The Arabists: The Romance of an American EliteFree Press, 1993 - 333 pages Here is the untold story of an inbred, gifted, and powerful elite of families and friends who dominated America's relations with the Middle East for over a century. Known to Foreign Service colleagues as "the Arabists", these were the men and women who had spent much of their lives, usually with their families, living in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, and educators. Descended from the missionaries, scholars, and explorers who first ventured into the region - an offshoot of the WASP elite that ruled America during the nineteenth century - the Arabists were an exclusive caste linked by complex social, institutional, and family ties. Thoroughly at home in Arab cultures and often enjoying relations of longstanding intimacy with the monarchs and ruling elites of Arab countries, these American expatriates lived a charmed lifestyle that has become a source of intense nostalgia among the Arabists themselves as well as a symbol of their romance with Arab culture and increasing isolation from American society and interests. The Arabists dominated American policy and shaped our perception of the Arab world throughout the colonial and interwar periods. But after World War II, the diplomatic corps began to change, reflecting the country's new ethnic and social diversity. Kaplan describes the impact of this change within the State Department, showing how the advent of Irish Catholics, Jews, and Harvard-trained regional experts created internal pressures that slowly loosened the Arabists' grip on Middle East diplomacy in the postwar period. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the hundred-year history of theArabist elite, and traces their decline against the background of this social transformation. |
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Page 5
... region of the north , called Syria , and everything else — a sandstone desert reaching all the way south to Yemen . Syria , a Greek word derived from the Semitic Siryon , first appears in Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon , a ...
... region of the north , called Syria , and everything else — a sandstone desert reaching all the way south to Yemen . Syria , a Greek word derived from the Semitic Siryon , first appears in Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon , a ...
Page 94
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
Page 248
... region where various groups clashed and overlapped . Outsiders have been inclined to interpret Iraq as a modern outgrowth of an age - old polity known variously by such names as Sumer , Akkad , Assyria , Babylonia , the Baghdad ...
... region where various groups clashed and overlapped . Outsiders have been inclined to interpret Iraq as a modern outgrowth of an age - old polity known variously by such names as Sumer , Akkad , Assyria , Babylonia , the Baghdad ...
Contents
Three generations Three wars Three marriages | 1 |
Dream | 11 |
Home to Lebanon | 13 |
Copyright | |
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