The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot of understandable suspicion out there about exactly how good American intentions even are when it comes to the Middle East.  That’s the theme of David Rohde’s book ‘Beyond War:  Reimagining American Influence in the Middle East.’

The first step I’d suggest:  do some major reimagining of images, and forget Orientalist stereotypes like the camel-rider on  the cover.  The second step:  question the whole concept of influence.

The Catholic weekly America asked me to review the book, and here’s what I wrote:

When the Egyptian military seized power in June, American pundits instantly rushed to preach about democracy.  This took some hubris considering that two recent American elections – 2000 and 2004 – are still considered by many to be of questionable legality, and that redistricting is rapidly ensuring the minority status of Democratic strongholds throughout the south.

Is the US even in a position to preach democracy?  Especially since as with national elections, so too with foreign policy:  democracy is subject to money, and how it’s spent.

This is the hard-headed reality behind two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and former Taliban captive David Rohde’s new book, which focuses on how the US government spends money abroad, specifically in the Middle East.  It’s an argument for small-scale economic rather than large-scale military aid, and as such is immensely welcome in principle. The question is how to do it in practice.

As Rohde writes, “Washington’s archaic foreign policy apparatus” and its weakened civilian agencies mean that “in the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department, and Congress to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered.”

Whether Rohde is aware of it or not, the problem might be encapsulated in the subtitle of his own book, which assumes not only the existence of American influence, but also its necessity. Many of his sources are well-informed and palpably frustrated employees of the Agency for International Development (USAID) who are basically in conflict with both the State Department and Congress.  Yet the stated goals of USAID are clear:  they include providing “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the US.” [my italics].

For all the talk about the need for humanitarian aid and intervention (most recently in Syria), the reality is purely political.  What’s presented as humanitarian aid is always a matter of foreign policy.  And American foreign policy is still intensely focused on George W. Bush’s GWOT – the “global war on terror.”

The principle is that US aid should act as a stabilizing force against militant Islamic extremism.  But the very idea of the US as a stabilizing force has been thoroughly undermined by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even the best-considered foreign aid has now been rendered suspect in many parts of the Middle East, especially when there’s “a widespread perception of the American government as a finely tuned, nefarious machine, not an unwieldy cacophony of viewpoints,” and when authoritarian control fosters an intense rumor mill, with conspiracy theories rampant (most recently, for instance, Malala Yousufzai as a CIA plant, or American-backed ‘Zionists’ as the instigators of the new regime in Egypt).  In Egypt in particular, Rohde notes, “Washington faces an extraordinary public-policy conundrum.  Decades of support for Mubarak will not be forgotten overnight.”

Rohde details the conundrum in a series of country-by-country chapters, some intensively well-reported (particularly on civilian contractors’ takeover of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and on the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan), while others (on Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia) seem more perfunctory by comparison.  But in the light of the June military coup, the chapter on American dollars-for-peace financing and the Egyptian army’s vast business empire is particularly fascinating and uncomfortably prescient.

Oddly, though, there is no chapter on Israel, the largest recipient of American aid.  This seems to me tantamount to ignoring the elephant in the room, since the intense investment in an Israel that seems willing only to prolong and intensify the conflict with Palestine undermines US efforts elsewhere in the region.  In fact you could make a pretty strong argument that American support of Israel, driven by domestic electoral politics, runs directly counter to its own foreign policy interests.  Inevitably, the US is perceived elsewhere in the Middle East as at least tolerating if not encouraging Israel’s land grab in the Palestinian territories;  if its funds do not literally finance the expansionist project, they certainly free up funds that do.

Even assuming the best American intentions, then, they’re all too often interpreted as the worst.  But what exactly are those best intentions?

At root, this book is, or could have been, about America’s perception of itself.  Are we the world’s greatest do-gooders, distributing our largesse (and our arms) where most urgently needed?  Or are we acting to secure a blinkered and out-dated conception of our own interests?

Either way, as Rohde wrote in a New York Times op-ed back in May, “We should stop thinking we can transform societies overnight…  Nations must transform themselves.  We should scale back our ambitions and concentrate on long-term economics.”  His economic recommendations are accordingly small-scale (sometimes to the level of pathos, as in his enthusiasm for an Egyptian version of ‘The Apprentice’).  Yet his emphasis on entrepreneurship may actually undercut his argument that trying to force Western models on other countries will backfire.  And this is the argument that matters.

Like Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, says Rohde, American officials need to listen rather than try to muscle their way in, whether economically or militarily.  A little respect, that is.   Preach less, listen more.  That may not be much of a “reimagining,” but it’s the really important message of this book.

Just five hours before President Obama announced Sunday night that Bin Laden was dead, instantly capturing the collective mind of the world, there was something else on American television that I wish would capture the world mind just as effectively.   CBS reporter Lara Logan spoke out on the news program ’60 Minutes’ about her extended mass rape in Tahrir Square in the middle of the celebrations on February 11, the night of Mubarak’s resignation.

