BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, February 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about
the West from radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense
of the terrorists. But the Middle Eastern mainstream--diplomats,
intellectuals and journalists--has also bombarded the American
public with an array of unflattering images and texts,
suggesting that the extremists' anti-Americanism may not be an
eccentricity of the ignorant but rather a representative slice
of the views of millions.
Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly
announced from his Cairo home that America's bombing of the
Taliban was "just as despicable a crime" as the September 11
attacks--as if the terrorists' unprovoked mass murder of
civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes
against enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to
answer back their Middle Eastern critics for fear of charges
of "Islamophobia" or "Arab smearing," have let such accusations
go largely unchecked.
Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most
Arab invective: first, that there is some sort of equivalence--
political, cultural and military--between the West and the
Muslim world; and second, that America has been exceptionally
unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and
reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by
pillars of utter ignorance.
Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins or
history of democracy, a word that, along with its family
(constitution, freedom and citizen), has no history in the Arab
vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language
other than Greek and Latin and their modern European offspring.
Consensual government is not the norm of human politics but a
rare and precious idea, not imposed or bequeathed but usually
purchased with the blood of heroes and patriots, whether in
classical Athens, revolutionary America or more recently Eastern
Europe. Democracy's lifeblood is secularism and religious
tolerance, coupled with free speech and economic liberty.
Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are
better than tyranny, surely; but they do not make consensual
government. Nor do the Palestinian parliament and advisory
bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies are elected by
an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall,
impeach or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even
to speak openly to journalists about the failings of their own
government. Plato remarked of such superficial government-by-
deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-
take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural
but is not the same as the formal machinery of democratic
government.
Our own cultural elites, either out of timidity or sometimes
ignorance of the uniqueness of our own political institutions,
seldom make such distinctions. But the differences are critical,
because they lie unnoticed at the heart of the crisis in the
Muslim world, and they explain our own tenuous relations with
the regimes in the Gulf and the Middle East. Israel does not
really know to what degree the Palestinian authorities have a
real constituency, because the people of the West Bank
themselves do not know either--inasmuch as they cannot debate
one another on domestic television or campaign on the streets
for alternate policies. Yasser Arafat assumed power by Western
fiat; when he finally was allowed to hold real and periodic
elections in his homeland, he simply perpetuated autocracy--as
corrupt as it is brutal.
By the same token, we are surprised at the duplicity of the Gulf
States in defusing internal dissent by redirecting it against
Americans, forgetting that such is the way of all dictators,
who, should they lose office, do not face the golden years of
Jimmy Carter's busy house-building or Bill Clinton's self-
absorbed angst. Either they dodge the mob's bullets or scurry to
a fortified compound on the French coast a day ahead of the
posse. The royal family of Saudi Arabia cannot act out of
principle, because no principle other than force put and keeps
them in power. All the official jets, snazzy embassies and
expensive press agents cannot hide that these illegitimate
rulers are not in the political sense Western at all.
How sad that intellectuals of the Arab world--themselves given
freedom only when they emigrate to the United States or Europe--
profess support for democratic reform from Berkeley or Cambridge
but secretly fear that, back home, truly free elections would
usher in folk like the Iranian imams, who, in the manner of the
Nazis in 1933, would thereupon destroy the very machinery that
elected them. The fact is that democracy does not spring fully
formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon--the
formal icing on a pre-existing cake of egalitarianism, economic
opportunity, religious tolerance and constant self-criticism.
The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men
and women insist upon the latter--and therein demolish the
antidemocratic and medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian
traditionalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
How much easier for nonvoters of the Arab world to vent
frustration at the West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a
democratic America, Israel and Europe have conspired to prevent
Muslims from adopting the Western invention of democracy!
Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and
kept from the mujahideen. Islam is welcome to it, with the
blessing and subsidy of the West. Yes, we must promote democracy
abroad in the Muslim world; but only they, not we, can ensure
its success.
The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its
failure to grasp the nature of Western success, which springs
neither from luck nor resources, genes nor geography. Like Third
World Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for their own self-
inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism and racism--
anything other than the absence of real markets and a free
society--the Islamic intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim
world's inferiority vis- -vis the West, but it then seeks to
fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government
spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the
cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the
courage to say that they are poor because their populations are
nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free,
that their economies are not open, and that their
fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression
and cultural exchange.
Tragically, the immediate prospects for improvement are dismal,
inasmuch as the war against terrorism has further isolated the
Middle East. Travel, foreign education and academic exchanges--
the only sources of future hope for the Arab world--have
screeched to a halt. All the conferences in Cairo about Western
bias and media distortion cannot hide this self-inflicted
catastrophe--and the growing ostracism and suspicion of Middle
Easterners in the West.
