| Mr. Hanson starts from
an observation that few would dispute – that
there are strong antipathies between Islamic fundamentalists
and Western society. This issue is well-documented
and well-understood – I highly recommend Karen
Armstrong’s “The Battle for God,”
recommended in turn to me by a reader of an earlier
piece, which explains both more and less than Mr.
Hanson would like. Armstrong talks at length about
the history of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and
about how each of them has reacted over time to the
Enlightenment and the threat it posed to religion.
Armstrong shows the antipathy of all fundamentalists
to logic and reason. But her enumeration of the policies
and actions of the colonial powers in the Muslim world
are also highly relevant to an understanding of Islamic
hatred – it is not merely antipathy to abstractions,
but is grounded in concrete injustices.
Hanson also observes that the sins of the average
American cannot justify the events of September 11
– an observation few would gainsay. But Mr.
Hanson’s argument quickly goes off the rails
from there. Hanson makes five specific arguments:
1. The “Islamofascists” cannot
be believed because they “neither allow criticism
nor tolerate self-reflection.” Putting
aside the name-calling and oversimplification (as
far as I know, Osama and his gang have not governed
– terrorists, by definition, are outside the
nation-state system), and granting that the Taliban
were a despicable lot, what does this have to with
the price of tea in Kabul? If we dismiss the opinions
of all societies because they disclaim our views on
introspection, we are in for a very long fight.
And would this be a good place to point out that
it has been widely reported that these faults apply
to our own solipsistic
commander in chief as well?
2. Our “alleged sins against Islam
transform monthly.” In other words,
if the Muslims cannot make up their minds about which
of our sins they are dying for, none of them are worth
serious introspection. To restate this absurdity is
to refute it. Must we choose between Pearl Harbor
and the rape of Nanking to find fault with WWII-era
Japan? Should we apply the same test to the 23
separate justifications given by this Administration
for invading Iraq? And do we have to remind anyone
that the Declaration of Independence lists (by my
count) nearly 30 separate grievances against the King
of England, none of which come close to the deaths
of perhaps as many as 100,000
Iraqis? Mr. Hanson’s logic puts him the
company of not only our own current King George, but
his logical predecessor and spiritual namesake.
3. “Bin Laden and various mujahadeen
distort history.” This claim is likely
as true as it is meaningless. All history is distortion;
as if to prove the point, in the very next sentence
Mr. Hanson refers to American “beneficence”
in “saving” Kuwaitis, as if it was beyond
all possible interpretation to wonder if the first
Bush war might have been about something
other than the freedom of the Kuwaiti people.
The fact is that the history we tell ourselves about
American foreign policy is, in the view of much of
the rest of the world, itself horribly distorted –
does that invalidate our conclusions about the war
on terror?
4. Because “terrorists still imperil
liberal Europe, which subsidized Hamas, (and) armed
Saddam,” what the US does cannot be at issue.
The fact that Muslims hate what the US does not preclude
them from hating what Europe has done in the Middle
East. Though we have taken a leading role in the Gulf
over the last 50 years or so, we are following in
well-worn European footsteps there. Britain in particular
has a sordid imperial past in the region, which continued
right up to the time the sun set on the Empire after
WWII. The bombings in Spain were unconscionable and
indiscriminate in their destruction, but from a political
standpoint were almost surgical in their purpose,
timing and effect.
It was well known that the war was widely reviled
by the Spanish public. The ruling party lost the election
that came only three days later, and the new government
announced that Spain was pulling out of the coalition
immediately after. (The situation in Spain, which
was largely under Muslim control for a time, and which
has its own ethnic troubles, is more complicated than
can be covered here.) And Mr. Hanson should be made
to write “terror is a tactic, not an enemy”
100 times on the blackboard – Europe is home
to myriad terrorist organization with innumerable
agendas, most of which have nothing to do with Al
Qaeda.
5. Al Qaeda is under-inclusive because it
does not target an oil-hungry and “cutthroat
nuclear China.”
