Beyond Our Borders
The foes and woes of the lone superpower . . . and a Dutch Muslim woman.
My, Do They Hate Us
Is the last superpower getting neurotic? As America struggles to navigate the post-9/11 world, the same questions keep recurring: Is America hated because of its power, its principles, its policies or its people? For that matter, is it hated at all or simply envied? Are America and the rest of the West now pitted against the Muslim world in the "clash of civilizations" that the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington forecast more than a decade ago? A few sweeping and unwieldy theories have emerged, which may be why, among a slew of recent contributions to this debate, the personal accounts tend to be more revealing than the surveys.
  Protesters in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, with an effigy of President Bush (March 19, 2005) (Alexandre Meneghini / Ap) |
In America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (Holt, $25), Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes examine numerous Pew Research Center polls, conducted at home and abroad, to explain what makes America special and why those qualities elicit so much resistance. Unfortunately, their conclusions break little new ground. Although Americans and foreigners alike identify such characteristics as individualism and optimism as quintessentially American, Kohut and Stokes write, these traits don't make the United States any more exceptional than other countries. In some respects, such as religiosity, the United States is no exception at all: Americans are as devout as Middle Easterners, and it's the Europeans and the Japanese, those staunch secularists, who stand out.
Kohut (the director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a nonpartisan polling organization) and Stokes (a National Journal columnist and Pew consultant) do single out a few misunderstandings about U.S. policy to help explain anti-Americanism. Despite what many foreigners believe, Americans have no imperial ambitions, they write; U.S. chauvinism breeds indifference toward the rest of the world, not the desire to conquer it. As they see it, America's unchallenged global primacy, rather than its exceptionalism (real or misconstrued), largely accounts for anti-Americanism abroad. Such resentment, the book declares, is the complex product of the world's more or less accurate perceptions of both U.S. ideals and U.S. policies. Perhaps, but that's not much help in thinking about how to stem the anti-American tide.
Through Our Enemies' Eyes
A particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. image problem is America's relationship with the Muslim world, especially its radical fringe. Fawaz A. Gerges's Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt, $25), which features extensive interviews with several Islamist militants (some repentant, some not), is a fine introduction to the topic. Though Gerges's interviews present a slightly random sampling of views, his book manages to sketch a recent history of jihadism and identify the movement's major strands. Despite differing perspectives, many of Gerges's subjects (including one of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat's killers) are united in opposing what they see as the West's cult of the individual and the resulting secularization of modern society.
These traits have been raising hackles since at least the late 1940s, when Sayyid Qutb, the father of contemporary jihadism, visited the United States and decried the laxity of American mores. In 1949, anticipating Huntington's thesis, Qutb made this prediction: "The real struggle in the future will not pit capitalism against Communism, or the Eastern camp against the Western camp . . . it will be between materialism throughout the world and Islam." Judging from Gerges's interviews, Qutb was largely right. This zealous sentiment fueled opposition to secular Arab regimes (like Egypt's) or debauched ones (like Saudi Arabia's); it also spurred Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to internationalize the struggle against Western depravity and to urge Muslims to take up arms against "crusader" forces in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere.
Gerges is also attuned to strains within the jihadist movement; in particular, he writes that, after 9/11, many Islamists faulted al-Qaeda for focusing on the United States rather than on local apostate regimes. But at just the moment the argument was heating up, the Bush administration chose to kick the anthill by invading Iraq. That move, Gerges argues, hasn't helped America's image.
A Soldier's Story
That dawning truth is amply confirmed in the pages of Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America From Baghdad to Washington (NAL Caliber, $24.95), the angry memoir of Paul Rieckhoff, a New York National Guard lieutenant who led a light infantry platoon in central Baghdad during much of 2003. Rieckhoff, who writes that he volunteered for the war despite opposing its rationales, opens his wartime journal with skepticism: "George Bush had better be [expletive] right." His book is a scathing insider's look at how the subsequent occupation was conducted on the cheap. Short on patrol cars, Rieckhoff's men made their rounds in looted luxury SUVs after hacking off the vehicles' doors. Meanwhile, their very presence seemed to breed more insurgents than it eliminated. Upon coming home thoroughly disheartened, Rieckhoff founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Rieckhoff's writing is sometimes ponderous ("There is no worse feeling than helplessness. It really got to me"). But his straightforward style comes across as honest and underscores the earnestness of his attempt to wrest back from the Bush administration his cherished conception of America. Most of the Iraqis in Chasing Ghosts are normal folk trying to get by, and Rieckhoff's grunts are generally eager to help out. They pay for a janitor's emergency surgery out of their own pockets, and Rieckhoff finagles from home a pair of size-19 Air Jordans for a local giant -- gestures that generate much gratitude and goodwill. Chasing Ghosts suggests that far below Washington's high-falutin' rhetoric, Americans -- exceptional or otherwise -- can do a lot for their country's reputation. Radical Islamists may despise basic American values, but many other Muslims are more upset by America's failure to live up to them. One way to bridge that divide, Rieckhoff's story suggests, may be for sensible people to reclaim the ideals of their cultures from the perverting influence of their respective elites.
A Woman's Place
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (Free Press, $19.95), by the controversial Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, may be read as such an effort. It includes her script for "Submission," which got the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who directed it, killed two years ago by an Islamist fanatic. The rest of The Caged Virgin contains mostly advice for young Muslim women about how to flee abusive homes. Although Hirsi Ali's tone can be self-helpy, her book is largely a measured attempt by an atheist who still calls herself a Muslim to save Islam from its excesses -- with some help from the West. Hirsi Ali, who moved to Holland in 1992 as a refugee, proposes several reforms, such as new laws and screening procedures to help end female genital mutilation among immigrants living in the Netherlands. More generally, though, she advises Muslims to be more self-critical.
In light of her recent run-ins with the Dutch authorities, that call now seems uncannily applicable to the Western liberal establishment as well. In May, Hirsi Ali was forced to quit parliament -- and almost lost her Dutch citizenship -- for having lied on immigration forms years ago. Since those mistruths had long been an open secret, the brouhaha smacked of petty politicking and betrayed Holland's fraught relationship with even its most liberal Muslim immigrants. The government has since resigned over the controversy -- a development that adds an interesting twist to Hirsi Ali's manifesto: If the West wants the world to understand its values, perhaps it should first do more to protect them at home. ·
Stéphanie Giry is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.
