Beirut, Lebanon - No nation wants to be hated, least of all the United States, which aspires to be loved. But as far back as I can remember in the Middle East, no one has collectively loved -- even liked -- the Americans. So the pursuit of love as an aim of foreign policy seems, as always when the U.S. deals with the region, a parochial debate with little resonance for Arabs or Muslims.
Whenever I hear this question posed, I wonder what good explanation we have for the 9/11 attacks, which took place before the Bush administration's supposedly reprehensible policies and rhetoric provoked a spike in anti-U.S. sentiment. 2001 began with Secretary of State Colin Powell trying to "engage" Syria's despot, Bashar Assad, over Iraq, and the young president played him for a fool. The Bush administration had taken a step back from stalemated Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, and generally preferred to ignore the Middle East. Neither Arabs nor Muslims could complain of undue suffering from this policy of benign neglect.
But the attacks came nonetheless -- not directed against specific U.S. policies or rhetoric, but directed against America as America. Al Qaeda's objective was merely to kill as many people as possible. It was left to others, particularly America's critics, to read what they wanted into the mass murders, while Al-Qaeda's leaders offered no explanation.
America's primary goal in the Middle East and Muslim world should not be to reduce hostility, since in many cases it won't work; nor should it be to allow foolish policies to unnecessarily increase hostility either. What the U.S. must do is show more competence in its dealings with the region, more foresight in determining how its actions might be interpreted, more understanding of the cultural and political complexities required to mount a successful campaign in our lands. The ongoing headache in Iraq shows what happens when these qualities are lacking.
Americans often seem blind in the Middle East, undermining their laudable ambitions, and the reason is that there aren't enough practical experts to shape and implement policy, while those experts that do exist, many of them in universities, often refuse to collaborate with a government whose behavior they have routinely denounced. Indeed, if there has been a flagrant problem since 9/11, it's that much of Middle Eastern academia in the U.S. has marginalized itself on policy issues, particularly on Iraq, so that a profession that should have grown after 9/11 has been rendered trivial by ideological disputation.
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