Issue No. 603
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Heritage |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Lessons unlearned
America lost an opportunity to draw closer to the rest of the world, as humility gave way to aggression, writes Mohamed El-Sayed Said*
When someone who is proud of his power, security and wealth receives a disastrous blow, he may be stunned into a state of paranoia. Yet such a blow may also teach him the value of modesty. At first, this appeared to be what was happening to the US in the wake of 11 September. However, somewhere along the way over the past year, all trace of that initial modesty faded. Instead the paranoia began to lash out with increasing violence and anger.
Pain, however dreadful, can sometimes open a nation's eyes to the flaws in its moral and cultural development and spur it to remedy the tensions in its relationship with its environment. Indeed, there are nations that have benefited from calamity; crisis triggered introspection, and introspection led to domestic and foreign policy reform, based on a fresh outlook on the nation's culture and its behaviour towards others. Some nations have made great strides forward in economic and social development after absorbing the lessons to be learned from catastrophe. Emerging from the horrors of World War II, Europe initiated the process of unification, ended traditional colonialist occupation of the South, achieved astounding progress in the entrenchment and expansion of democracy and scored immense social achievements. The subsequent decades demonstrated that such developments did more for economic performance than all its colonialist plundering and the wars that had raged over imperial spoils.
Following 11 September, many intellectuals in the Arab world and elsewhere asked whether the US would heed the lessons of those events and rectify its relationship with the rest of the world. Time has answered that question. It has told us that, if anything, the US has learned the wrong lessons, and has chosen a path which will both hamper its moral and cultural development, and exacerbate the already serious crisis of human civilisation.
American society and culture lack many elements conducive to a sense of security. In spite of an astounding network of social guarantees, sharp economic fluctuations, a high crime rate, vast disparities in standards of living and keen political, cultural and ethnic clashes have combined to make fear and suspicion primary traits of both social and personal development in the US. In this, America may be simply a model of modern capitalist society with all its advantages and disadvantages. However, what is new and unique to the American experience is its paranoia towards the outside world. Well before 11 September, the fear of Confucianism (sic!), Islam and African cultures was already ingrained in American political culture.
Until only a few decades ago, the outside world was alien to the American consciousness, buffered as it was by long years of isolationism, as well as by that overwhelming power that it has so frequently abused in its dealings with Latin America, the region with which it has interacted more than any other area. However, globalisation and the US's rise as sole superpower have since generated two contradictory tendencies.
As Americans began to become aware of the panoply of problems plaguing the third world, from poverty and dictatorships to religious, political and ethnic violence, they grew smug over their own considerable wealth, civil liberties and domestic peace. Simultaneously, it dawned on them that they, along with a handful of other capitalist nations, were islands of wealth and prosperity in a surging sea of poverty, cruelty, despotism and violence, and they began to feel claustrophobic. Like wealthy people everywhere, the US never owned up to its own considerable share of responsibility in the plight of the Third World. Thus, instead of contributing to improving and preserving the environment which it, more than any other power, is destroying, and to universal development and peace, it recoiled from others, and blamed them for their troubles. It also began to panic over possible "contagion" from the Third World via immigration into the US, whether illegal or legitimate, as well as through various channels of social and economic globalisation.
Yet, in tandem with these reactions which are driven by fear, its narcissism led it to adopt an evangelical approach towards the Third World, in both the political and religious senses. Christian fundamentalism, which has experienced a meteoric rise since the end of the 1970s, has been increasingly active in many parts of the world, drawing strength from US power. Meanwhile, US policy architects are busy preaching the market economy, democracy and the universal spread of the American way of life.
Against the backdrop of this political and cultural climate, 11 September struck. Nothing had shaken the US as severely since the Civil War. In spite of all they had been told about the threat of Islam and the Muslim people, the American mindset had never taken them seriously. Indeed, they could not even understand why the attacks occurred. They had only a scant notion of the extent of the threat posed by Al-Qa'eda, or by religiously inspired violence in general. For several months, at least, they feared that the danger might be far more extensive than it actually appeared.
Perhaps because of this ignorance, panic quickly escalated into an immense phobia. For months, the US media talked of little else but the terrorist ghoul that lurked around every corner. Every few days there were reports of another "alleged terrorist" being apprehended, accompanied by lurid details of the diabolical plot he was hatching, only for the story to fizzle out as though it were some immense practical joke. At intervals, too, sirens would blare for the feeblest reason, merely to test them, or deliberately to alarm the people and keep alive their fear and hatred of that unknown, yet all too glibly defined, enemy.
Contrary to all logic, the paranoia and insecurity grew over time. Soon, incomprehension had dominated the American conscious or subconscious, and evolved into resentment and anger directed against Arabs and Muslims. At first, the US political elite, including the president, moved to counter the wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred that swept certain segments of the American people. Indeed, these officials' timely statements did much to avert a massive backlash against American Arabs and Muslims. The current administration in Washington should be given credit for this, regardless of its many shortcomings in its dealings with the Arab and Islamic world.
Unfortunately, this positive stance soon gave way to a more fully rounded beligerence, with the declaration of the "war against terrorism". Not only has the blaze of aggression continued unabated in Afghanistan, it has unleashed itself in the Middle East through America's whole- hearted backing for Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people. The most benign manifestation of the aggressive US mindset is its sweeping verbal onslaught against Arab and Islamic nations, including such US allies as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This is a campaign which only grows more vehement with every passing day.
However, the most telling example of US paranoia is its stance on Iraq. The danger from the regime in Iraq, US strategists and policy-makers tell us, is that it might furnish chemical, biological or, in the not so distant future, nuclear weapons to terrorists. If Bin Laden could cause all that death and destruction without weapons of mass destruction, imagine what he could do if he possessed them. Yet the logic is spurious; it is the product of unmitigated paranoia, rather than of corroborative evidence and precise reasoning.