I’m running the clip here partly in shame, because I was among those whose first reaction was to say “Oh, she’s exaggerating, she was just badly groped.”  That is, I didn’t want to know — not then, not there.  I didn’t want the jubilation of that evening spoiled by such ugly reality.  I was in denial.

Yes, this was rape.  Multiple rape.  Rape aimed at pulling her apart, inside and out.  So first, take 13 minutes and watch this video of her account:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/_g0S6UQem1k]

And if you still question the title of this post, consider these extracts from a New York Times story two days later on Iraqi victims of torture (by the Iraqi army, American forces, Saddam’s thugs, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and various militias):

He described… daily horrors like the suicide of a young prisoner who electrocuted himself with wires from a hot plate after being raped by soldiers.

An 11-year-old girl and her family revealed that she was raped by a group of men who then shaved her head and threw her on a trash heap.

A woman whose husband was an interpreter for the Americans had water and salt thrown on her and was then tied to electrified metal bars.  Then: “They raped her more than once in front of us,” R. said, looking down as he spoke. “She died two or three days later.  There were four guys who raped us….  I was destroyed.  It feels as if something is missing.  I don’t mingle at all with people.”

As Susan Brownmiller made crystal clear in Against Our Will (published in 1975 and, sadly, as essential reading today as it was then), rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction.  It’s brutalization:   the forced domination of another person through their genitalia, whether female or male, 5 years old or 90 years old, close relative or total stranger.  The means of this can be a hand or a penis, a gun or a knife or a broken bottle, a baton or a broomstick or a bathroom plunger (remember Abner Louima?).  Whatever the weapon, the aim is to violently, deliberately, and painfully invade and break another person’s physical and psychological autonomy, will, integrity, humanity.  That is:  torture.

Rape was recognized as a war crime in 1949 (the Fourth Geneva Conventions) and as a crime against humanity in 2001.  Amnesty International has consistently reported on rape as torture: “In every armed conflict investigated by Amnesty International… the torture of women was reported, most often in the form of sexual violence.”  But when rape happens in a dorm room or at a party — even one as large as Tahrir Square on February 11 — we seem less able to recognize it for what it is.  Which is why Amnesty International also reports that in peacetime Europe as elsewhere, victims of rape are consistently denied justice.

This is what we need to get straight in our minds, once and for all:

Whenever rape happens, wherever it happens, and whatever form it takes, it is a crime against humanity.

A crime, that is, against every one of us.

No exultation.  No victorious “mission accomplished.”  No jingoistic “Rah rah, USA USA.”   What a relief that Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States.

While students cheered wildly in front of the White House as though their team had just won a major football game, Obama’s announcement last night was characteristically calm and realistic:

Bin Laden’s death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must –- and we will — remain vigilant at home and abroad.

Obama is clearly aware that the killing of Bin Laden is more a symbolic victory than anything.  “Emblematic” is the word being used.  Al Qaeda is a loose alliance, with no reliance on a single leader.   But the fact that this happened on Obama’s watch and on his orders is a huge shot in the arm for the voices of calm and reason in the United States.  And a brilliantly timed one.  Bin Laden’s death may finally give Obama the respect and authority he merits in Congress, especially since it has to be clear as of last night that he is all but assured of a second presidential term.

We need it.  The US is still reeling from the racist absurdities of the “birther” luantics (how many hours until they start demanding Bin Laden’s “long-form death certificate”?).  It’s still in deep recession.  It’s still enmeshed in Iraq, newly mired in Libya, and floundering in Afghanistan. And, as Steve Coll makes clear on The New Yorker blog, bamboozled in Pakistan, where Bin Laden was hiding out just a thousand feet from a major Pakistani military base, “effectively housed under Pakistani state control.”

So I know this is naive.  I know it’s not going to happen soon.  But really, all I can think right now is this:

Mr President, can we please get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya?

Can we please go home now?

It’s kind of absurd that I should even be writing this post, since I know next to nothing about Libya.  But I’m writing it because I have the uncomfortable impression that those policy-makers who urged the current American and European military intervention in Libya – aka instituting a “no-fly zone” (a strange formulation when it involves so much use of fighter jets) — know very little more than I do.

I hope I’m wrong about this.  But hope isn’t much of a substitute for reason when people’s lives are at stake.

Why Libya?  Apparently because it seems safe.  Everyone in the west can agree that Qaddafi is nuts, that his regime sucks, and – most important from their point of view – that they have nothing to lose by intervening.  No strategically important naval base to protect, as in Bahrain.  No major oil supplier to coddle, as in Saudi Arabia.  No “partner” in the struggle against the elusive Al Qaeda, as in Yemen.  No close military ties, as in Egypt.

