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.

Unless you have the misfortune to live under their flight paths, it’s easy to push drones to the back of your mind.  That’s what’s so perfect from a US military point of view:  remote-control warfare, with the emphasis on ‘remote.’  See no evil, know no evil. What does an operator sitting in a bunker in Nevada know of what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan?

What do you?

While you might have registered the fact that US drone use in Pakistan quintupled in the Obama years from the Bush years, you’ve probably avoided dwelling on it.  You almost certainly haven’t thought through the personal and political havoc these drones are wreaking.  And you probably don’t want to even consider reading Living Under Drones, a 165-page report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Center at Stanford and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU (that mouthful of authorship is off-putting enough).

Enter Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani writer whose deliciously wicked novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist touched the raw edge of western anxiety, and whose newly published satire How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is a well-deserved best-seller.  Hamid has the novelist’s ability to bring you inside experience that otherwise remains… remote.  So it was a savvy move when the New York Review of Books asked him to review the Stanford/NYU report, even if they then published his piece under the almost perversely understated headline ‘Why Drones Don’t Help.’  If you don’t read the report itself (there’s a summary here, and the full report is downloadable), at least read Hamid’s review of it.

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is any misconception that the drone strikes are primarily counter-terrorist in nature, aimed at key leaders of international terror networks, this can be dispensed with [….]  The elimination of ‘high-value’ targets — al-Qaeda or ‘militant’ leaders — has been exceedingly rare:  fewer than 50 people, or about 2% of all drone deaths.  Rather, ‘low-level insurgents’ have been the main targets [….]

In the media, the term ‘militant’ is often used in describing drone casualties.  The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people.  A ‘militant’ who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a ‘militant’ who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat top his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the ‘current administration’s apparent definition’ holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed.

In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant.  Your death in a drone strike is all the proof that’s needed of your guilt, and thus of the right to have killed you.

Neither Orwell nor Kafka could have dreamed up better.

Hamid continues:

This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are ‘extremely rare’ or have been in ‘single digits’ since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children.

This includes so-called ‘signature strikes’ which attack unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise “behaving like militants” as well as people trying to bring aid to injured victims of strikes.

Hamid goes on to look closer at the harrowing experience of those affected, and at the widespread Pakistani revulsion at the use of drones.  And with the US now intensifying its drone campaign elsewhere, as in Yemen, he cogently makes the case that their use only weakens already weak governments and thus severely undermines America’s own foreign-policy interests.

In other words, this isn’t counter-terrorist; it’s counter-effective.  What’s touted as “clean” technology (for the man in the bunker) is in fact as dirty as ever.  And the depressing conclusion is that the Obama administration is as stuck as its predecessor in the self-defeating meme of a military “war on terrorism.”

Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.

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?

I’ve been asked what I’d do about the crackpot pastor Terry Jones, the Quran-burning Florida redneck who keeps a poster of Mel Gibson’s ‘Braveheart’ in his office for “spiritual sustenance.” It would be wonderful to just laugh, but last week Jones’ idiocy set off the reciprocal idiocy of riots in Afghanistan that have so far resulted in at least 24 deaths (in addition to the 5 he caused last September when he first threatened to burn the Quran).  It’s a horrendous example of how prejudice feeds prejudice and ignorance feeds ignorance — with the food being other people’s blood.

If ever you wanted proof that extremists of all faiths are the real co-religionists, this was it.   Terry Jones meet your soul brothers:  the Taliban.

What actually happened?  The publicity-hungry Jones, whose entire church consists of some twenty family members, was encouraged to hold a mock trial of the Quran by Ahmed Abaza, a former Muslim who runs a deliriously amateurish satellite channel called TheTruthTV — that tell-tale capitalized Truth yet again.   (Abaza’s testimony to his conversion to “the light of Christ,” apparently intended as heart-rending, is here, if you can stand it).  Abaza obligingly live-streamed the trial proceedings,  and then (the verdict being a foregone conclusion) Jones carried out his heart’s desire, got out a can of firelighter fluid, and burned a copy.

The American media acted with uncharacteristic wisdom and ignored the event.  All might yet have been calm if word of the burning had not reached Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardawi and Afghanistan president Hamid Kharzai, who then tried to outdo each other in condemning it — an excellent way to distract attention from the real problems in their respective countries, especially at a time when both are highly aware that the call for regime change throughout the Middle East might spread to threaten their hold on power too.  Three fire-and-brimstone mullahs took up the call the next day at Friday prayer, inciting an anti-American mob out for blood, and UN workers paid the price.

So what would I do?   Well, as you can imagine, my fantasies at first tended to my own version of violent retribution, but then my better side took over.  So here’s my proposal, courtesy of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play Huis Clos (No Exit) is starkly simple in conception:  three people locked together in a bare room, slowly realizing that where they are is hell.  As they tear each other apart with words, they conclude, in the play’s most famous line, that “hell is other people.”

