color his advice, whose steady advancement owed to solid work and devotion to duty. Subordinates looked up to him as a model of what they might become,” particularly because, as Henderson had no children, he adopted a fatherly attitude toward many young Foreign Service officers, seeing them as his heirs.

Loy Henderson, in a sense, invented the political culture of the Foreign Service in the first decades of the postwar era. He was affectionately called Mr. Foreign Service, a title that many of his former colleagues still use when talking about him. While the diplomatic reception rooms on the top floor of the State Department take the names of the Founding Fathers, a large public hall on the ground floor is named after Henderson. Dedicating the hall in 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lauded Henderon as “the quintessence of what makes our Foreign Service a great and dedicated instrument of national policy.”

There could be no greater proof of the immeasurable distance between the State Department and the Jewish state than the fact that the very man who fought hardest to prevent its recognition was thought by his peers to represent the highest standards of their profession. While to Israelis and American Jews Henderson was a “bastard,” to Foreign Service officers he was a martyr to public ignorance. Henderson was the classic elitist and insider, who knew popular domestic opinion deserved no place in computing the national interest because the public lacked the facts, the analytical skills, and the living experience overseas that he and his colleagues had in abundance. Wasn’t he right — and all those Jewish intellectuals wrong — about the true nature of communism?