But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is
easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth.
Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal,
the fertility of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates valleys,
invaluable geopolitical locations and a host of other natural
advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past
now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of
resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be
otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building
permit in Cairo, when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad,
and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic
studies than in medicine or engineering?
To tackle illiteracy, gratuitous state-sanctioned killing, and
the economic sclerosis that comes from corruption and state
control would require the courage and self-examination of
Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, even of China. Instead,
wedded to the old bromides that the West causes their misery,
that fundamentalist Islam and crackpot mullahs have had no role
in their disasters, that the subjugation of women is
a "different" rather than a foul (and economically foolish)
custom, Muslim intellectuals have railed these past few months
about the creation of Israel half a century ago, and they have
sat either silent or amused while the mob in their streets
chants in praise of a mass murderer. Meanwhile millions of
Muslims tragically stay sick and hungry in silence.
Has the Muslim world gone mad in its threats and ultimatums?
Throughout this war, Muslims have saturated us with overt and
with insidious warnings. If America retaliated to the mass
murder of its citizens, the Arab world would turn on us; if we
bombed during Ramadan, we would incur lasting hatred; if we
continued in our mission to avenge our dead, not an American
would be safe in the Middle East.
More disturbing even than the screaming street demonstrations
have been the polite admonitions of corrupt grandees like Crown
Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or editor Abdul Rahman al Rashed
of Saudi Arabia's state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat. Don't they see
the impotence and absurdity of their veiled threats, backed
neither by military force nor cultural dynamism? Don't they
realize that nothing is more fatal to the security of a state
than the divide between what it threatens and what it can
deliver?
There is an abyss between such rhetoric and the world we
actually live in, an abyss called power. Out of politeness, we
needn't crow over the relative military capability of one
billion Muslims and 300 million Americans; but we should
remember that the lethal, 2,500-year Western way of war is the
reflection of very different ideas about personal freedom, civic
militarism, individuality on the battlefield, military
technology, logistics, decisive battle, group discipline,
civilian audit and the dissemination and proliferation of
knowledge.
Values and traditions--not guns, germs and steel--explain why a
tiny Greece of 50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times
larger; why Rome, not Carthage, created world government; why
Cort s was in Tenochtitl n, and Montezuma not in Barcelona; why
gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite
while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and
ever evolving weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western
power in the medieval ages, a Europe divided by religion and
fragmented into feudal states could still send thousands of
thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had
neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad
in Scotland or Brittany.
Much is made of 500 years of Ottoman dominance over a feuding
Orthodox, Christian and Protestant West; but the sultans were
powerful largely to the degree that they crafted alliances with
a distrustful France and the warring Italian city-states, copied
the Arsenal at Venice, turned out replicas of Italian and German
canon, and moved their capital to European Constantinople.
Moreover, their "dominance" amounted only to a rough naval
parity with the West on the old Roman Mediterranean; they never
came close to the conquest of the heart of Western Europe.
Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa,
Asia and the Pacific and the Americas--and not merely because of
their Atlantic ports or ocean ships but rather because of their
longstanding attitudes and traditions about scientific inquiry,
secular thought, free markets and individual ingenuity and
spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on
morality--Pizarro's record in Peru makes as grim reading as the
Germans' in central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the
amoral dynamism that fuels ships and soldiers.
We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not
because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more
ores or better weather, but because of our culture. When it
comes to war, one billion people and the world's oil are not
nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the House
of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O'Rilley and the G.I. Bill.
Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and
Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks
arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and
the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War,
lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest
of the world copies its weapons, uniforms and military
organization from us, not vice versa.
Many Middle Easterners have performed a great media charade
throughout this war. They publish newspapers and televise the
news, and thereby give the appearance of being modern and
Western. But their reporters and anchormen are by no means
journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry.
Whereas CNN makes a point of talking to the victims of
collateral damage in Kabul, al-Jazeera would never interview the
mothers of Israeli teenagers blown apart by Palestinian bombs.
Nor does any Egyptian or Syrian television station welcome
freewheeling debates or "Meet the Press"-style talk shows
permitting criticism of the government or the national religion.
Instead, they quibble over their own degrees of anti-Americanism
and obfuscate the internal contradictions of Islam. The chief
dailies in Algiers, Tehran and Kuwait City look like Pravda of
old. The entire Islamic media is a simulacrum of the West,
lacking the life-giving spirit of debate and self-criticism.
