The other night I hung out with one of my best Jordanian friends. He is brilliant, speaks multiple languages, and has a promising career ahead in the arena of foreign affairs. He is secular, fairly Westernized, and deeply critical of Islamist politics, but he is also anti-capitalist and hostile to the United States. We talk about politics endlessly. We come from radically different backgrounds and disagree on a lot, but our conversations are always enlightening.
My friend is deeply critical of what he sees as imperialist American foreign policy. We have had many debates about American foreign policy post-September 11th. We largely agree about the mistakes that have been made, but we have radically different views of the root causes. I think the Iraq war was launched because of (1) pragmatic fears of Iraqi WMD, which most of the policymaking establishment believed was a serious threat at the time and (2) neoconservative ideology that believed the US could accelerate the growth of liberal democracy around the world by employing its military power. My friend can't believe that US policymakers were actually well-intentioned. He believes the Iraq war was launched to make Dick Cheney and Haliburton rich, and advance the interests of the Israel and oil lobbies.
I guess my endless debating pushed my friend a little too far. When we hung out the other night, he kind of snapped. I sat silently for at least half an hour, listening and nodding, while he vented everything that had been building up over the past few months. He was emotional, frustrated, raising his voice, punctuating every point with waves of his hands. His conversation was all over the place, but it was all about one core topic: his deep frustration with the damage that he feels imperialistic US policy is doing to the world.
My friend feels that he is an innocent trapped between a clash of fundamentalisms. He has little love for Islam and despises extremist Muslim politics, but he told me that the United States is no different: it is a theocracy controlled by right-wing Christians. Both Muslims and Christians, he said, are opposed to modernization because they are anti-intellectual and opposed to a scientific mindset. It was Christian zeal, he said, that led President Bush on a messianic mission to transform the Middle East. And it is Christians, he said, who multiply the power of the Israel lobby in the United States. Christians' unconditional support for the state of Israel leads them to support extremist politics--like the Israeli settlement enterprise. They make it impossible for the US to broker a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because no US president can act against them. Obama tried and failed. The ordinary forward-looking people of Jordan, he said, are trapped between these warring fundamentalisms.
The very next night, my professor at university said almost exactly the same thing. He was explaining how important it is to understand history and culture if we want to understand contemporary policy. American Protestants, he said, believe that the land of Israel is for the Jews even more strongly than the Jews do. He elaborated on this for a while, explaining that Britain joined the US in invading Iraq because both countries have Protestant backgrounds and are consequently wed to Judaism and Israel. Suddenly he put me on the spot and asked if I was Protestant. In my best possible Arabic I said yes, but explained that not all Protestants are with Israel 100%. This is a speech I give often here in Jordan. I explained that I am not on the side of Israelis and not on the side of Palestinians. I am on the side of peace. I support people on both sides who are willing to work for peace; I oppose those on both sides who stand against it. My teacher and all my classmates applauded, but my teacher eyed me suspiciously. I got the sense that he's still wary that I'm a closet Zionist.
By the way, plenty of Americans would agree with these guys. Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Hedges are a couple of thinkers who come to mind.
I don't repeat these conversations here because I agree with them, but because I think it's vital for Americans to understand that this is how they are viewed. Many Americans would be shocked to hear that much of the world views the US as a theocracy. Most Christian Zionists have no idea how much damage they're doing to their faith's reputation or the cause of peace. Academics in the US debate whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semitic for writing a scholarly analysis of the Israel lobby, but in Jordan, the overwhelming influence of the lobby is simply assumed as a first principle. President Bush is viewed the way Americans view Hitler; it's taken for granted that he is evil incarnate, and no sane person would dare to suggest otherwise.
This is the human terrain in which the US has to market itself and its policies. That's tough work. What makes it so difficult is that truth and myth are so deeply interwoven. My friend and my professor base their arguments on seeds of truth, but they take them to extravagant lengths. Yes, the Israel lobby is wealthy and very influential; no, there is no secret Jewish cabal running the country. Yes, American Christians are largely sympathetic to Israel and are an important voting bloc; but no, the vast majority of Christians are not interested in waging a new crusade against Islam, and Christians hold a variety of political views. Yes, America has troops deployed all over the globe and is currently occupying two Muslim countries; no, the US was not motivated by raw greed and hate, and it has zero interest in conquering vast swaths of Muslim lands to control their oil. In fact, we're trying to figure out how to get out.
How do you dialogue with this knotted logic? You do it one conversation at a time. You do it through friendship and personal example. Human, face-to-face contact and personal experience is what breaks down stereotypes. My friend told me that our friendship has radically changed how he views the US and the American military. We'll keep talking, we'll keep learning, and we'll keep trying to understand each other... one conversation at a time.
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2 comments:
This is an incredibly helpful article. I've been sharing this with many of my more conservative, fundamentalist friends in and outside of the military, and it's amazing what sort of discussion has ensued. Please keep up the writing on this and other topics.
Your strategy is correct. I have had many such conversations in Europe, the Middle East, China, and Africa with people deeply suspicious and fearful of the United States. I challenged their assumptions by listening to what they had to say, trying to understand why they felt that way, and respectfully disagreeing with them. Once a German friend got very upset at another American who had behaved in a way that confirmed many of the German's worst stereotypes of Americans. He contrasted the other American's behavior with mine, that he considered acceptable. He thought that he was complimenting me when he said, "It is a mistake that you are an American." I simply asked him why he chose to judge Americans by the other's bad behavior instead of his respect for me.
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