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Tavis: Michael B. Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He’s written extensively about the Middle East for publications like “The Wall Street Journal” and “The New Republic.” His most recent book, which is already a “New York Times” best seller, is called “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present.” Michael Oren, nice to have you here in Los Angeles.

Michael Oren: Tavis, thanks for having me.

Tavis: Can I dissect this title, to begin with?

Oren: Please.

Tavis: “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present.” The power would be?

Oren: America’s pursuit of power, of its interests in the Middle East through power, whether it be diplomatic power, economic power, military power. The most common theme would be America’s pursuit of its interests through power.

Tavis: The faith would be?

Oren: Faith, America’s really sort of irrepressible missionary urge to bring its faith to the Middle East, whether it be its religious faith, usually Protestant faith, or the flipside of that would be a secular, civic faith. Democracy and human values.

Tavis: And the fantasy would be?

Oren: The fantasy is this popular image of the American imagination of the Middle East being the realm of sort of unbridled romanticism, exoticism, eroticism, flying carpets, harem girls. It’s deeply ingrained.

Tavis: When I saw “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” I thought that the power and the faith were the fantasy. That is to say that we think we can still, in the world that we live today, export those two things. Use our power to export out faith. Would that be a bit of fantasy there?

Oren: There’s certainly fantasy involved, but it’s a fantasy that’s deep-seated and deeply ingrained in the America experience. Americans back in the 1700s were trying to export Democracy and Republican government to the Middle East. There's not so much new about America’s involvement in the Middle East.

Tavis: Okay. Let me ask you then, what – and I'm sure there are any number of things, and you talk about some of this in the book in a different way. But just to hone in on it, for everyday Americans, the kind of folk watching this program right now, what are the greatest misconceptions we have about the Middle East that our government has sold to us?

Oren: Again, going far back, there’s a tendency of Americans to look at the Middle East in the way you'd sort of look at a mirror, Tavis. You look in the mirror and you think, well, it may be a little bit tarnished, it may be a little cracked, this Middle East mirror, but basically, the Middle East is just like us. It’s just like the United States.

And with a little bit of effort on the part of the United States, a little bit of elbow grease, we can make the Middle East look just like us. This is certainly what was animating a lot of the American intervention in Iraq. The book quotes George McClellan, you remember this Union general from the Civil War? He wasn’t such a successful general, but he was a very good Middle Eastern traveler.

And he goes to the Middle East in the 1870s and he writes that Americans do tend to look at this Middle East as sort of an extension of their own America, and as long as they continue to do this and don't recognize that the Middle East has its own cultures, its own ancient civilizations that are not the United States, as long as Americans persist in doing this, they’ll be doomed to misunderstand the Middle East.

Tavis: A cynic would argue that the U.S. doesn’t really care about understanding the Middle East. That what it’s really about is one word. It ain’t power, it ain't faith, it ain't fantasy, it’s O-I-L. And to that, you would say?

Oren: I would say that’s part of power. America emerges in the post-World War II world as the preeminent power in the Middle East. The Western power. It replaces Britain and France; it becomes very, very dependent on Middle Eastern oil. And so this power component in these three themes of power, faith, and fantasy grows really exponentially very, very fast.

And yes, one cannot look at America’s involvement in Iraq without noting that Iraq is in the Middle East, and it’s directly related to oil. I don't know if America would be exporting its democratic ideas and toppling tyrants in areas in the world that didn’t have oil.

Tavis: Beyond what you’ve already said, from 1776 to the present, is there a particular theme of arrogance or hubris about the Middle East that is there from then until now?

Oren: From then until now, I call it in the book benevolent arrogance. Yes, it’s that American tendency to look at the Middle East and say, “What they have isn't good. What we have is good. And we are going to give them, the people in the Middle East, what we have.” So, there’s arrogance involved, but many of the intentions behind the arrogance are good.

Tavis: One of the things I wanted to bring out in the reading of the text is something that I don't know that I've seen other – I don't cast aspersion on other people, but every one of us brings our own interests to the table as talk show hosts. And one of the things, of course, that interests me is the role that African Americans have played, for obvious reasons.

The role that African Americans have played, and we sit here in the month of February, which happens to be, as you know, Black History Month. And there are a number of African Americans who've played significant roles in the Middle East. We think, of course, these days, of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who happens to be our current secretary of state.

But in a historic sense, you write about some very, very wonderful African Americans and their contribution to this Middle East conversation over the years. Let me throw out, if I can, a few names at you, and have you share with me in the audience what these African Americans did in such a significant way. In no particular order, let me start with David Dorr.

Oren: David Dorr, extraordinary individual. David Dorr was a slave from Louisiana, who in 1854 went with his White plantation owner to the Middle East. Accompanied basically his master to the Middle East. And, but David Dorr, unlike his master, kept a journal of what he perceived there, the experiences that he endured there.

And he came back to the United States and escaped to Ohio and published his memoirs, which sold very briskly and was very well received by the northern press, particularly by the Abolitionists. And what we have in this book is a perspective, an insight, into what the Middle East looked like to an African American of the antebellum period, before the Civil War.

And it’s extraordinary. First of all, many, many Americans traveled to the Middle East during this period. They kept memoirs. And their approach to the Middle East, again, is one of great arrogance. Really looking down on Middle East cultures. David Dorr comes to the Middle East and says, “No, as an African American, I have a lot in common with the African cultures of the Middle East, particularly of the Egyptians.”

And he comes to the Middle East with a tremendous amount of sympathy. And he’s disappointed in some ways by the intolerance shown to Christians, 'cause he is a Christian, by Muslims of the region. And he is very much enticed by Middle East fantasies also, particularly women with veils. But he comes home and he gives us, he’s left us this legacy of this insight. And it’s really an extraordinary book.