As a result, when Americans see a cavalcade of talking Middle
Eastern heads nod and blurt out the party line--that Israel is
evil, that the United States is naive and misled, that Muslims
are victims, that the West may soon have to reckon with Islamic
anger--they assume the talk is orchestrated and therefore worth
listening to only for what it teaches about how authoritarian
governments can coerce and corrupt journalists and
intellectuals.
A novelist who writes whatever he pleases anywhere in the Muslim
world is more likely to receive a fatwa and a mob at his
courtyard than a prize for literary courage, as Naguib Mahfouz
and Salman Rushdie have learned. No wonder a code of silence
pervades the Islamic world. No wonder, too, that Islam is far
more ignorant of us than we of it. And no wonder that the
Muslims haven't a clue that, while their current furor is
scripted, whipped up and mercurial, ours is far deeper and more
lasting.
Every Western intellectual knows Edward Said's much-hyped theory
of "Orientalism," a purely mythical construct of how Western
bias has misunderstood and distorted the Eastern "Other." In
truth, the real problem is "Westernism"--the fatally erroneous
idea in the Middle East that its propaganda-spewing Potemkin
television stations give it a genuine understanding of the
nature of America, an understanding Middle Easterners believe is
deepened by the presence in their midst of a few McDonald's
franchises and hired U.S. public-relations firms.
That error--which mistakes ignorance for insight--helps explain
why Osama bin Laden so grossly miscalculated the devastating
magnitude of our response to September 11. In reality, the most
parochial American knows more about the repressive nature of the
Gulf States than the most sophisticated and well-traveled sheikh
understands about the cultural underpinnings of this country,
including the freedom of speech and inquiry that is missing in
the Islamic press.
Millions in the Middle East are obsessed with Israel, whether
they live in sight of Tel Aviv or thousands of miles away. Their
fury doesn't spring solely from genuine dismay over the hundreds
of Muslims Israel has killed on the West Bank; after all, Saddam
Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands of Shiites, Kurds and
Iranians, while few in Cairo or Damascus said a word. Syria's
Hafez Assad liquidated perhaps 20,000 in sight of Israel,
without a single demonstration in any Arab capital. The murder
of some 100,000 Muslims in Algeria and 40,000 in Chechnya in the
last decade provoked few intellectuals in the Middle East to
call for a pan-Islamic protest. Clearly, the anger derives not
from the tragic tally of the fallen but from Islamic rage that
Israelis have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly,
decisively, at will and without modesty.
If Israel were not so successful, free and haughty--if it were
beleaguered and tottering on the verge of ruin--perhaps it would
be tolerated. But in a sea of totalitarianism and government-
induced poverty, a relatively successful economy and a stable
culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less
successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds
us, is a powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of
denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its
frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate
concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for
millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems
from a deep psychological wound. It isn't about lebensraum or
some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that
it is a nation's culture--not its geography or size or magnitude
of its oil reserves--that determines its wealth or freedom. For
the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare
war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of
doing business--not the Jews--makes it poor, sick and weak.
Throughout the Muslim world, myth and ignorance surround U.S.
foreign policy toward the Middle East. Yes, we give Israel aid,
but less than the combined billions that go to the Palestinians
and to Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim countries. And it is one
thing to subsidize a democratic and constitutional (if
cantankerous) ally but quite another to pay for slander from
theocratic or autocratic enemies. Though Israel has its fair
share of fundamentalists and fanatics, the country is not the
creation of clerics or strongmen but of European migr s, who
committed Israel from the start to democracy, free speech and
abundant self-critique.
Far from egging on Israel, the United States actually restrains
the Israeli military, whose organization and discipline, along
with the sophisticated Israeli arms industry, make it quite
capable of annihilating nearly all its bellicose neighbors
without American aid. Should the United States withdraw from
active participation in the Middle East and let the contestants
settle their differences on the battlefield, Israel, not the
Arab world, would win. The military record of four previous
conflicts does not lie. Arafat should remember who saved him in
Lebanon; it was no power in the Middle East that brokered his
exodus and parted the waves of Israeli planes and tanks for his
safe passage to the desert.
The Muslim world suffers from political amnesia, we now have
learned, and so has forgotten not only Arafat's resurrection but
also American help to beleaguered Afghans, terrified Kuwaitis,
helpless Kurds and Shiites, starving Somalis and defenseless
Bosnians--direct intervention that has cost the United States
much more treasure and lives than mere economic aid for Israel
ever did. They forget; but we remember the Palestinians cheering
in Nablus hours after thousands of our innocents were
incinerated in New York, the hagiographic posters of a mass
murderer in the streets of Muslim capitals, and the smug
remonstrations of Saudi prince Alwaleed to Mayor Rudy Giuliani
at Ground Zero.
