|
 uwait
has become a metaphor for the growing divide between the United
States and the Islamic world — one that is fundamental and
cannot be so easily resolved by shaking hands, holding conferences,
and promising to "just to get along."
A recent 60
Minutes report by Mike Wallace of grassroots popular expression
there brought a flood of official disavowals from the kingdom. On
film, dozens of Western-educated, yuppified Kuwaitis smugly expressed
outright enmity for the United States — making past reports
somewhat more understandable that infants born last year in the
kingdom were named after bin Laden and that a vast majority opposes
our efforts in Afghanistan. Those who were educated over here seemed
to be the most virulently anti-American.
The facts of
September 11 made no impression whatsoever — either of remorse
or of fear that most of the killers were Arabs from the Gulf and
so might invite American reprisals. Listening to the Kuwaiti anger
you would think that 19 Americans had blown up 3,000 Muslims in
Mecca and Medina, along with 20 acres of the downtown, while in
the immediate aftermath the American government had lectured the
grieving Gulf States about their improper policies concerning Israel
— rather than vice versa.
Of course,
the Kuwaiti sheikdom, which likes to be defended, ship its oil over
safe waters, be paid in a calm and lawful market, and send its elites
overseas — immediately issued a series of denials and corrections.
The monarchy no doubt must now turn to the usual meretricious public-relations
firms in Washington for damage control. Glib Western-educated bureaucrats
are already seeking to "correct" on television a "false"
impression of Kuwait.
Yet the more
disinterested Gallup poll of Middle-Easterners apparently reveals
that roughly three-quarters of Kuwaitis (72%) do not much like the
United States. Nearly as many Middle Easterners in general (61%)
subscribe to the lunatic view that Arab terrorists were not
responsible for the murders of Sept. 11. In other words, a more
systematic appraisal of Kuwaiti public opinion confirms the anecdotes
we hear on television and read in the media. Indeed, after fielding
questions the last six months on radio and in public fora from Middle
Easterners in the United States, I was surprised only that nearly
a third of those polled in some countries actually expressed any
admiration at all for the United States.
What can we
learn from the baffling stance of the Kuwaitis? First, the past
conduct of the United States counts for nothing in the present crisis.
For months Americans have been amazed that Muslims showed so little
appreciation that we helped save Islam from the Russians, fed starving
Somalians, and prevented Kosovars from being annihilated. We were
damned by Russians, Armenians, many eastern Europeans, and Orthodox
Balkan peoples for ousting Milosevic by force and attacking a Christian
European country — but oddly, never praised by the Islamic
world for saving Muslims and therein incurring such wrath from our
natural allies and friends. In this regard, it is not our duty "to
get the message out," but rather the Kuwaitis' to admit the
truth of the past; it is not our problem to assuage their hurt,
but their very real need to lessen our anger that is rising, not
diminishing, each day since Sept. 11.
So the case
of Kuwait is an example of ungratefulness of a completely different
magnitude — one that puts the French of the late 1940s to shame.
Quite simply, by autumn 1990 Kuwait had ceased to exist. Invaded
and conquered by Iraq in a matter of hours, it was already annexed
by Saddam Hussein as a "province" of Iraq. Exiled Kuwaitis
of the royal family, who ran from Saddam's tanks, still managed
to fly over here to swarm Washington for nearly six months. They
immediately began imploring Americans not to give up on them. We
were to spend our blood to do what they themselves either could
not or would not. Horrific stories of gratuitous Iraqi butchery
were staples of congressional committees and the evening news —
as we Americans were asked to become allies with an autocratic Islamic
state to save it from another Arab dictatorship. In late 1990 purported
notions of pan-Arabism, common Islamic brotherhood, and regional
solidarity didn't seem to matter much to the Kuwaitis — when
the neighborhood viper had slithered in to swallow their country
whole.
No Arab state
or European nation took the initiative in freeing the Kuwaitis.
American servicemen spearheaded their emancipation — and then
graciously allowed a token armored column of Kuwaitis to enter their
homeland first to "liberate" their enslaved population.
If few had seen the Kuwaiti princes scamper out of town when the
Iraqis came, the world now witnessed on television their staged
triumphant return. Somewhere in between the two events was the intervention
of the Americans.
What can we
learn from this ungracious about-face? Again, the answer surely
is not that we must mediate more, "work harder" on public
relations, or learn more about Kuwait. What we know about it is
already depressing enough. Since there is not a single democracy
or free media in the Arab Middle East, there is almost no chance
that religious figures, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and
average people can debate honestly the growing contradictions between
Islam and the modern world — or Islam's need for Western expertise
and the ensuing resentment that such dependency apparently incurs.
Instead the success and power of the United States — and to
a lesser extent of Israel — in Pavlovian outbursts become the
cheap targets when venting Middle-Eastern frustration at internal
economic failure, religious hypocrisy, government autocracy, and
endemic cultural contradiction, whether in an impoverished Egypt
or the affluent Gulf.
If saving an
entire people from extinction earns less than a decade's worth of
appreciation, then nothing we do in the future will matter much
either. In the same manner, we should assume that the billions of
dollars that go to Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine to help "moderates"
bring not thanks for our largess, but rather contempt for our naiveté.
