The Arabs' False View of the United States
Although the charges are manifold, their common denominator is a belief that the U.S. does not understand or care about the Arab world. Monopolizing the Arabs' oil industry and making the region safe for Israel are held to be the driving forces behind American foreign policy in the Middle East. It follows from this policy that the U.S. seeks to colonize Iraq and allow Israel to impose its will on the Arab world.
A reflection of this pandemic rationale was emphasized by one commentator, who wrote that "the American president either does not understand, or does not care to understand, how the attitudes and policies of his administration have fueled unprecedented anti-American rage in the Arab and Islamic world."
This assertion followed a litany of charges, echoed in the Arab world, that ranged from accusing the president of devastating the civilian structure of Iraq to holding Muslims illegally at Guantanamo Bay, to treating Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the most brutal leader in Israel's history, with hand in glove.
Such assertions not only reinforce widespread anti-American attitudes, but also play into the hands of lay, religious and official figures who share the belief that U.S. efforts to democratize the Middle East are doomed to fail. These voices insist that democracy will bring extremists to power and is unlikely to happen before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is settled.
Another way of saying all of this is that the U.S. does not understand or care about the Arab world, yet it seeks to bring democracy to the Arab world in order to colonize it.
The phoenix has to rise from the ashes of such circumlocutions and fossilized impulses. The challenge for the Arabs, especially Arab intellectuals, now is not to ask why the U.S. does not try to understand the Arab world but rather why the Arabs themselves do not try to understand the U.S.. Why for example don't they ask their oft-repeated questions in reverse? Do the Arabs understand or try to understand what has happened in the U.S. since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? The irony is that the only attempt at understanding what happened on Sept. 11 has generally generated ludicrous conspiracy theories faulting the U.S. itself.
Understanding the U.S. is the key to affecting its behavior and addressing its shortcomings. The U.S., as a democratic system, is indeed not perfect. Yet it is still a system that reflects the aspirations, fears, and needs of the American people, who are currently deeply concerned about Islamic radicals. The Sept. 11 attacks, and the trauma they brought upon the collective consciousness of the U.S., are the works of such radicals.
Consequently, Americans authorized President Bush to disabuse the radicals of the illusion that America is a paper tiger and to confront far away dangers. From an American perspective, killing innocent people for a cause is terrorism, and terrorists and nations that harbor them will face the wrath of U.S. justice. This forms the background against which the U.S. is pursuing a policy to promote democracy in the Arab world, beginning in Iraq. Hence, one needs to address some of the issues Arabs blame the U.S. for.
The U.S. did not devastate the civilian infrastructure of Iraq. The U.S. liberated Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant that built an infrastructure of killing fields. It was Saddam Hussein that collectively and individually killed, tortured and mutilated Iraqis. Reading thousands of Iraqi official documents has shown me how Saddam whimsically, arbitrarily punished Iraqis and atomized Iraq's civil society. He tried to brutally forge a symbiosis between tribal traditions, Baath ideology and his personality cult while at the same time aiming to turn as many Iraqis as possible into accomplices and executioners.
He, along with many in the region who kept silent, is responsible for the devastation of Iraqi civil society and, by extension, the country's civilian infrastructure. Can someone really assert that had it not been for the Americans, Iraqis would have been able to remove Saddam?
Innocent Muslims at Guantanamo Bay need to be released. In this respect, the U.S. is gripped by a raging debate about the anti-terrorism powers granted to Justice Department officials by the USA Patriot Act. Civil liberties groups and high-ranking U.S. politicians and officials have complained about the federal government's detention of defendants as material witnesses in connection with the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.
On the other hand, a recent Justice Department report states "the government's success in preventing another catastrophic attack on the American homeland … would have been much more difficult, if not impossibly so, without the USA Patriot Act." The U.S. is beset by questions of legality and morality over how to provide security without trampling on civil liberties.
Regarding the Bush administration's bias in favor of Israel's Ariel Sharon government, questions do abound. But one crucial question that needs to be asked is: Who helped elect Sharon? Can someone deny the fact that Palestinians themselves helped elect Sharon by making Israelis more insecure?
Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not serve as a pretext to forestall dealing with political and economic reforms. As I see it, sooner or later, the Palestinians and Israelis will find out that they are natural allies. But until that time, the intifada needs to be demilitarized. Let us not forget that in the late 1980s it was the intifada of children with stones that turned Israel's policy of "breaking bones" on its head.
The U.S. as a democratic system has its imperfections. But it is a versatile and flexible system that can be affected if properly engaged. Can Arabs rightly engage this system for their own benefit?
This article first appeared in the Daily Star and is reprinted with Mr. Rabil's permission.