Saudi and Kuwaiti Westernized elites find psychological comfort
in their people's anti-American rhetoric, not out of real
grievance but perhaps as reassurance that their own appetite for
all things Western doesn't constitute rejection of their
medieval religion or their 13th-century caliphate. Their
apologists in the United States dissemble when they argue that
these Gulf sheikhs are forced to master a doublespeak for
foreign consumption, or that they are better than the
frightening alternative, or that they are victims of unfair
American anger that is ignorant of Wahhabi custom.
In their present relationship with the terrorists, these old-
fashioned autocrats are neutrals only in the sense that they now
play the cagier role of Franco's Spain to Hitler's Germany. They
aid and abet our enemies, but never overtly. If the United
States prevails, the Saudis can proclaim that they were always
with us; should we lose a shooting war with the terrorists, the
princes can swear that their prior neutrality really constituted
allegiance to radical Islam all along.
In matters of East-West relations, immigration has always been a
one-way phenomenon. Thousands flocked to Athens and Rome; few
left for Parthia or Numidia unless to colonize or exploit.
People sneak into South, not North, Korea--in the same manner
that few from Hong Kong once braved gunfire to reach Beijing
(unless to invest and profit). Few Israeli laborers are going to
the West Bank to seek construction jobs. In this vein is the
Muslim world's longing for the very soil of America. Even in the
crucible of war, we have discovered that our worst critics love
us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the abstract.
For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported
enemies wish to visit, study or (better yet) live in the United
States--and this is true not just of Westernized professors or
globetrotting tycoons but of hijackers, terrorists, the children
of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs and the spoiled
teenage brats of our Gulf critics. The terrorists visited lap
dancers, took out frequent-flier miles, spent hours on the
Internet, had cell phones strapped to their hips and hobnobbed
in Las Vegas--parasitic on a culture not their own, fascinated
with toys they could not make, and always ashamed that their
lusts grew more than they could be satisfied. Until September
11, their ilk had been like fleas on a lazy, plump dog, gnashing
their tiny proboscises to gain bloody nourishment or inflict
small welts on a distracted host who found them not worth the
scratch.
This dual loathing and attraction for things Western is
characteristic of the highest echelon of the terrorists
themselves, often Western-educated, English-speaking and hardly
poor. Emblematic is the evil genius of al Qaeda, the sinister
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He grew up in Cairo affluence, his family
enmeshed in all the Westernized institutions of Egypt.
Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia
maddening, especially in its inability to fathom that all the
things that Muslim visitors profess to hate--equality of the
sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance, egalitarianism,
free speech and secular rationalism--are precisely what give us
the material things that they want in the first place. CDs and
sexy bare midriffs are the fruits of a society that values
freedom, unchecked inquiry and individual expression more than
the dictates of state or church; wild freedom and wild
materialism are part of the American character. So bewildered
Americans now ask themselves: Why do so many of these anti-
Americans, who profess hatred of the West and reverence for the
purity of an energized Islam or a fiery Palestine, enroll in
Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in Pakistan or military
academies in Iraq?
The embarrassing answer would explain nearly everything, from
bin Laden to the intifada. Dads and moms who watch al-Jazeera
and scream in the street at the Great Satan really would prefer
that their children have dollars, an annual CAT scan, a good
lawyer, air conditioning and Levis in American hell than be
without toilet paper, suffer from intestinal parasites, deal
with the secret police, and squint with uncorrected vision in
the Islamic paradise of Cairo, Tehran and Gaza. Such a
fundamental and intolerable paradox in the very core of a man's
heart--multiplied millions of times over--is not a healthy thing
either for them or for us, as we have learned since September
11.
Most Americans recognize and honor the past achievements of
Islamic civilization and the contribution of Middle Eastern
immigrants to the United States and Europe, as well as the
traditional hospitality shown visitors to the Muslim world. And
so we have long shown patience with those who hate us, and more
curiosity than real anger.
But that was then, and this is now. A two-kiloton explosion that
incinerated thousands of our citizens--planned by Middle
Easterners with the indirect financial support of purportedly
allied governments, the applause of millions, and the snickering
and smiles of millions more--has had an effect that grows not
wanes.
So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their
spokesmen abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the
edifice of your anti-Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers
from within to even more difficult questions without. Do not
blame others for problems that are largely self-created or seek
solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home.
Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about
the deaths of thousands of Americans and your relationship with
the United States.
America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now
you are on the verge of turning its people--who create, not
follow, government--into an enemy: a very angry and powerful
enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come.
Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is author most recently
of "Carnage and Culture" (Doubleday 2002) and a contributing
editor of City Journal, in whose Winter issue this article
appears.
