Arabists: The Romance of an American EliteSimon and Schuster, 1995 M07 1 - 368 pages A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite. |
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... President Slobodan Milosevic, as awful as he is, was not building nuclear or chemical weapons as Saddam was. And the Serbianrun “ethnic cleansing” camps constituted an atrocity no worse than Saddam's gassing to death of thousands of ...
... President Slobodan Milosevic, as awful as he is, was not building nuclear or chemical weapons as Saddam was. And the Serbianrun “ethnic cleansing” camps constituted an atrocity no worse than Saddam's gassing to death of thousands of ...
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... president of Aleppo College when Bill was a year old. Aleppo was also where Bill and Janet had gone to celebrate their engagement. There was also Beirut, only a few hours by car from Damascus, where Bill's parents had recently returned ...
... president of Aleppo College when Bill was a year old. Aleppo was also where Bill and Janet had gone to celebrate their engagement. There was also Beirut, only a few hours by car from Damascus, where Bill's parents had recently returned ...
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... president arrived.” Playing tennis with Agnew was not unpleasant, though. Bill had been warned that the vice president was “a guy who hated to lose.” So for a while Bill kept hitting the ball meekly. “'This is ridiculous,' I finally ...
... president arrived.” Playing tennis with Agnew was not unpleasant, though. Bill had been warned that the vice president was “a guy who hated to lose.” So for a while Bill kept hitting the ball meekly. “'This is ridiculous,' I finally ...
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... more than two hundred years later. As we shall learn, the famous encounter in July 1990 between U.S. ambassador April Glaspie and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was, in reality, two centuries in the making. Miss Glaspie entered.
... more than two hundred years later. As we shall learn, the famous encounter in July 1990 between U.S. ambassador April Glaspie and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was, in reality, two centuries in the making. Miss Glaspie entered.
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... president of the American University of Beirut and another of Anne's childhood acquaintances, remembers her walks home from school by the “deep blue and green” Mediterranean, “mottled with brown silt” from a river egress that the ...
... president of the American University of Beirut and another of Anne's childhood acquaintances, remembers her walks home from school by the “deep blue and green” Mediterranean, “mottled with brown silt” from a river egress that the ...
Contents
Aggrieved Area Experts | |
Mugged by Reality | |
Horan of Arabia | |
Indiana Jones | |
Debacle | |
The Icy Eyes That Had Contemplated Nineveh | |
Cowering in a Dark Alley | |
Hostages to Idealism | |
Reality | |
Mr Foreign Service | |
Old Hands | |
Never a Dull Moment | |
Redemption | |
A New Species? | |
Bibliography | |
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Common terms and phrases
Akins American missionaries antiSemitism April Glaspie Arab country Arab nationalism Arab world ArabIsraeli Arabists Aviv Baghdad became Beirut Bill Stoltzfus Bliss British cables Cairo career Christian Cluverius colleagues College Congregationalist Coon Crane culture Custis Damascus David Department Department’s desert Doughty Eagleton Eastern Egypt Eli Smith expatriates Falashas Feisal Foreign Service French FSOs Glaspie’s going Hermann Eilts Hume Horan Iran Iraq Iraq’s Iraqi Islam Israel Israeli Jerry Weaver Jerusalem Jewish Jews Jidda Kelly Khartoum Killgore Kissinger Kissinger’s knew Kuwait language Lawrence Lawrence’s learn Arabic Lebanon lived Loy Henderson Maronites Mesopotamia Middle East military mission Moslem NEA assistant secretary never officer Operation Moses Palestine Palestinian Parker peace Philby political president Protestant Roy Atherton Sadat Saddam Saudi Arabia says Seelye’s Shiite Sisco SixDay Soviet Sterner Sudan Sudanese Syria Talcott Seelye U.S. ambassador U.S. diplomats U.S. embassy United University Veliotes Washington Western Wiley William Yemen