Rumor and Consequence
Dean
John Burgess has a lengthy and thoughtful piece about how America is viewed in the Arab world.
I have to say that I disagree with very little of it, at all. And yet, I take a few exceptions.
I would not call most of what happened at Abu Ghraib "atrocities": they were revolting and degrading and a deep shame to all Americans. But, with only a couple of exceptions, worse things happen in college and even high school hazing rituals every year--up to and including deaths. Mind you, hazing is a bizarre and vile practice (I've written about it before), but it's weirdly common: something seems to happen in young people who aren't receiving mature supervision to make them want to humiliate and degrade others. That seems to have been (most of) what happened at Abu Ghraib: young people in their early 20s were largely unsupervised for long stretches of time over prisoners. That was a failure of leadership, without question.
Yet there are other perspectives that need to be kept in mind: the whistle was blown on Abu Ghraib not by the press, nor by Arabs, but by members of the military, starting with Joseph Darby. Then his superiors launched an investigation, issued arrest warrants and indictments, and informed the political leaders of what had happened. The Army itself broke the story to the press.
In the scandal of the mutilated Koran, my fury is at an American press corps that has shown itself willing to publish bad news before good news, even to the point of trumpeting unsubstantiated rumors, when it comes to our armed forces. I'm proud to live in a contry where freedom of press is enshrined in law, and I would have the government take no part in limiting that freedom. But as an American I am proud of my own freedom to criticize the press for carelessness, shoddy reporting, and for acting as Al Qaeda propagandists. Have they no conscience? Have they no patriotism? It would seem that, too often, they do not. (Indeed, sometimes they even cooperate with fascist thugs while criticizing free governments.)
I also note that as an American, I have a guaranteed right to criticize anyone I please, not just the press but anyone else, including even the most powerful men. Which gets me to my larger point:
In military operations, there will always be accidental casualties, bureaucratic mistakes, and people who act in venal or disgusting or sometimes even monstrous ways. We can minimize those things, but they'll still happen. Which is why we publicly prosecute those who commit crimes in our name, and put them in jail.
Compare this to the treatment of prisoners in Saddam's regime. Compare this to conditions elsewhere in the Arab world, where torture--real torture, of the crippling and even killing variety, is still all too common. See Amnesty International's 2004 reports on prison conditions in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt just for example.
Hell, in Egypt, they're still putting political dissidents in coffin-sized cells for months at a time. This under the supposedly "moderate" government of Hosni Mubarak?
And that's just what we know about: all of these states still run under state-controlled media, and human rights observers do not have a free hand to roam at will.
This does not mean the U.S. has done nothing wrong. But we allow our press to discuss these things, and have a system of law and due process to address abuses. If things like Abu Ghraib cause a perception that Americans are anti-Arab, what does it say about the Arab world's silence over its own much worse abuses of Arabs?
And, while it is also certainly true that some people who are hurt in military conflicts will never forgive us, we are all too often in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation. The question I have is thus always the same: "What would you have us do differently, today, from what we are doing today?" You can criticize our decision to liberate Iraq from Saddam, but many of the same people who did that criticized us for leaving Saddam in power in the first place. Or criticized us for the trade sanctions and the "No Fly" zones that kept Saddam (and the Iraqi people) in a box. If we had just turned our backs and left Saddam completely alone to do whatever he wanted, we'd have been fiercely criticized and hated for that too.
In some situations, it is an inescapable reality that no matter what you do, someone will hate you. Which is why I say again: if you're mad at us, if you criticize us, fine. But it is incumbent upon you to say exactly and precisely what you would have us change about our behavior. And while generalizations like "be more sensitive" or "listen more" or "be less arrogant" are useful, they're impossible to quantify. Yes, we can try those things, but at the end of the day action must be taken. So what actions would you have us take?
There are those in the Arab world who despise America for not acting sooner to take out Saddam. There are those in the Arab world who despise the U.S. for being too lenient to Assad in Syria, or for being too nice to the House of Saud. Should we listen to them as well?
As an American I'm willing to listen to criticism, and to own up to our mistakes. We are sometimes arrogant, soemetimes pushy, sometimes careless, and sometimes even cruel. But I take constructive criticism (of the "You're doing A now, but we really think you should do B instead" variety) far more seriously than general advice over perceptions.
After all, from where I sit, as an American it would be very easy to have a general impression of the Arab world as full of torture-happy religious fanatics and anarchic barbarians far too ignorant to handle democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of press, or the rule of law. Of a world which has to be ruled by strong men with iron fists because the people are too backward to understand anything else. To get an impression of the Arab world as one that nurtured the monsters who perpetrated 9/11, and then tried to blame us for their own dysfunctional societies.
