America & the Middle East: U.S. involvement in the Mideast goes back 200 years. It's a complicated tale of American idealism, strategic interests, and the uses of military power.

• Author: Oren, Michael B.

Muslim militants backed by rogue states are attacking vital Western interests, The American President fails to convince Europe to join a coalition to confront the aggressors militarily.

No, this is not President George W. Bush versus Saddam Hussein, but Thomas Jefferson versus the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, who were plundering Western ships and enslaving their crews. When Jefferson proposed creating a multilateral force to stop the pirates, Europe went on bribing the vandals rather than resort to war.

"This is money thrown away," Jefferson concluded, before ordering the Navy into action. On August 1, 1801, the first American shots in the Middle East were fired when the 36gun frigate Enterprise defeated a pirate gunboat near the Mediterranean island of Malta.

"THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI"

As the pirate war continued in 1804, two U.S. naval officers and six marines led a small force of Greeks, Arabs, and others 500 miles across the desert to "the shores of Tripoli" in what is now Libya (an action later immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn). Later, an American armada bombarded Algiers in what is now Algeria before the pirates at last surrendered in 1815. To keep the peace, the U.S. established a permanent Mediterranean squadron--the precursor of today's Sixth Fleet.

The history of American involvement in the Middle East is long and complicated. From colonial times, Americans felt a special attachment to the region, giving biblical names to a thousand towns and calling others Cairo, Mecca, and Baghdad.

Americans came to the Middle East not only with bombs but with books. In 1819, the first American missionaries to the region, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, arrived with instructions to explore "what good can be done for the Jews, for the Mohammedans [Muslims], for the Christians, for the people of Palestine, Egypt, and Syria." Hundreds more followed, bringing with them printing presses that produced, in addition to Bibles, four mil lion books--science and medical texts, dictionaries, and school primers--in five Middle Eastern languages. By century's end, Americans in Arab lands had established 300 schools, among them the Syrian Protestant College (now known as the American University in Beirut).

The projection of U.S. power and the export of its ideals--the twin themes of America's Middle East interaction--were often intertwined. In 1848, for example, Lt. William Francis Lynch, who described himself as "an earnest Christian and lover of...