I can almost imagine the decision-makers thinking “Finally, a chance to prove that we really are on the side of freedom and democracy and all the things we keep talking about but don’t back up with action.  Phew!”

Of course the last time they did that – barging with heavy firepower and astounding ignorance into a country where it seemed clear who was Good and who was Bad – the result was disastrous.  Iraq is still a mess.  Afghanistan, an even worse mess.   But this time, you see, it will be different.  This time, we’ll do it right.  From the air,.  No feet on the ground.  So what if we don’t even know who’s who in Libya?  They hate Qaddafi;  what more could one ask for?

When I was a dreamy adolescent, I used to think that if I could only go round the world with a six-shooter and assassinate the worst dictators, the world would be a better place.  I spent hours deciding which six I would target (some weird English sense of fair play dictated that I could only have six bullets), until I grew up enough to realize that those I killed in my dreams would only be replaced by others, that this was not a matter of individuals, but of systemic social and political problems way beyond my grasp. (As for “solving” violence by violence, I’m glad to say I quickly grew out of that too.)

Now, in 2011, it seems that powerful nations are acting like that naïve adolescent that I once was, the difference being that their choice of target is determined not by dumb idealism, but by strategic realpolitik.  So sorry, Bahrain – we know you’re right in your demand for democracy, but our hands are tied.  Too bad, Egypt – we know the military has no intention of giving up power, but we need them.  You’re on your own, Yemen – who knows if you mightn’t threaten our good Saudi friends next?

But Libya?  Thank god for Qaddafi.  A chance to prove how good we are, at last…

“I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” someone wrote on this blog a while back, commenting on my agnosticism (actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but I’ll refrain).   And I was a bit shocked by that.  What kind of human being can I claim to be if I don’t believe in anything?  A nihilist?  A god-forsaken creature left to the whims and mercies of fate?    A craven whimpering coward afraid to commit herself?

So in between keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and Yemen and Jordan and Iraq and Iran and oh-my-god Libya, I’ve been haunted by what she said — and have realized that she placed the stress on the wrong word.  It doesn’t belong on the word ‘anything,’ but on the word before it:  ‘in.’

Of course there are things I believe.  I just don’t generally feel the need to believe in them.  I may well believe that such-and-such a thing is true, though in fact this is much the same thing as saying “I think that…” or the more amorphous “I feel that…”  and I’m trying not to be amorphous here.  And in fact there are some things I do believe in, prime among them the possibility of some seemingly impossible form of peace between Israel and Palestine.

If I look at Israel/Palestine rationally right now, I see no way to a peaceful resolution.   So in the lack of empirical evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on belief – that is, on the conviction that peace is possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not being over-idealistic here.   The first step in any thinking about peace is to get rid of all those images of doves fluttering around all over the place and everyone falling on each others’ shoulders in universal brother/sisterhood.  Peace is far more mundane than that.  It’s the absence of war.  It’s people not being killed.  It’s the willingness to live and let live.  And that will do just fine.

There’s no love lost between England and Germany, for instance, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the 20^th century.  There’s less than no love lost between Egypt and Israel – in fact it’s safe to say that for the most part, they detest each other —  but that peace treaty, signed by an Egyptian dictator and an Israeli former terrorist, has lasted three decades.  It’s nobody’s ideal of peace, but however uneasily, it’s held, and will likely hold whatever the changes in Egypt – a frigid kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.

But even thinking in terms of pragmatic, undramatic, boring peace, which once seemed as impossible for England and Germany, and for Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine, I still can’t see it.  Of course this may simply mean that I have a very limited imagination, and so can’t see the forest for the trees.   But to think that something is impossible because I can’t see it is not only an absurd assumption, but also a dangerous one.

What we believe affects how we act.   If we stop believing that Israel/Palestine peace is possible, or even desirable, as the Israeli government seems to have done, then that affects how we act:  we really do make it impossible.  That is, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of unending conflict.   We act in our own worst interests.

I’d rather be naïve than nihilistic.  So in face of the despair that often overtakes me at the latest news from Gaza or from the West Bank, I have to fall back on belief in the possibility of peace, no matter how seemingly irrational.  After all, if it was rational, it wouldn’t require belief.

One definition of despair is in the inability to imagine oneself into the future.  It is, in a very real sense, a failure of the imagination.  So perhaps this is what belief really is:  an act of imagination.   The astonishing human ability to imagine something into existence, and to act in accordance with that imagination.

That’s what we’ve seen these past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain (and maybe even in Libya), and that’s what’s been so inspiring about it:  belief transformed into possibility.   Belief not as faith in the divine, but as faith in the human ability to act and to change the future.   Belief, that is, in ourselves.

