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| International |
| Fouad Ajami: "The Falseness of Anti-Americanism" |
| 2003-09-04 |
| Long analysis in the current issue of Foreign Policy. Some key points: “America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. It is in Karachi and Paris, in Jakarta and Brussels. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism, a cover and an apology for the spell the United States casts over distant peoples and places. In the burning grounds of the Muslim world and on its periphery, U.S. embassies and their fate in recent years bear witness to a duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The embassies targeted by the masters of terror and by the diehards are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden, seductive country. If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams. The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil — dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo — reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands. Of late, pollsters have come bearing news and numbers of anti-Americanism the world over. The reports are one dimensional and filled with panic. This past June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey of public opinion in 20 countries and the Palestinian territories that indicated a growing animus toward the United States. In the same month, the BBC came forth with a similar survey that included 10 countries and the United States. On the surface of it, anti-Americanism is a river overflowing its banks. In Indonesia, the United States is deemed more dangerous than al Qaeda. In Jordan, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil, the United States is thought to be more dangerous than Iran, the "rogue state" of the mullahs. There is no need to go so far away from home only to count the cats in Zanzibar. These responses to the United States are neither surprising nor profound. The pollsters, and those who have been brandishing their findings, see in these results some verdict on the United States itself—and on the performance abroad of the Bush presidency—but the findings could be read as a crude, admittedly limited, measure of the foul temper in some unsettled places. The pollsters have flaunted spreadsheets to legitimize a popular legend: It is not Americans that people abroad hate, but the United States! Yet it was Americans who fell to terrorism on September 11, 2001, and it is of Americans and their deeds, and the kind of social and political order they maintain, that sordid tales are told in Karachi and Athens and Cairo and Paris. You can’t profess kindness toward Americans while attributing the darkest of motives to their homeland. The introduction of the Pew report sets the tone for the entire study. The war in Iraq, it argues,"has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans" and "further inflamed the Muslim world." The implications are clear: The United States was better off before Bush’s "unilateralism." The United States, in its hubris, summoned up this anti-Americanism. Those are the political usages of this new survey. But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. During the 1990s, no one said good things about the United States in Egypt. It was then that the Islamist children of Egypt took to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. U.S. pension funds were acquiring their assets and Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings. The United States incarcerated far too many people and executed too many criminals. All these views thrived during a decade when Americans are now told they were loved and uncontested on foreign shores. Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde’s publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani’s column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies. Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde aprÚs le 11 septembre 2001 ("All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001"). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani’s United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can’t, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one’s own schools; one can’t strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can’t denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can’t do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani’s sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place. Today, the United States carries the disturbance of the modern to older places— to the east and to the intermediate zones in Europe. There is energy in the United States, and there is force. And there is resistance and resentment— and emulation— in older places affixed on the delicate balancing act of a younger United States not yet content to make its peace with traditional pains and limitations and tyrannies. That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moïsi, recently told of a simple countryman of his who was wistful when Saddam Hussein’s statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. France opposed this war, but this Frenchman expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad, but it didn’t. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. The new history being made was a distinctly American (and British) creation. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee—I single out those towns because they are the hometowns of three soldiers who were killed in the Iraq war—who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it. The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States—in whole sentences of good American slang. There’s a lot more, and you really should read the whole thing. I’d be particularly interested in hearing from our regular visitors from overseas in the comments area. Aris, Murat, JFM, TGA: over to you, guys! |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #16 TGA, --The denigratory remarks about the French (and to a lesser extent German) character entirely funneled by the political stances of their respective leaders is worse than anything I have read in European blogs and heard in European opinions about Americans.-- Visit the Independent forum via Delphi. You'll get an eyefull. And visit merdeinfrance and dissident frogman. The cartoons and ink are just despicable. |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-9-4 10:52:18 PM |
