World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [119]
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Many of us tend to think of the Arab-Israeli conflict as being so ancient in its roots that it is impervious to the forces of modernity. In truth, the problem is worse. Given the current realities, the principal forces of modernization—markets and majoritarian politics—are fuel to the fires of ethnic conflict in the Middle East. While free market democracy may well be the optimal end point in the Middle East, the simultaneous pursuit today of laissez-faire markets and immediate majority rule would almost certainly produce even more government-sponsored bloodshed and ethnic warfare.
CHAPTER 11
Why They Hate Us
America as a Global Market-Dominant Minority
I found myself in the middle of an argument the other evening, one of many I’ve been in since September 11, 2001. An outspoken Chinese friend of mine, Mei Lan—born and raised in China but about to become an American citizen, having just married a native New Yorker—asserted at a Manhattan dinner party that 99 percent of all Chinese in China were happy about the attack on America. This prompted an outcry among the American guests. “Ninety-nine?” someone asked incredulously. “What pollster produced that statistic?” To which Mei Lan replied, “Let’s not get hung up on numbers. Face it, deal with it—Americans are hated.”
“People like you spreading misinformation, Mei Lan, are exactly the problem,” another guest heatedly interjected. He had visited China the previous summer. The Chinese were nice people, he explained, who didn’t always agree with American policies but who certainly didn’t hate us and in fact wanted to learn from us. Another guest, an international lawyer, agreed, and described all the sympathetic e-mails he had received from Hong Kong and Shanghai after September 11.
Mei Lan then brought up the topic of American hypocrisy about human rights, and the conversation further deteriorated after that.
In the aftermath of September 11, many Americans have experienced some version of this conversation, debating the extent of anti-Americanism throughout the world. A common problem is the tendency to generalize from an n of 2 or 3. “I got e-mails from my friends in Mexico and Chile. Anti-Americanism in Latin America is wildly exaggerated.” Or: “My Palestinian friend e-mailed me expressing horror about the World Trade Center. The U.S. media presents a totally distorted picture of anti-Americanism over there.”
Of course not all of the Middle East hates us. Nor does 99 percent of China hate us. The non-Western world is far from monolithic in its attitudes toward America; generalizations on this subject are especially perilous. Nevertheless, it is sadly untrue that Americans are loved and admired around the world. The existence of some anti-American resentment and objections to U.S. foreign policy was apparent to anyone who traveled outside the United States in recent years. But the depth and passion of anti-American hatred that was revealed on September 11 was a profound, nationwide shock.
“Once there was a time when the most evil people on earth were ashamed to write their crime across the heavens,” writes Neal Ascherson. This was not so of September 11, 2001. “Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column,