Jones, Karzai, and Zardawi locked together for eternity, condemned to listen to each other’s vanity and bombast?  That might not be the perfect punishment, but it’s a damned good one.

—————

[The only question:  should Jones be allowed to take his ‘Braveheart’ poster into the room with him?  For the sake of ensuring Karzai and Zardawi’s ongoing torment, I’d have to vote yes.]

A stand-up comedian’s take on the Roy Orbison oldie ‘Pretty Woman’ is the latest salvo in the burqa wars.  The video of Saad Haroon performing ‘Burqa Woman’ seems to have gotten a lot of Pakistanis all riled up, both for and against, with everyone reading into it whatever they already believe.

You’d think that with issues like nuclear weapons, the Taliban, and government corruption, Pakistan might have a few other things to worry about right now.  But the burqa is always a reliable way to distract attention and make everyone feel righteous.

The comments on YouTube are way over the top.  That’s nothing new, of course, but it’s disturbing to scroll through and see the preponderance of deep pious offense on the one side (one commenter even calls for Haroon to be stoned to death, for Christ’s sake), and a kind of schoolyard ‘yah-boo-take-that-you-Muslims’ Islamophobia on the other.

In fact if ‘Burqa Woman’ is satire, it seems to me a pretty mild form.  Cheeky would be a better word for it —  the kind of fond teasing a younger brother might deploy against an older sister.  True, if you want to get analytical about it, phrases like “sexy ninja” and “mystery prize” reflect a kind of contemporary Orientalism — the erotics of the mysterious hidden East.  And lines like “show me your left nostril” or “flirting with my living-room curtain” are kind of tasteless (though the veil did begin as a curtain hung in order to give Muhammad’s wives some degree of privacy).  But nobody seems to be getting analytical about this.   All we have so far is a slew of kneejerk responses.

But then what else could there be when the burqa has been so highly politicized?  With new burqa bans in Europe and elsewhere, the burqa has served as a convenient whipping boy (or should that be whipping girl?),  with right-wing politicians manipulating left-wing feminists into joining hands in righteous indignation.

I’ve been a feminist for four decades now, and I know when my feminism is being manipulated.  I’ve no desire to ‘defend the burqa.’  I find it as objectionable as any other form of religious ‘hiding’ of women like Orthodox Jewish women’s wigs or Catholic nuns’ coifs — any religious rule that focuses on women’s sexuality under the guise of ‘protecting them’ from the stereotypically ravenous male eye.  Such rules honor neither women nor men — nor religion itself.

But why single out the burqa?  Why not criticize the Catholic or fundamentalist Christian attitude toward women with the same passion as directed against the Wahhabi or fundamentalist Islamic one?  And why use the burqa issue at all when the vast majority of Muslim women would never dream of putting one on?

I’m looking forward to seeing what the dynamite writers over at altmuslimah have to say about this musical storm in a teacup.  Meanwhile:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkVl_7N-m3I]

Give a thousand Pulitzers to WikiLeaks — one for every American death so far in Afghanistan.   Their securing and release of  92,000 reports from inside the US military, spanning six years, is the largest ever of secret documents from an ongoing war.  And it’s a devastating confirmation of everything we already knew was wrong with this war.

I realize this is counter-intuitive for online readers, but it’s worth getting a hard copy of today’s New York Times (or The Guardian, or Der Spiegel, the three publications that co-released the secret cache together with WikiLeaks ) just to start to make sense of these tens of thousands of messages, many of them sent in the field and under fire, minute by minute, by US military in Afghanistan.   The NYT spends half the front page and five full inside pages quoting and analyzing them, in acknowledgment of their scope and potential effect on the course of the war.

Here’s Julian Assange, founder of London-based WikiLeaks, in an interview with Der Spiegel:

These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war — in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars. […]

This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence.

Self-promotion?  Sure.  But also correct.  Like many other pundits, Andrew Sullivan gripes over on The Daily Dish that the secret reports give us little information we didn’t have before, but he underestimates the vivid power of the horse’s mouth.   There is information and then there is real knowledge.  Read the desperate messages sent under fire, the laconic accounts of civilians killed by mistake. the reports of Pakistani intelligence leaders working with the Taliban, and you’ll see for yourself why the White House, so bafflingly committed to this absurd war, is in red-hot fury.

Above all, enormous credit to whoever gave this enormous cache of documentation to WikiLeaks.   This is clearly someone inside the US military, and there’s doubtless a major witch-hunt on now for him or her — to the same old tune of “blame the messenger.”   If whoever it is needs shelter, my home is open.