| #15 JFM - I don't know how old you are, but unless you've got a foot in the grave, think seriously about coming on over here. I can highly recommend central Virginia - Richmond, to be precise - great weather (we actually have 4 seasons, the summers are usually hot, winters not too cold) and an hour's drive to the beach or mountains, 2 hours to D.C. You will need a car, though - public transportation isn't usually subsidized by the government in the U.S., so we don't have as much of it, particularly between cities. But it's a great place to live. Think about how you could get here (legally) and come on over - we'd love to have you. P.S. E-mail me if you decide to come, even for a visit. I'd be glad to show you around, and teach you the correct way to use "you all" ("y'all"). :-p |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2003-9-4 10:45:17 PM |
| #14 TGA >> I couldn't agree with you more. I've always believed that the "Anti-US" notion was more "Anti-Bush." Over time, however, the Europeans (just like the Democrats) are just waiting and drooling for a US blunder or major setback. What has "really" gone bad in Iraq? Compared to how things could have been. I think the progress has been very good under the circumstances. I also think the Europeans are just plain envious that the US gets all of the spotlight and has the corner on military technology. Quite frankly, in the last 15 years we've been blessed with the outcomes we've had. Alot of bad things could have gone down in all of the operations that we've had in those last 15 years. Europe is just now waking up to the fact, that while the US spent billions of dollars for Europe's defense (and saved European countries billions as well), that they have failed to keep up. In Kosovo, the US was giving them hell because their aircraft had such inferior commsec and weapon packages. We can rant and rave all we want. The fact is, in the end, we still need each other. Not just for the military, but for intelligence and counter-terrorism ops. I have all, but lost faith in the US intel machine. Reading Bob Baer's book "See No Evil: A CIA operative's perspective" (Not exact title) In it I can fully believe what he says. Anyone that's served in the military has seen the increase in political (chickensh@t) ticket punchers and the decline in the warriors that always (thankfully) arise in times of crisis. Sidenote: The warriors tend to lead combat troops. The sh@itbags/has beens/political ticket punchers tend to become "military analysts." |
| Posted by: Paul 2003-9-4 9:59:16 PM |
| #13 TGA: Well said, as always. |
| Posted by: Mike 2003-9-4 9:55:03 PM |
| #12 Everyone do their best to improve their own country. The only anti-Americans that truly bother me are the Americans that dispect our own country to the extent of cheapening the honest sacrifices of Americans that actually loved our country. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-9-4 8:40:11 PM |
| #11 There are a few things I don't agree with: The most important being the very notion of "Anti-Americanism" equally applied to death-to-america-yelling turbans, blasé french intellectuals and German (leftist politicians). Maybe I just have a different idea about what Anti-Americanism means: Hating of everything America stands for and applying this hate down to the American people. This is certainly true for the islamofascist crowd, this may (to a certain degree apply to some (read some) arrogant French intellectuals. A few Germans of the extreme left might also think so. But most of what Americans see as European "Anti-Americanism" is in fact a sceptical (and yes, sometimes arrogant) look at US-politics, especially of Republican administrations (although I don't remember Carter being too popular here, Clinton was). I still insist that the Schröder election campaign was not Anti-American: Schröder did not try to grab votes from people who hate or loathe America, he tried to grab them from people who didn't want to see German soldiers involved in a war in Iraq. Schröder has certainly criticised Bush policies (Kyoto, ICC, Iraq), but he has never said a despising word about America and her people. Some Schroeder comrades (mostly very leftist) have voiced unacceptable opinions (the Bush-Hitler remark standing out), but this didn't get Schröder votes, this made him lose some. Yes you will find arrogant quotes about America and Americans, but this is not a pervasive thing. Watch Geman TV, especially the ads, read your German Telekom bill (using words like "call by call" and "preselection", impossible in France). Nobody burns down McDonalds, most Germans still rave about their last trip to NY, Florida or California. Ah, the pollsters: You can get anything out of people. Take away the Iraq issue and ask Germans whether they generally like Americans and a wide majority will say, yes I do. America is the German's third preferred country for emigration (after Australia and Spain). But a forced choice between Europe and America is not an option: After the Soviet threat is gone and Germany in the center of Europe, with 80 pc of its trade going to EU countries, Germany cannot chose America over Europe. Canada chosing Europe over the U.S. would be equally foolish. The problem is that we kept the transatlantic structures of the Cold War, but we're dealing with a new world, with new threats and new challenges. The fallout between European countries and the U.S. has a lot to do with the fact that we haven't yet redefined the role of NATO. America cannot just lead and Europe follow. The power and importance of nations is not only defined by military strength. The U.S. could defeat most nations in a few week, but they can't control them that easily. We need visions for the 21st century. And in the "Project for the New American Century" Europeans might feel a little left out... And when we discuss European Anti-Americanism, we might have to discuss American Anti-Europeanism as well. The denigratory remarks about the French (and to a lesser extent German) character entirely funneled by the political stances of their respective leaders is worse than anything I have read in European blogs and heard in European opinions about Americans. That includes Rantburg (but LGF is certainly "harder" in that respect). A little French (or German) bashing might be fun, but it should not get out of control. The chocolate producing euroweenies (Swiss and Austrian protests ignored) thank for your attention. |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2003-9-4 8:13:19 PM |
