jeregenest

I'm currently reading Michael Oren's Power, Faith and Fanatsy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present which is a hugely ambitious history of America's invovlement in the Middle East, providing a finely balanced overview of this enormously complex subject. Highly recommended, I've delighted in its treatment of how the Barbary Coast was a huge incentive behind getting a constitution and Federalist government; the fact that the Statue of Liberty was originally intended for the Suez Canal; that the first Zionists to settle in Palestine were in fact American Protestants, who planted successive, ill-fated colonies aimed at “restoring” the Holy Land to Jews, so that their subsequent conversion to Christianity would speed the Second Coming; that Civil War veterans officered Egyptian campaigns in Sudan and Abyssinia; that before landing in North Africa during World War II, the United States Army dropped leaflets advertising the arrival of “Holy Warriors ... to fight the great jihad of freedom”. I could go one and on about this book, its probably the best and most comphresnive book on the subject I've read. It can absically replace 3 or 4 other books in my collection, which should make