A friend rewrote the Obama “end-of-combat-mission-in-Iraq” email we’d both received.   You probably got it too.  Here’s the rewrite:

From Barack Obama:

Lesley —

Seven years ago, the US’s Commander-in-Chief led our country into a stupid and unnecessary war. We tried to beat the shit out of the Iraqis, and the Iraqis tried to beat the shit out of us. We killed many tens of thousands of Iraqis, but only 4500 Americans died, so one might say we kinda won. As we now make our departure from the battlefields, we can look back to see a land well and truly ravaged, more violent and unstable than it was when we first arrived.

As your present Commander in Chief, I am proud to say that we are now dragging our sorry asses off the scene, licking our wounds, and hoping to hell we won’t have to go back.

Hope this reaches you as it leaves me,

Here’s hopin’!

Barack

Here (by way of compare and contrast) is the original Obama email:

Lesley —

Tonight marks the end of the American combat mission in Iraq.

As a candidate for this office, I pledged to end this war responsibly. And, as President, that is what I am doing.

Since I became Commander-in-Chief, we’ve brought home nearly 100,000 U.S. troops. We’ve closed or turned over to Iraq hundreds of our bases.

As Operation Iraqi Freedom ends, our commitment to a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq continues. Under Operation New Dawn, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain to advise and assist Iraqi forces, protect our civilians on the ground, and pursue targeted counterterrorism efforts.

By the end of next year, consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, these men and women, too, will come home.

Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest — it is in our own. Our nation has paid a huge price to put Iraq’s future in the hands of its people. We have sent our men and women in uniform to make enormous sacrifices. We have spent vast resources abroad in the face of several years of recession at home.

We have met our responsibility through the courage and resolve of our women and men in uniform.

In seven years, they confronted a mission as challenging and as complex as any our military has ever been asked to face.

Nearly 1.5 million Americans put their lives on the line. Many returned for multiple tours of duty, far from their loved ones who bore a heroic burden of their own. And most painfully, more than 4,400 Americans have given their lives, fighting for people they never knew, for values that have defined our people for more than two centuries.

What their country asked of them was not small. And what they sacrificed was not easy.

For that, each and every American owes them our heartfelt thanks.

Our promise to them — to each woman or man who has donned our colors — is that our country will serve them as faithfully as they have served us. We have already made the largest increase in funding for veterans in decades. So long as I am President, I will do whatever it takes to fulfill that sacred trust.

Tonight, we mark a milestone in our nation’s history. Even at a time of great uncertainty for so many Americans, this day and our brave troops remind us that our future is in our own hands and that our best days lie ahead.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

Ten at night on July Fourth, and the gunship helicopter comes in low over Seattle’s Lake Union, the prelude to the fireworks show.  A giant Stars and Stripes hangs from it as it parades slowly around the lake, an ominous matte-black presence made all the more threatening by the music blaring from the loudspeakers at the north end of the lake.  That music was chosen by someone who was either cinematically ignorant or had zero sense of irony, because until last year, it was Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ — the same music that accompanies the long tracking shot of gunship helicopters flying off to napalm the hell out of a Vietnamese village in perhaps the best war movie ever made:

Even in liberal Seattle, nobody seems to question why an attack helicopter is considered a suitable means of displaying the flag.   National independence is  easily militarized, since it is often — far too often — achieved at the cost of war.   “Blood and treasure” is the current phrase for this cost, and a particularly abhorrent one, not least because it seems to imply that blood is not treasured.   We are now past the 1,000 mark for US dead in Afghanistan, and approaching the 5,000 mark in Iraq (nobody keeps precise tallies of the far greater fatalities of Afghanis and Iraqis, said to be anywhere from “tens of thousands,” as though an extra ten thousand here and there makes no difference, to close to 200,000).   So this year, when the gunship flies around the lake, albeit sans the Valkyries (did irony finally hit? or did someone catch up on their Netflix queue?),  the sight and sound of that massive metal weapon looming and booming over my houseboat will again make me feel not pride in my American citizenship, but anxiety.   And not just because of the association with ‘Apocalypse Now.’

That gunship makes me see the fireworks differently.  I still go ‘Wow,’ but there’s no innocence in it.   Instead, I remember how people watching TV went ‘Wow’ as ordnance arced over the night skies of Baghdad in 2003, or how they tuned in to the cameras in the nose-cones of those peculiarly imprecise ‘precision’ missiles in the Kuwait war, as though the light and sound effects had nothing to do with real lives, real blood, real bones pulverized into the dust.    The fireworks, I realize, are non-lethal versions of that lethal ordnance, the utterly literal illustration of the national anthem:   “The rockets’ red glare/ The bombs bursting in air/ Gave proof through the night/ That our flag was still there.”

But how strange that rockets and bombs are needed to prove independence.   The insecurity behind those lines from the anthem is clear, which may be part of why we’re now mired deeper than ever in Afghanistan.  Two hundred and thirty-four years have passed, yet even in Seattle, we still need to send in the gunships.