Try to remember the scene on September 11, 2001. Remember the planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And the news footage showing thousands of people around the world—but especially in the Middle East—celebrating in the streets. If you can picture all of that, you probably remember the refrain, “Why do they hate us?â€
It’s now six years later, and that question still has not been seriously addressed, either by our political leaders or the mainstream press.
Do you remember Bush’s explanation? “They hate our freedom.†He even repeated it in his State of the Union speech in January.
Or the self-righteous proclamation that “They’re jealous of our prosperity.†Or of “our strength.†Or “our success.†The suggestion is that we’ve worked hard and earned the good life. Lazy people in the undeveloped world want someone else to hand them all that we’ve attained through selfless toil.
I’ve heard the likes of Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh go so far as to suggest that some people are just born evil. That they’re congenitally attracted to an ideology which preaches hate and murder. Since their problem is genetically hard-wired, the only way to deal with them is kill them all before they kill us.
Most thinking people understand that truth is complicated, and even the right-wing zealots not completely wrong. Undoubtedly, some people do envy American wealth and power. Many devout Muslims—like many Christians—are, indeed, offended by our styles of music, dress, and popular culture. There may even be some people who are predisposed to violence and find themselves attracted to extreme religious sects. We have our Timothy McVeighs, and “they†have their bin Ladens. But to suggest that such factors are primarily responsible for world-wide anti-Americanism is little more than paranoid delusion.
Social scientists have overwhelming evidence that people’s actions, by and large, are shaped by their experience. And if that experience includes (mis)education by religious fanatics, we still need to ask: Why has fanaticism taken root so strongly at this moment in world history? Moreover, why have we been targeted while other prominent non-Muslim countries—say Japan, Switzerland, Brazil, or Canada—have not.
My job as an anthropologist requires me to picture how the world might look to someone whose experience is very different from my own. I invite you to try it. If you do, you might begin to understand why others are so angry … so desperate … that they are willing to commit unspeakable violence against unarmed civilians, even at the cost of their own lives.
Our own reactions to attacks on relatives, associates, and our national institutions should help us see how millions of Vietnamese must have felt about our dropping countless tons of napalm and explosives on their villages and farms. How Iraqis must have felt about the bombing raids and economic blockade that we imposed for more than a decade, at a cost 5000 lives a month. How Nicaraguans must feel about the Contras’ US-backed terror campaign that took the lives of over 30,000 civilians? How Indonesians must have felt about the US-backed coup that brought Suharto to power in 1967 and took perhaps as many as a million lives? How Chileans must have felt about the CIA-backed coup that put Pinochet in power and led to tens of thousands of desaparecidos. Or how Arabs must feel about our role in Palestine, in a conflict that has taken far too many lives on both sides, but over the years has claimed five times as many Palestinians as Israelis.
When our government supports the likes of Marcos in the Philippines, Chiang Kai-shek in China, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Diem, Ky, and Thieu in Vietnam, Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, Apartheid South Africa, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Kasavubu and Mobutu in Zaire, the Shah in Iran, and … yes … even Saddam Hussein for decades in Iraq, how do we expect the world to feel about us?
We claim that our military interventions are to foster freedom and democracy. Yet our CIA and military have intervened to depose democratically elected governments in such places as Iran (in 1953) and the Dominican Republic (in 1966).
After Chileans elected Salvador Allende president in 1970, Henry Kissinger declared “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.†Three years later, General Pinochet, supported by the CIA, engineered a coup and, for two decades, led one of the bloodiest regimes in the history of South America.
When Daniel Ortega of the Sandinistas was elected president of Nicaragua in 1984 with 63% of the vote in an election that international observers found free and fair, President Reagan continued illegally to fund and arm the Contras until the Sandinistas were overthrown. And just last year, when Hamas won the Palestinian election, the US and its allies withdrew all support with the avowed intention of making it impossible for the victors to rule. Our government has a history of being all for democracy as long as its side wins, but gladly turning to repressive tyrants when it loses. Is it hard to understand why our lectures on freedom and democracy so often fall upon deaf ears? Why we’re so widely dismissed as hypocrites? Why, when we complain that Muslims (or Latinos, Africans, or Asians) are incapable of embracing democratic governance, others say they would like to see us try democracy ourselves.
My point is not, as right-wing critics put it, to “blame America first.†As I said earlier, reality is contradictory and complex. Our country and our people have many wonderful qualities that are widely admired. One can cite our wealth and power, democratic institutions, and many heroic acts of self-sacrifice intended solely to improve the lives of others. Think of the Peace Corps, or Habitat for Humanity, or Amigos de las Americas—an organization with which my family has been involved. But we also need to understand how people maimed and orphaned by our bombs and napalm, or those who have lost sisters, brothers, sons and daughters at our hands might well perceive our country as an arrogant bully and a leading source of mindless, heartless terrorism.
As long as we continue to cause suffering to people the world over, they’ll rush to join bin Laden or Muqtada al-Sadr. Bush and his misbegotten war against Iraq have been the best conceivable recruiting tool for radical Islamists—as even the bipartisan Baker Commission recently acknowledged. If we hope to challenge them effectively, we have to claim the moral high ground—through our deeds as well as our intentions. Bush’s war has done the very opposite. Eric Alterman, in the January 29th issue of The Nation (2007:10) observed:
The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has proven to be even more catastrophic than those who had the good sense to oppose it could have predicted. It has killed Americans and Iraqis, destroyed a functioning, albeit unfree nation, increased the threat of terrorism, destabilized the region, empowered our enemies—particularly Iran and Syria—inspired hatred of the United States across the globe and will ultimately cost American taxpayers upwards of a trillion dollars. It is, almost certainly, as Al Gore has noted, “the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States.â€
Or, as Former Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bowman (October 2, 1998) commented in the National Catholic Reporter:
We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism … Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children…
In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth … the American people need to hear.
One could hardly say it better. It’s well past time for us to end the war and let the people of Iraq settle their own problems in their own way.
Feinberg is Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University. This opinion piece was first presented as a speech to an anti-war rally on 18th March 2007 in Kent, Ohio.
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