As an American, I've been trying very hard in the last few years to avoid that temptation. I prefer to believe that all people are capable of and deserve freedom, self-respect, and self-rule. I prefer to believe that if the U.S. government's foreign policy was part of the problem all along, part of it was that we were too anxious to value "stability" in the region rather than human rights.
So I'll take criticism from Arabs. We often deserve it, after all. We are human and we are far from perfect.
But I'll take criticism far more seriously when I see it coming from people who possess freedom of speech, freedom of press, and universal suffrage. And I'll take it far more seriously if it's constructive criticism, rather than criticism which draws moral equivalencies between us and monsters like Saddam Hussein.
(By the way, none of these is things I'm arguing with John Burgess over. It's things that I would say to any Arab who criticized the U.S.--or any American who reflexively apologizes for everything America does. On that score, some people are far more blunt than I am.)
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and then there are those who despise us just because we are the hegemon and that's what they've been taught all their lives.
..it’s one thing to be on the observing side of atrocities and quite another to be on the receiving end.
Those on the receiving end include, of course, the individuals who were so badly mistreated. Even if it were not torture— and mostly I think, it wasn’t—it was mistreatment of a sort that we, as citizens, do not condone. We’re not proud of it, even if we might concede that it was somehow “necessary".
But the victimhood of the atrocities is wider than just the prisoner. It includes those who identify, in one way or another, with that prisoner. I don’t mean fellow terrorists, I mean people who see the mistreatment of one Arab as indicative of treatment of all Arabs, the treatment of one Muslim as the treatment of all Muslims.
That, of course, is not the message the US government, the US military, or individual US soldiers is intending to convey. But that is the message that is received.
It just doesn’t work to say, “Oh, but they’re being over-sensitive or paranoid.” So what if that’s exactly the case? The point is, millions of people are outraged and, to their minds, justifiably so.
If America used that logic after 9/11, the Middle East might be a sheet of glass right now. Fortunately, we don't.
America has a very disfunctional parent/child relationship with the Muslim world. They're allowed to react with very loud and violent temper tantrums to any provocation, and our response is supposed to be to ask "what did we do wrong? Are you humilitated? Did we hurt our image?"
Responding to threats and provocations with apologies and bribes is bad parenting and it's terrible foreign policy. We've been doing this for years, and the result is a generation of brats like Arafat, al Sadr, Zarqawi and bin Laden.
I understand why people are outraged about the Koran flushing atrocity, I understand the Islamist groups who provoked this outrage and I understand why an angry toddler smears the walls with his own poop. That doesn't mean I'm going to tolerate it or beg for their forgiveness.
Islamists and the press need to understand that a person cannot simultaneously be the murderer and the victim. Islamists caused the deaths of 15 people in Afganistan. The Islamists are not the victims here, they're the perpetrators.
The press has been publishing inaccurate "values neutral" stories about terrorism for decades. It's a shame that this extreme reaction may be the first sign that they need to change.
Those that slip a cog, rather than find what, exactly, it is that motivates some people to hyperextend their religiosity into violence, jump to easy--and wrong--conclusions: "It's the Wahhabis", "It's Islam in itself", "It's the 'Saudis'"--whomever they might be.
Particular individuals are coming out of a variety of backgrounds--some privileged, some not; some well-educated, some not; some xenophobes, some not; some conservatively religious, some not--and are feelings empowered by specific interpretations of the world and relations between Islam and modernity/westernization/Americanization.
Yes, a certain amount of blame can be laid at the feet of mendatious governments who deflect internal criticism by pointing outside. But that's not enough to explain the whole deal.
Yes, certain threads of Islamic thought are less tolerant of difference than others. That explains some of the terror, but not all of it--or even most of it.
Yes, the perpetual Palestinian-Israeli arguments have enflamed, rightly or wrongly, public opinion throughout the region. But that is only part of the reason.
The entire Middle East--including Israel--is going through a period of complete re-evaluation of what it means to be an Arab, a Muslim, or an Israeli. There is a major crisis of identification which entails a reappraisal of world views and value systems.
Not only is the question of identification a hard one for a single person--remember yourself in high school or university--but it's enormously more complicated for a group, a country, an "umma".
I think Yeats said it best:
One need not lack conviction to realize that simple answers do not generally solve complex problems.
I've found that the growth of fascism (Islamism and Arab Nationalism) in the Middle East can best be understood by studying the growth of fascism in Europe.
"The Anatomy of Fascism", by Robert Paxton and "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" by Goetz Aly are good sources.