| #10 JFM.. That paints a rather grim picture of France. They honestly don't know? Then again, from what I've heard, Beigbeder doesn't think of himself as being anti-American. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2003-9-4 6:59:09 PM |
| #9 Rafael The French at Lille were commanded by General Juin. Juin was the guy who came with the plan allowing to break the deadlock at Cassino. Unlike your average 1940 French general he was a good one and that ever makes soldiers to become braver. BTW De Gaulle and Juin were not precisely friends. In part because they were together at St-Cyr (Franc's officer school) and Juin came largely ahead. :-) |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-9-4 6:02:10 PM |
| #8 Mike My rant was out of place but I saw red when I saw my name associated with those of Aris and Murat. I regret not being able to clearly detail the situation in France because today it far too late. Mail me in private if you want a detailed report. However the French people don't know about ELF's contracts with Saddam, they don't know about the state rapers, they don't know about the plastic shreders, they probably don't know about the mass graves and not about that one with children and toys, they neraly missed the liberation of Baghdad: the FR3 TV station showed TEN seconds of people rejoicing and a LENGTHY interview of a guy who wasn't happy (who could have been a Saddamist plant), apocaliptoic rants about lootings and scenes of hospitals. Do you want to know what is the French press worth? When the Pope came to Paris, there were 100,000 Catholics who joined hands in a circle around Paris. And there were 80, eighty, counterdemonstrators. The public radio didn't interview anyone of the 100,000, they only interviewed one of the eighty catskinners. This was not a problem of radio obeying government. The governemnt was rigt wing and the PM a practicant catholic. It was a problem of journalist feeling he had the right to use the radio, a radio funded by the tax payer, for advancing HIS political beliefs, when his mission was supposed to inform. And of course he got away with it in the nae of freedom of expression. (BTW: In 1981, a numeber of Trostskites infiltrated the socilist party and the state-owned media, then once they were in place those media were declared "independent", and specially, indepent of elected governemnt. |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-9-4 5:54:18 PM |
| #7 I also do my share of French bashing.... but... "The French defenders at Lille impressed the Germans so much that they were allowed to march into captivity with bayonets fixed and full honors. The battle at Lille was a rearguard action which aided the evacuation from Dunkirk." Link with an interesting picture. |
| Posted by: Rafael 2003-9-4 5:20:20 PM |
| #6 Greg, might I quote George Pickett, who replied to a correspondent asking him who he thought was responsible for the defeat at Gettysburg: "I always thought the Yankees might have had something to do with it." Please don't shit on the dead of Verdun by pulling out that old, obscene Marxist canard that they were mystified class-traitors betrayed into meaningless deaths. I have my problems with the French in most cases, but Verdun is a monstrous, awesome monument to a nation's self-defense. |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2003-9-4 3:15:43 PM |
| #5 JFM: I certainly do my share of Chirac- and de Villepin-bashing here and there, but you are right about the bravery of the French army at Verdun, and you'll not hear a contrary word from me (or most of the regulars here) on that point. I'd agree with Ernest--what problems France has are the fault of its governing elite, not a reflection on the bravery or decency of its people. That said, we'd be happy to have you in north-central Ohio if you feel like a change of scenery. |
| Posted by: Mike 2003-9-4 3:15:33 PM |
| #4 JFM, In my mind, the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" refers to your political elite, which has a vicious and perennial habit of betraying France's braver defenders. Jeanne d'Arc is a paradigmatic example. |
| Posted by: Ernest Brown 2003-9-4 1:57:28 PM |
| #3 The soldiers at Verdun were killed by their own government, not the Germans. The French and Germans have been killing each other for centuries! |
| Posted by: Greg 2003-9-4 1:51:48 PM |
| #2 Let me be clear. At times I have been pissed enough about some derogratory comments on the French by people who had never opened a history book in their lives. Pissed enough to counterattack (before you speak about "cheese eating surrenderiung monkeys" think in your draft dodgers during Vietnam because you had suffered a mere fifty thousand dead and compatre them to the 400,000 dead at Verdun for a population who was five times lower). But I happen to love America, I love its ideals and what I see of its citizens through blogging. It is my deep regret to be stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic and of being too old to reestablish myself in the right one, become a US citizen, cheer the Denver Broncos and vote for the Republican candidate. But whatever my loath of Chirac and what France has become and despite being an ethnic Spanish not French I don't accept people spitting on the graves of the Verdun soldiers just because they have a grief with their grand-grand-children. |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-9-4 1:04:53 PM |
| #1 I already cited the bit about Greece the other day. (g) |
| Posted by: Ernest Brown 2003-9-4 1:04:09 PM |