World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [152]
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And what about the United States? What should the world’s market-dominant minority do about the growing anti-Americanism around the globe? Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jared Diamond recently offered one answer, much along the lines of what I have proposed for other market-dominant minorities. In an essay entitled, “Why We Must Feed the Hands That Could Bite Us,” Diamond urges Americans to combat the forces of poverty and hopelessness on which international terrorism feeds through three basic strategies: providing health care, supporting family planning, and addressing chronic environmental problems such as deforestation that infuriate local populations. Diamond recognizes that these measures will not eliminate the immediate threat of terrorism. But as he points out, the “few active terrorists [who carried out the September 11 attacks] depended on many more people, including desperate populations who have tolerated, harbored and even taken part in terrorist activities. When people can’t solve their own problems, they strike out irrationally, seeking foreign scapegoats, or collapsing in civil war over limited resources. By bettering conditions overseas, we can reduce chronic future threats to ourselves.”
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Other influential figures have taken a similar position. Not long after September 11, 2001, World Bank president James Wolfensohn joined the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and British chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, in calling for a $50 billion increase in foreign aid to poor countries, calling it “an insurance policy against future terrorism.” Similarly, former U.S. treasury secretary Robert Rubin has called for an international campaign to raise public support for increased aid budgets, particularly in the United States.
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Not surprisingly, the “more foreign aid” view has its acerbic critics, both from the left and the right. Gregory Clark, for example, a commentator for the Japan Times, mocks the liberal notion that addressing poverty will solve the problem of terrorism. “If people in the Third World want to use force against their governments or the West, that is because of perceived injustice. Large outpourings of aid will just add to the long history of aid waste and corruption.” In Clark’s view, terrorist attacks will continue as long as the United States continues its overseas “meddling” and its hypocritical support of oppressive regimes.
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Similarly, but for vastly different reasons, Daniel Pipes argues that U.S. foreign aid is not the right response to the September 11 attacks. In an essay called “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?,” Pipes answers his own question with a vociferous no. “Indeed,” writes Pipes, “if one turns away from the commentators on militant Islam and instead listens to the Islamists themselves, it quickly becomes apparent that they rarely talk about prosperity. As Ayatollah Khomeini memorably put it, ‘We did not create a revolution to lower the price of melon.’” In Pipes’ view, militant Islam is ultimately about a struggle for power. Thus, “economic assets for Islamists represent not the good life but added strength to do battle against the West.”
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Clark, Pipes, and many others are obviously right that anti-Americanism, including the particularly virulent Islamicist strain, stems from much more than just economic deprivation. Moreover, it is fantasy to think that U.S. monetary assistance might be able to do anything more than make a small dent in eliminating world poverty, at least in the near future. In my opinion, however, the wisdom of recent calls for American beneficence lies in their potentially far-reaching symbolism. Rightly or wrongly, for millions around the world, the World Trade Center symbolized greed, exploitation, indifference, and cultural humiliation. (John Cassidy recently observed that, relative to the size of our economy, the United States has the smallest aid budget of any advanced country: around 0.1 percent