Present day studies include anything by Bernard Lewis, Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism" by Dore Gold and "Terror and Liberalism" by Paul Berman.
You see likenesses in some behavior--intolerance of or hatred for the 'other', for instance--and assume likeness of cause. One, fascism, came about due to very specific causes, ranging from the growth of socialism/Marxism/communism, the consequences of the Versailles Treaty, and global economic depression, among others. Islam, which started some 1,400 years earlier--though it has seen some "updating" since then--was answering an entirely different set of questions.
But trying to equate them and turn that into a call for action is similar to the hammer's seeing the world as populated with nails. I suggest a bigger toolbox.
And just to make it clear, citing an Israeli politician as an objective source on things his country sees as threats is just a touch specious. Sort of like considering Paul Krugman or Howard Dean as "authoritative" on Republican policies. How one can imagine that Gold will be "neutral" is beyond belief.
I respect Lewis, and cite him, but he's not at the top of his game when it comes to the contemporary Middle East. I'd rather Fouad Ajami The Arab Predicament, Gregory Gause The Approaching Turning Point, or Mamoun Fandy The Politics of Dissent (though the last is a little out of date).
"Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations, we find that no one, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you."
..but I trust her evaluation of the fascist mindset.
See. I think the situation in Nazi Germany and in the Middle East are far more similar than we are willing to admit. We forget that such literature as Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are quite popular there. After 911, I remember reading a story about there being many Muslims named Adolf and let's not forget that Adolf himself considered Islam to be a potential ally. And that there were Muslim Nazis.
I would recommend that someone claiming "weakness" in an argument not use cliche, poetry, or bald assertion as "evidence" for one's point of view.
It would also help if one does not insert claims of "neutrality" (regarding Gold) into your interlocutor's prose where they do not exist. Such argumentation turns the whole debate into "gotcha jousting" regarding one's sources, and inevitably ends poorly.
Let me help. It has been asserted that many of the modern Mideast political movements have direct ties to Naziism, with the Nazi takeover of France (and its Arab colonies) as a catalyst. If true, such a connection would justify a connection between Fascism and modern Arab totalitarianism despite the cultural differences. Do you have anything concrete which would cast doubt on this?
But that mutual admiration society a) did not represent the totality--even the majority--of Arab views, and b) was based on political opposition to colonialism.
Anti-Semitism was of course a mutually agreed platform, but were, in fact, of very different natures. And it was only after the Nazi decided that the Semitic Arabs were "honory Aryans" (e.g., "could be useful") that even these steps were taken.
By assuming that "anti-Semitic" equals "Nazi" you damage both terms and our horror of them.
The Middle East of the 1930s-40s was full of anti-colonial sentiment. You can start in Morocco and work your way east. (You might pause to note that anti-colonialism never got much traction in the Arab Gulf states, for a variety of reasons.)
Look at Maghrebi insurrection against the French--both the Republic and the Vichy French. Note how that political insurrection--which took on an Islamist coloration--continued into the 1960s.
Some Egyptians were sabotaging the British war efforts--while pushing their own, independent political aspirations. Some Egyptians went so far as to join the German Army--as you might note in passing, did some Indians.
The Lebanese and Syrians fought--both in military units and through sabotage campaigns--against the Free French, but also the Vichy French, seeing an opportunity to gain their political goal of independence.
Even in Iraq, the British had to put down outbreaks that threatened both their colonial powers and their war efforts.
My point here is that you've got several different things going on, mostly on a political level. The adage (sorry if it's seen as a lapse into poetics) that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" may have originated in Arab, but it's a concept well understood in the West, as any reading of European history should prove.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows. It shouldn't be surprising that if two groups identify a third as "a problem", they might work together. That their "problems" weren't, in fact, the same problem, complicates the picture.
The Arabs had their "reasons" to support anti-Semitism; the Nazis had their own. Both calculated that the other could prove helpful in solving their "problem" with the Jews. Both calculated that cooperation with the other might prove politically beneficial, post-war.
Both, obviously, were wrong on many counts, including these.
There is nothing about anti-Semitism that is good or acceptable, even for short-term goals. It is as wrong as any other stereotyping for political ends. But that cuts in all directions. Assuming that the Nazi-loving Arabs represent all Arabs is factually incorrect. Assuming that Arab nationalist movement define contemporary Muslim anxieties, or even Islamist extremism is equally incorrect.
[Jeff: you've missed a long-running argument between me and Mary about sourcing.]
Certainly their form of fascism has its own expression: Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese fascism all had their unique expressions too. But the influence of racist Arabist thought and general fascist tendencies seems to be just another ingredient that's been swirling around in the mix in that part of the world, and not all that minor an influence.