JEDDAH, 1 February 2003 — The Pakistani taxi driver, mistaking me for an Englishman, was giving me a lecture on the iniquity of Tony Blair’s slavish stance on Iraq.
“Why?” he asked. “Britain is, Alhamdulillah, a rich country: Why does Blair need to do everything America tells him to?”
Why indeed?
I told him what an Englishman would tell him: That the British government no more represents its people than Saddam Hussein represents his; that the views of 40 percent of the British public are never reflected in the media; and that that is the way of the world.
An Afghan was about to prepare my food the following day in a local restaurant when he froze and stared at me.
“What is your nationality?”
“German,” I said, truthfully.
“Good,” he said, and proceeded to cook my dinner.
There are clear benefits to being German in the Middle East these days. Thursday’s statement by Donald Rumsfeld that there remain “serious differences” between the US and Germany on Iraq only improved my potential popularity here.
I didn’t tell the Afghan that I had no hand in electing the German government. I didn’t tell him that I have spent no more than 20 minutes on German soil in the last 15 years; that I have never been to Berlin nor expect to go there; that I find the German language grating on the ear and German food inimical to my stomach; and that I left the country as soon as I was old enough to do so.
Nor did I tell him that Tony Blair’s election to prime minister some five years ago found me cheering from my London flat. Then again, the reason I was cheering was simply that he was replacing a government so grotesque and out of touch that anything would have been a relief.
Five years later that strikes me as odd too: What was I doing cheering someone else’s government? It wasn’t until I was told by endless “special” supplements that 60 percent of the British population had watched the funeral of Princess Diana on television — had, in short, gone mad — and that the remaining 40 percent had not only remained without a voice in the past weeks but had actively had their voice suppressed, that I knew it was time to leave that country as well.
Many people are vaguely proud of their nation’s past achievements, or ashamed of its failures. But to feel emotionally involved in the fortunes of a government, to somehow see one’s being embodied in a government’s actions, is a rare and potentially dangerous thing.
Democratic governments are in theory the servants of the people: We elect them to do a job so that we don’t have to do it. Ideally, like the current German government, they act in our interest; but frequently they do not, and can be replaced. Only in times of extreme stress or mass hysteria — such as Germany under the Nazis or Iraq under Saddam — do people identify with their government to the point of feeling representative of it rather than the other way round.
So in Saudi Arabia there seems to be a climate of emotional rather than rational response to people from the West at the moment.
The truth must be, though, that there a great many Saudis — particularly among the post-Sept. 11 returnees — whose experience is similar to mine.