Tavis: Tell me about James Riley.

Oren: Ah. James Riley was a White man. He was an American merchant, a seaman, who was shipwrecked on the North African coast in 1812. He was taken captive by Arab rulers. He was enslaved, he was beaten, mistreaten, marched across the desert, and starved. But he managed to escape, and he came back to America and wrote his memoirs, which became an overnight best seller. It sold a million copies, went through 30 printings in the United States.

And in these memoirs is an impassioned plea against slavery in the United States. He says, “I am a White man. I now know what it’s like to be a slave. And we cannot afford to affect this type of hypocrisy on our own people. We have to release these slaves immediately.” And among the avid readers of James Riley’s memoirs was a young Indiana farmhand named Abraham Lincoln, who later listed James Riley’s books among the three books that most influenced his political thinking.

Tavis: Let me go back to these African Americans, specifically Ralph Bunch.

Oren: Ralph Bunch is a personal hero of mine. Ralph Bunch, graduate of UCLA here in L.A., becomes Harvard’s first African American to win the Ph.D. At Harvard. Goes into the diplomatic corps and achieves the impossible. Certainly what would be impossible today. He negotiates an Arab-Israeli peace accord not just between Israel and one Arab state, but between Israel and four Arab states, in 1949, after the Palestine war.

After Israel’s war of independence on the island of Rhode. He basically took the Israeli representatives, and all the representatives of the Arab countries. He stuck them in one room together. There’s a great scene where he had them down to a very nice dinner, and they had very elaborate plates on the table. And he said to these representatives of Arabs and the Israelis, he said, “You see these plates?”

“If you negotiate a successful treaty, I'm gonna give you each one a set of these plates. If you don't negotiate a treaty, I'm gonna break these plates over your head.” And he got the treaties (laugh). Won the Nobel Prize, by the way.

Tavis: (Laugh). Indeed he did.

Oren: Yes, he won the Nobel Prize.

Tavis: I asked that question not just as a way to give a shout out to Black folk in Black History Month, or those who, like Mr. Riley, have been conscious where African and issues of people of color are concerned. I raise that in part because we now live, as you well know, in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, and the most multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial world ever.

I wonder how that reality can, in fact, influence what happens in this colored region of the world?

Oren: Well, I think that Frederick Douglass said it best. We’re talking about African Americans who traveled to the Middle East. Frederick Douglass goes to the Middle East at the end of the nineteenth century, and again, he comes with a different approach to the Middle East. He doesn’t come making judgment; he doesn’t look down his nose in arrogance at the Middle East.

On the contrary, he sees that many times, people in the Middle East are different colors. Black men, White men, different shades in Africa in the Middle East get along together. There seems to be no race divide in the Middle East. And he concludes – and he’s really the only one in the entire century that concludes, who comes from America, that the Middle East has a great amount to teach us.

Not that we have to teach the Middle East. He said, “Americans should be learning from Arab culture. Americans should be learning from Middle Eastern Islamic culture.” So really, an extraordinary insight on the part of Frederick Douglass.

Tavis: Is George Bush the person to lead us in a conversation opening our eyes about the Middle East, or is that just naïve to even think he could lead us in a conversation of greater appreciation for the Middle East?

Oren: Well, the degree that America has a problem in understanding the Middle East is not endemic or particular to George Bush alone. What you'll see in the book is that many generations, going back to the founding fathers, have had great difficulties in understanding this region of the world. One of the reasons I wrote this book is so that future American leaders, the president who comes after George Bush, will be able to look back and say, “Look, we, Americans, have faced similar problems, similar challenges, had to make similar choices in the past. This is how we went right; this is how we went wrong. Let’s let history be our aide and our guide for the future.”

Tavis: Ralph Bunch got, to your earlier point, a great deal of respect because of who he was, and what his experiences were that he could bring into that room to help negotiate that agreement that came from that. A lot of folk held hope that Colin Powell, given who he was, this Black man – I remember all these articles, as you do, about the hope that existed because of what this guy looked like when he walked into the Middle East.

The same thing we said of Condoleezza Rice. Pardon my English, it ain't panned out. I wonder, then, whether or not you think that it’s going to take a greater involvement of people of color in that region, or is that, again, naïve to think that only somebody of color can get the message in the way that it needs to be delivered these days?

Oren: You have to somehow see the color divide the way it looks from the Middle East. The big divide in the Middle East is not between White and Black, or any other racial division. The big divide in the Middle East is religion and ethnicity. You can have Sunni Arabs who are White or Black, you have Shi’ite Arabs who are White and Black.

Tavis: But to your point, there’s so many folk in that region, though, who feel persecuted, and it takes someone coming from a standpoint of knowing what it feels like to be persecuted to make that conversation work, like Ralph Bunch.

Oren: Indeed. I think the fact that Ralph Bunch’s African American heritage actually helped him in these negotiations. Because at the negotiating table, say, between the Arabs and the Israelis in 1949, both sides felt that they had been victims. And he was able to show, “Look, I have also been, and my family, my people, have been victims of oppression. I know what it feels like. I can approach these negotiations from a feeling of empathy.”

That was the sense that (unintelligible) Colin Powell. Condoleezza Rice, facing a very, very complicated relationship in the Middle East, but look how much she’s done in the last couple of weeks, to give her fair due, to try to advance the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

Tavis: I just picked some particular pieces and passages of this new text that fascinated me. It is a dense book, there’s a lot in here. So I'm sure you will enjoy reading and be empowered by what you read in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present.” Already on “The New York Times” best seller list, written by Michael B. Oren. And Mr. Oren, nice to have you on the program.

Oren: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: What a pleasure.