Anybody who believed Dick Cheney’s rosy picture of Iraqi masses turning their weapons on their oppressors and welcoming our soldiers with open arms had not been paying attention in 2002 when a poll conducted by a Kuwaiti newspaper on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks found that 74% of Kuwaitis considered Osama Bin Laden a hero. These were the Kuwaitis, a people we had liberated from Saddam Hussein scarcely a decade before. At the same time we had slaughtered over 30,000 Iraqis, including more than 2500 civilians. Most of these were not members of the Baath Party. Then there were the sanctions. Saddam made sure the misery caused by the US-led sanctions spread as widely as possible across the non-Baath Party population while he hoarded humanitarian aid and spent lavishly on himself from revenues that came from the Oil-for-Food program. Whether Iraqis understood this clearly or not, the sanctions couldn’t have inspired much fondness for Americans. Never-the-less, when US and British soldiers were not met with instant loyalty and cooperation in Southern Iraq, the embedded media fed us stories about intimidation, family members held hostage, death squads of Baath Party enforcers menacing would-be freedom fighters. All of these may have been real enough on some scale, but they were hardly sufficient to explain the reluctance of vast numbers of Iraqis to embrace their liberators as the Administration had predicted. As a matter of fact, a whole stack of opinion polls conducted in Middle Eastern countries between 9/11 and the beginning of the war explained it all perfectly: The United States, Britain, and Israel were invariably at the very bottom in the esteem of Islamic populations. In the same polls, France, Canada, Germany, and Japan enjoyed favorable numbers .
Even more revealing was a Gallup poll analyzed by Dr. Shilbey Telhami that confirmed an overwhelming belief in the “Big Lie” theory of the World Trade Center attack. Most Arabs, as it turned out, refused to believe Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with it. Instead, it was an Israeli conspiracy to trick Americans into joining Israel in a conquest of the Middle East. The proof was, according to the story, 4000 Jewish employees were called and warned not to go to work that day at the World Trade Center. Such willful irrationality has far-reaching implications for the future of democracy in the region. These implications will not go away no matter how successful any military operations might be. War and occupation, in themselves, are extremely inefficient tools of education; they are much more likely to teach hate than humanity.
Much has been said and written in the time since September 11, 2001 about the psychology of the “Arab Street” and Islam in general as being tied to a “has-been” civilization. Muslims are portrayed as beset by a morbid preoccupation with their own history-- diseased by a sense of victimhood and a fetish with the “mentality of the underdog”, as one commentator put it. According to this popular hypothesis every Muslim is acutely aware and perpetually oppressed by the accumulated political failures of Islam dating back to the Crusades. Perhaps there is value in such mass psychoanalysis. Perhaps such generalizations shed some light on Middle Eastern sensibilities and motivations and perhaps not. In any case there is danger in attributing opposition to our own civilization, culture, and foreign policy to the psychological aberrations of opponents—particularly when there are so many simpler explanations close at hand. Moreover, time and again, polls and studies in the region show that Muslims actually may like and admire Americans and things American, while hating our policies in their region of the world. Thus it has been remarked in more than a few cases that middle-class Muslims who eventually became our attackers had previously tried to emigrate to the US, to become a part of it, but were refused visas. Denied access to America, they ultimately vowed to destroy it.
In the build-up and selling of the invasion of Iraq the Bush Administration promised many things to the Iraqi people, among them freedom, democracy, and a rebuilding of their society and economy. These were the same things we promised in Afghanistan and have yet to deliver. The Iraqi people, given the kind of picture Dick Cheney and others painted of their future, could hardly be faulted if they began to entertain dreams of being transformed by America into something like America. That, of course, was never even remotely possible. Forced to settle instead for an incremental improvement over what they already were, a country on the margins of world power and prosperity, many Iraqis prefer to go back to a historical core identity—fiercely nationalistic, Muslim, and the scourge of Crusaders.
Regardless what one makes of popular motivations in Iraq, one thing is certain: as long as US troops occupy Iraq, they will remain a target of all those in the region who hate America. The prospect that we will be able to simultaneously create in Iraq and Afghanistan shining examples of prosperous and egalitarian secular democracies is not good-- not at a price in tax dollars and American lives that the American nation is likely to find acceptable. The dilemma is that having started this war, we cannot afford to walk away. We would be wise, however, to swallow our pride and seek any and all assistance we might still be able to get from the rest of the world. We owe that to the Iraqi people, and we owe that to American and Coalition troops who are being sacrificed in mounting numbers. Finally, we must turn over the security of Iraq to Iraqis. There is wisdom in the old Lyndon Johnson doctrine (honored entirely in the breach since it was certainly never practiced in reality) that we should not “send American boys to do what Asian boys will not”. Only Iraqis can decide the future of Iraq. That future may or may not include democracy. Ultimately, if Iraqis want freedom and democracy they will have to fight for it themselves. They themselves will have to cast out their own historical demons and an anti-western mythology that blames their failures on a “Great Satan” in the form of the US. They will have to battle the forces of murderous religious fascism for themselves, just as Americans and Europeans did. There is no way to build a nation from without, and there is no future for an empire based on political rhetoric, domestic fear, and deferred payments to be borne by future generations of American taxpayers.