Michael Oren: On Bush's typical American intentions in the Middle East
ELIZABETH JACKSON: Two hundred and thirty years ago, a hardy American called John Ledyard became the first from his country to travel to the Middle East.
He went with the aim of making a difference. He was the first American to do so, but certainly not the last.
American born academic, Michael Oren, has written a book about the history of US entanglements in the Middle East.
Called Power, Faith and Fantasy it traces the various motives and the many misunderstandings which have underpinned US policy.
Michael Oren lives and works in Jerusalem, where he met with our Middle East Correspondent David Hardaker.
David asked Michael Oren for his assessment of the impact of the Bush administration.
MICHAEL OREN: Put it this way, I think that the Bush administration came into the Middle East with very good intentions and with sort of very typical, classical American intentions.
DAVID HARDAKER: By which you mean?
MICHAEL OREN: By which I mean that Americans have, for more than two centuries, regarded the Middle East as sort of a fractured reflection of themselves. And they look at the Middle East and say basically, "we can fix this, we can make this Middle East resemble us, we can make it into democratic United States of the Middle East".
DAVID HARDAKER: Do the people in the Middle East want democracy or not?
MICHAEL OREN: It depends again on how you define democracy. Um, democracy, it's widely misunderstood in the west. Translated, democracy means casting a ballot every four years.
But the people in the Middle East understand that democracy is not that. That democracy is a package, democracy is a civilisation, and that with democracy comes rights of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, but even more importantly women's rights, children's rights, which are in many ways an anathema to the traditional societies of this region and they're not going to, don't want that part of the package.
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He went with the aim of making a difference. He was the first American to do so, but certainly not the last.
American born academic, Michael Oren, has written a book about the history of US entanglements in the Middle East.
Called Power, Faith and Fantasy it traces the various motives and the many misunderstandings which have underpinned US policy.
Michael Oren lives and works in Jerusalem, where he met with our Middle East Correspondent David Hardaker.
David asked Michael Oren for his assessment of the impact of the Bush administration.
MICHAEL OREN: Put it this way, I think that the Bush administration came into the Middle East with very good intentions and with sort of very typical, classical American intentions.
DAVID HARDAKER: By which you mean?
MICHAEL OREN: By which I mean that Americans have, for more than two centuries, regarded the Middle East as sort of a fractured reflection of themselves. And they look at the Middle East and say basically, "we can fix this, we can make this Middle East resemble us, we can make it into democratic United States of the Middle East".
DAVID HARDAKER: Do the people in the Middle East want democracy or not?
MICHAEL OREN: It depends again on how you define democracy. Um, democracy, it's widely misunderstood in the west. Translated, democracy means casting a ballot every four years.
But the people in the Middle East understand that democracy is not that. That democracy is a package, democracy is a civilisation, and that with democracy comes rights of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, but even more importantly women's rights, children's rights, which are in many ways an anathema to the traditional societies of this region and they're not going to, don't want that part of the package.