Mr. Hanson, a classics professor, seems to have forgotten
the 1998
riots in Indonesia, in which Muslims raped and
killed members of their ethnic Chinese minority. More
to the point, though China is undoubtedly “oil
hungry,” it has never occupied a Gulf state
or overthrown a government there. And if Gulf state
citizens hate oil-hungry nations, I submit that their
anger is less about who pays and more about who benefits.
In closing, Mr. Hanson claims that the U.S. has a
“rational strategy against Islamic Fascism:
Kill the terrorists, remove illegitimate regimes that
aid the extremists…” To unpack this dense
concatenation of falsehoods is to expose its absurdity:
(1) while the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was brutal,
totalitarian and reprehensible, a fair reading of
Lawrence Britt’s 14
characteristics of Fascism makes the term a loose
fit at best; (2) while we have had a dismal record
in capturing, prosecuting,
and killing actual terrorists, according to a report
from the Pentagon, we seem to be doing a magnificent
job of imprisoning and killing innocent civilians,
thereby creating far more people who hate us, whatever
the claimed reason; and (3) was Saddam’s regime
less legitimate than the puppet we placed in Iran,
or the ones we are now installing in Iraq? And do
we have to point out, yet again, that Saddam had nothing
to do with Al Qaeda? Unless the theory employed is
that “two wrongs make a right,” it is
hard to see how this string of nonsense is either
rational or a strategy.
In unraveling the specific arguments Hanson makes,
I have of course left for last the most obvious and
damning flaw. The dishonesty of the whole endeavor
becomes clear when we parse the phrase “they
hate us for who we are.” The assumption seems
to be that “who we are” is somehow dissociated
from what we do, and that abstractions like “freedom”
are so odious that people turn kamikaze to lash out
at them. But that assertion is unacceptable for a
number of reasons. First, it is simply too self-serving:
it gives us a pass on all possible excesses, because,
what the hell, they’re going to hate us anyway.
There has long been a particularly ugly strain of
American patriotism that says that we are above the
law because we are uniquely above reproach; this circular
reasoning can, and should, infuriate the rest of the
world.
Most important of all, “who we are” is
what we do – we are not merely the myths we
believe about ourselves. To Iranians, who we are is
colored by the way we installed and helped to maintain
a puppet dictator on the throne of their country,
and ignored legitimate challenges to his myriad excesses
– and then armed Saddam Hussein to the hilt
in an effort to defeat them again. To ordinary Saudis,
who we are has a lot to do with our support of the
rapacious
House of Saud and our blind eye toward the suffering
of its subjects. And to ordinary Iraqis, we are the
occupiers who leveled Fallujah, backed criminals like
Chalabi and CIA stooges like Alawi, and tortured ordinary
Iraqis for sport.
This point was reinforced months ago by no less an
authority than our own Department of Defense, which
published a
report that squarely rebuts Hanson’s argument.
Among the report’s conclusions:
• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,”
but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming
majority voice their objections to what they see as
one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian
rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support
for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most
notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and
the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks
about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this
is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover,
saying that “freedom is the future of the Middle
East” is seen as patronizing, suggesting that
Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist
World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they
feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American
occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to
democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.
U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by
ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order
to best serve American national interests at the expense
of truly Muslim self-determination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since
9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical
Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and
the flow of events have elevated the authority of
the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy
among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves
as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim
community) invaded and under attack — to broad
public support.
I do not mean to suggest that men like Osama bin
Laden are rational actors. Religious fundamentalists
– all of them – are irrational. Reason
is antithetical to absolute belief. On some level,
I agree that they do hate at least some of what we
believe in. But they didn’t attack Canada, or
Germany, or France. Until terrorists crash an Air
Canada jet into the CN Tower in Toronto, I think we
ought to be willing to take a hard look at how the
United States behaves in the world in general and
the Gulf in particular.
There is of course a sense in which what we believe
is an important aspect of who we are. But if what
we believe is that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda;
if we believe both that we went to war in Iraq because
it had WMDs and that it does not matter that they
in fact didn’t; if we believe that our actions
are irrelevant to how the world feels about us and
that America can do no wrong, then who we are is stark,
raving bonkers.
John
Steinberg bloviates regularly at www.bluememe.blogspot.com.
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