It would be far more intellectually honest — and cheaper —
simply now to allow them all to be the enemies that they wish to
be rather than the friends they do not.
Second, a common
theme of the Kuwaiti displeasure toward us is apparently the murderous
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can put aside all the thorny issues
involving the West Bank and focus on just one event. In 1990 Mr.
Arafat, with apparent support from the Palestinian people, and seconded
by the monarchy in Jordan, quite vocally backed the Iraqi destruction
of Kuwait. As I recall, Arafat was captured on television kissing
Mr. Hussein after the latter's dismemberment of Kuwait. In other
words, the very peoples that the Kuwaitis now express solidarity
with just a few years ago were celebrating their own demise.
Nor should
we forget that in turn, upon liberation of Kuwait, many Palestinians
were forcibly evicted from the entire sheikdom. So let us pause
for a moment and sort out the astounding facts and zany logic of
Iraqis kicking out Kuwaitis kicking out Palestinians: (1) we intervened
in the Gulf to save the Kuwaiti nation from serfdom; (2) whereas
the Palestinians cheered on news that Kuwait was dissolved; (3)
and the Kuwaitis now express dislike toward America over our own
purported lack of sympathy for the Palestinian people! We give over
100 million dollars a year to Mr. Arafat. We ignore reports that
Palestinians were cheering on news of 3,000 murdered Americans.
And we welcome Palestinian students to our shores. In contrast,
the Kuwaitis once ethnically cleansed their country of Palestinians
— and the Kuwaitis now express hatred toward America over our
treatment of Palestine!
But besides
ingratitude and hypocrisy, there is also the larger and more metaphysical
issue of Westernization that explains Middle-Eastern schizophrenia
— the third rail upon which neither our own Arabists nor Middle
Eastern "moderates" dare tread. Kuwait possesses no indigenous
tradition of consensual government, religious tolerance and diversity,
secular rationalism, free speech and open debate, or class and gender
equality — in other words, the entire cargo necessary for a
humane and technically sophisticated culture.
It is a tribal
society that exists under the veneer of a modern nation simply because
of two facts: oil and the Western expertise and learning it buys.
Its oil wells were created by the West. They were blown up by its
Arab neighbor. And then they were restored — along with the
surrounding environmental mess — through Western protocol and
machines. Everything that works in Kuwait and so separates it from
a Cairo or Islamabad is due to oil-generated Westernism — from
its skyline and its power-grid to its automobiles and foreign-educated
elite. Its sophisticated weapons that once proved so useless when
the Iraqis crossed the border were impotent not because of their
American designs and fabrication, but simply because there were
Kuwaitis, not Americans, using them.
At some point,
such a stark paradox might prompt Kuwaiti introspection and contemplation
about Westernization — rather than such infantile resentment.
A mature people would implement a true democracy, create a secular
and independent judiciary, and institute a free press as part of
a national discussion on the advantages and perils of modernism
in a traditional society. Instead, once again as in the case of
the terrorists who incinerated our citizens on Sept. 11, murdered
Danny Pearl, and are planning more mayhem for us all, public opinion
in Kuwait confirms that the root of anti-Americanism is not poverty
(they are rich), not exploitation (they do not give oil away), not
past grievance (we saved them), not purported solidarity with the
Palestinians (whom they ejected), but a basic sense of umbrage and
accompanying envy that grows with greater exposure to the West.
The more the
Kuwaitis and their neighbors learn of and copy us, the more they
understand that what they desire for their own only others can create;
and that their new Westernized appetites grow faster than their
old rules can repress them. Because emotions such as jealousy and
self-absorption at their most basic are puerile, and entirely explicable
without help from Marx, Freud, Foucault, or Edward Said, there is
a tendency among elites in Washington and New York — quite
dangerous to my mind — to dismiss them, and instead construct
all sorts of other hypothetical and more sophisticated grievances.
That would be a grave mistake. The answer to Kuwait is not apology
for who we are, withdrawal of our support for Israel, or more obsequious
requests for their bases and mutual defense ties.
No, the solution
for our fickle friends in the Gulf is a long overdue accounting
with the terrorist autocracy of Iraq and the implementation of consensual
government in its place. We saved Kuwait once from Iraqi fascism
and apparently received ingratitude for our efforts. Perhaps next
time we should encourage a new and free Iraq to ignite a chain reaction
of democratic revolution in the Gulf — and let the sheiks deal
with reformers who seek not to take their oil, but to oust them
altogether.
These are grim
times when our very best Americans are dying in Afghanistan to stop
Islamic fundamentalists from vaporizing thousands more of our innocent
civilians. It is not the hour to mince words, back-peddle, or pretend
about a Middle East that presently does not exist. Courting Kuwait
in the present crisis would be like hosting Franco in Washington,
D.C. during December 1941. We really are in a war about which our
President has said that you are either for us or against us. What
we are learning from the Kuwait people is that they prefer the latter.
So for once let us just listen to their wishes — and let the
chips in the ensuing months fall as they may.
|
