Why do they hate us so much?
That was one of the questions Americans asked in the wake of the diabolically successful destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the bloody stab at the Pentagon in Washington, respectively symbols of America's financial and military might.
A reasonable question, to be sure, but not much different from the one raised in the wake of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 when millions of Iranians marched, day in, day out, in the streets of their capital hollering "death to America" and identifying the US as "the Big Satan"; or in the wake of the CIA-engineered coup in Chile in 1973 that resulted in the murder of the country's duly elected President Salvador Allende, a bloody affairs that left a large residue of anti-Americanism in Chilean society, and a taste of ash in every Chilean's mouth upon uttering the name United States.
But Americans are entitled to ask that question, little in touch though they are with, and little though they care about, their government's foreign policy.
The most chilling quote in David Halberstam's new book, "War in a Time of Peace," released last week, was the one the author attributes to Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Short on the eve of the bombing raids on Belgrade during the Kosovo war, as he left a final, failed negotiating session in the Yugoslav capital with his Serbian counterpart: "Why don't you go out now and drive around your city and take one last look at it as it is today, because it will never look that way again."
Oh, yes, the awesome, unimaginable and fearsome might of American military power, whose exercise a lot of nations that had crossed the US at one time or another are all too familiar with. (Imagine this: B-52s stationed in Missouri flew halfway around the world on bombing runs in Kosovo and returned home without stopping to land.)
No less than its military power, consider America's economic and diplomatic power. With a growth domestic product in excess of $10 trillion, the American economy is larger than that of the next four largest industrialized nations combined. And with its diplomacy derived less from a politico-moral impulse than from a cauldron of imperial egoism, ambition and Machiavellian realpolitik, the US set out, more than half a century ago, to regroup the world in response to its interests, and the devil with how this impacted on the lives of the natives of Palestine, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Vietnam, Chile and Nicaragua, to name a few countries where people's lives were devastated by American machinations in their national affairs.
Consider, as an example, the lasting and tragic impact these machinations left on the lives of the Palestinian people. The UN resolution calling for the partition of Palestine came up for a vote on Nov. 29, 1947, and called for granting 37 percent of the population, the Jews, 55 percent of the land (of which they owned only 7 percent). Absurd? That's what a lot of the member states in the General Assembly though too, and there was no chance that the resolution, which required a two-thirds majority to pass, would see the light of day.
That's when the US, then under President Truman's administration, stepped in to pressure those states that had declared their intention to vote against, like Haiti, the Philippines, Greece and Liberia. Greece, for example, was threatened with a foreign aid cutoff and Liberia with a rubber embargo.
Preceded by that kind of arm-twisting "do as I say, or else" -Resolution 181 passed with 33 states voting yes, 13 no, and 10 abstaining. Had three of the yes voted nay, the resolution would have failed.
America thus doomed the people of Palestine to a life of destitution, exile and suffering. It deflected their history from its preordained course, robbed them of their patrimony and reduced their sense of nationhood to a fragment.
Why do they hate us so much?
John Lee Hooker, the 78-year-old African-American blues master, once said: "Those who don't enjoy the blues have a hole in their soul." The same can equally be said about those who don't enjoy, because they are denied it, the freedom of being the only determining force in their destiny. A hole in the sole translates into an aggrieved people who refuse to swallow their grievances.
With the sense of sorrow and shock that all of us have voiced over the death of innocent Americans in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon comes the hope that America will temper its sense of superpower self and that it will abandon its perch above the rest of the world. And though to many oppressed people (a term Americans prefer not to use in polite company), America's grief is also its comeuppance (a dreadful thought in itself), it is time that US policy-makers acknowledged that Washington often underestimates, or opts to dismiss, how less fortunate societies view America's sponsored coups, its strong-arming, its bullying, its double standards, and its hypocrisy in preaching to others on democracy, social justice and freedom, as it exempts itself from demonstrating them in its foreign policy.
As Steve Chapman, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, wrote last Thursday, about Washington's asymmetrical relationship with the Arab world:
"Most of the time, Washington does what it pleases in the region, paying little heed to criticism from Cairo or Riyadh or Amman. But then comes along an emergency, and suddenly the Americans expect Middle Eastern governments to do our bidding."
The case of a selfish friend who is always there when he needs you.
There are a lot of Americans around, including Americans in government - a lot more than Arabs care to admit - who are aware of their country's flawed policies, but they feel helpless at making a difference, given the bewildering complexity of institutions such as the White House, the State Department and Congress, and how policy gets made in the interplay of this trinity of American power.
In this context, we return to David Halberstam's book for another, if not chilling, then telling, quote. The author tells us about Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, a tortured soul who did not know where to turn with his advocacy for a more humanistic American foreign policy.
Halberstam writes of Lake in 1994: "He wondered if he was becoming the kind of public official he had often privately criticized in the past, a person who believes deeply in something, finds again and again that he is powerless, and yet stays on in his job, seizing upon various rationales to justify not following his conscience."
Why do they hate us so much?
The answer is that, truth be hold, the world, including that part of it we call the Arab world, does not in the least hate America or Americans, but rather their government's lack of "conscience" in dealing with them.
The centrality in the world today of "American exceptionalism", to borrow the term coined by the American scholar Seymour Lipset, is manifest; it is the humanity that has often been tragically absent.