The events of 11 September had another important effect, which might have helped the US learn humility and openness. The events occurred at a time when the US felt itself virtually immune to any external threat. It stood poised to exert total hegemony over the world, fully confident that it had the most perfect of all systems in history, indeed, that these systems would bring about the end of history itself. 11 September delivered a message to the US that was crystal clear: there is much in these systems that needs to be revised. Above all, the US security apparatus failed to prevent the assault, in spite of the dozens of warnings it received from the Arab and Islamic worlds, from Europe and from domestic sources. The universally awe-inspiring American security system was suddenly exposed as a broken-down machine, perhaps because its immense hubris had let it go to rust. Those who observed the US in the weeks following the attacks on Washington and New York knew that its self-confidence had shattered in one go. During those days, US analysts and commentators were asking some very pertinent questions, along, of course, with others that were utter nonsense. There was a window of opportunity to learn and to bring that learning to bear on redressing US relations with the world, and with the Arabs and Muslims in particular. Sadly, such a move was never made; in fact, the opposite, as the instinct for violence and revenge prevailed over the intellect and the spirit of humility.
A central question for future historians to answer will be why America's brief access of humility dissipated so quickly. Although the answer may require a more thorough and impartial knowledge of the US than is available to us today, it will also need to refer to certain factors pertaining to the events of 11 September, as well as to others which pertain to the political and cultural nature of the US itself.
Thus the events triggered a visceral and instinctive reactions. Unlike Pearl Harbour, the attack on the World Trade Centre claimed thousands of victims of all ethnic and religious origins, rendering it easy to comprehend as a purely senseless criminal act, undertaken by individuals entirely devoid of conscience or any human feeling. Adding force to this preliminary diagnosis was the fact that Bin Laden's group had accomplished an extraordinary technical feat while scoring an equally extraordinary political failure. Even the most unaccomplished and obtuse terrorists will attempt to put a gloss of legitimacy on their acts through a political rhetoric that appeals to certain humanitarian values for which they are ostensibly fighting. Bin Laden's rhetoric, however, was directed against Americans for being American and for being Christians or Jews. It was a rhetoric which average citizens were guaranteed to find repulsive, and it further presented the Americans, who are unfamiliar with even the rudiments of Islam, with the image of a barbaric creed. This, in turn, helped anti-Arab agitators and hate-mongers affix that image to Islam itself. The political objective of those operations was thus apparently to wage war on the US and the American people, not on American policies or positions. This is what voided it of any meaning that Americans could construe as even remotely positive or constructive.
As a result, the events played directly into the hands of all shades of the American right, bolstering the hawkish tendencies that had brought the current administration to power. The traditional right benefited from the attacks, because the reaction of any society to such events is inevitably to prioritise security and military considerations and their respective agencies. Until 11 September, the American right had no credible pretext to justify its obsession with the military component of "America the strong". As the source of the danger was Muslims and the cause of the threat was that the US was supposedly Christian, the attacks also benefited Christian fundamentalism and its political agenda.
With regard to American society, many factors contributed to the dissipation of humility and the crumbling of the will to learn, thus blocking the subsequent process of introspection and self-correction. American culture is highly superficial and shallow, characteristics which the current president himself embodies admirably. The majority of Americans recoil from probing things too deeply; they would rather take them at their face value and prefer the quick and easy answer. The US media plays up to and fosters these tendencies. Indeed, it is permeated with anti-intellectualism and an antipathy towards cultural refinement.
Without a doubt, too, Zionism and the Zionist right have had an extraordinary impact on the US. For many reasons, these forces have achieved immense success in channeling Americans' confusion and anger against the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. In their intense focus on eliminating all prospect of constructive action based on new insight, these forces have been criminally derelict towards the truth, boundlessly opportunistic and unethical in their response to these events. The interpretation of the events that these circles have propagated was crude and simplistic in the extreme, but it was easy for Americans to swallow. The Arabs hate us because of our wealth, freedoms and democracy, and because they come from violent dictatorial societies that have no respect for human life. The aim of such drivel was obvious: to exonerate Israel from all censure for its actions against the Arabs and Palestinian people -- one of the prime factors in generating the climate which has encouraged the rise of extremism within the Islamist movement in the Arab world. This strategy succeeded in augmenting the Americans' hostility towards the Arabs and Muslims, and in enabling Israel to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Intifada and swallow up yet more occupied territory.
A third factor which contributed to diminishing the need to learn was the easy victory the US military scored in Afghanistan at hardly any cost in American lives. That victory revived the naïve faith in guns, planes and easy wars as the solution to all problems. With such a ready solution at hand, why bother one's head with introspection and self-rectification on the basis of a fuller understanding of circumstances and problems elsewhere in the world?
We should also mention one final factor, which pertains to the Arab world. The Arabs, today, appear weaker and more helpless than ever before in their modern history. They make no impact whatsoever, because of their failure in economic and social development and the prevailing despotism and tyranny of their governing systems. Above all, they have no influence worth mentioning among the American people and their political system. As a result, in spite of the fact that the Arabs cooperated in the campaign against terrorism, they reaped no political returns, not even in terms of sympathy for their problems and causes. Worse, they seem incapable of explaining their most straightforward and obvious cause: the plight of the Palestinians.
But perhaps we should not dwell any further on our problems, which must inevitably project a negative image of ourselves to the US and elsewhere in the world. After all, to do so is simply to beat a dead horse.
* The writer is Al-Ahram bureau chief in Washington DC.
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