Posted on 9/24/2012
By PANKAJ MISHRA* – The New York Times
THE murder of four Americans in Libya and
mob assaults on the United States’ embassies across the Muslim world this month
have reminded many of 1979, when radical Islamists seized the American mission
in Tehran. There, too, extremists running wild after the fall of a pro-American
tyrant had found a cheap way of empowering themselves.
But the obsession with radical Islam misses a more meaningful
analogy for the current state of siege in the Middle East and Afghanistan: the
helicopters hovering above the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975
as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city.
That hasty departure ended America’s long and costly involvement
in Indochina, which, like the Middle East today, the United States had
inherited from defunct European empires. Of course, Southeast Asia had no
natural resources to tempt the United States and no ally like Israel to defend.
But it appeared to be at the front line of the worldwide battle against
Communism, and American policy makers had unsuccessfully tried both proxy
despots and military firepower to make the locals advance their strategic
interests.
The violent protests provoked by the film “Innocence of Muslims”
will soon subside, and American embassies will return to normal business. But
the symbolic import of the violence, which included a Taliban assault on one of
the most highly secured American bases in Afghanistan, is unmistakable. The
drama of waning American power is being re-enacted in the Middle East and South
Asia after two futile wars and the collapse or weakening of pro-American
regimes.
In Afghanistan, local soldiers and policemen have killed their
Western trainers, and demonstrations have erupted there and in Pakistan against
American drone strikes and reported desecration of the Koran. Amazingly, this
surge in historically rooted hatred and distrust of powerful Western invaders,
meddlers and remote controllers has come yet again as a shock to many American
policy makers and commentators, who have promptly retreated into a lazy “they
hate our freedoms” narrative.
It is as though the United States, lulled by such ideological
foils as Nazism and Communism into an exalted notion of its moral power and
mission, missed the central event of the 20th century: the steady, and often
violent, political awakening of peoples who had been exposed for decades to the
sharp edges of Western power. This strange oversight explains why American
policy makers kept missing their chances for peaceful post-imperial settlements
in Asia.
As early as 1919, Ho Chi Minh, dressed in a morning suit and
armed with quotations from the Declaration of Independence, had tried to
petition President Woodrow Wilson for an end to French rule over Indochina. Ho
did not get anywhere with Wilson. Indian, Egyptian, Iranian and Turkish
nationalists hoping for the liberal internationalist president to promulgate a
new “morality” in global affairs were similarly disappointed.
None of these anti-imperialists would have bothered if they had
known that Wilson, a Southerner fond of jokes about “darkies,” believed in
maintaining “white civilization and its domination over the world.” Franklin D.
Roosevelt was only slightly more conciliatory when, in 1940, he proposed
mollifying dispossessed Palestinian Arabs with a “little baksheesh.”
Roosevelt changed his mind after meeting the Saudi leader Ibn
Saud and learning of oil’s importance to the postwar American economy. But the
cold war, and America’s obsession with the chimera of monolithic Communism,
again obscured the unstoppable momentum of decolonization, which was fueled by
an intense desire among humiliated peoples for equality and dignity in a world
controlled by a small minority of white men.
Ho Chi Minh’s post-World War II appeals for assistance to
another American president — Harry S. Truman — again went unanswered. But many
people in Asia saw that it was only a matter of time before the Vietnamese
ended foreign domination of their country.
For the world had entered a new “revolutionary age,” as the
American critic Irving Howe wrote in 1954, in which the intense longing for
change among millions of politicized people in Asia was the dominant force.
“Whoever gains control of them,” Howe warned, “whether in legitimate or
distorted forms, will triumph.” This mass longing for political transformation
was repressed longer by cold war despotism in the Arab world; it has now
exploded, profoundly damaging America’s ability to dictate events there.
Given its long history of complicity with dictators in the
region, from the shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak, the United
States faces a huge deficit of trust. The belief that this deep-seated
suspicion can be overcome by a few soothing presidential speeches betrays only
more condescending ignorance of the so-called Arab mind, which until recently
was believed to be receptive only to brute force.
It is not just extremist Salafis who think Americans always have
malevolent intentions: the Egyptian anti-Islamist demonstrators who pelted
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s motorcade in Alexandria with rotten eggs in July were
convinced that America was making shady deals with the Muslim Brotherhood. And
few people in the Muslim world have missed the Israeli prime minister’s blatant
manipulation of American politics for the sake of a pre-emptive assault on
Iran.
There is little doubt that years of disorder lie ahead in the
Middle East as different factions try to gain control. The murder of Ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens in Libya, the one American success story of the Arab
Spring, is an early sign of the chaos to come; it also points to the
unpredictable consequences likely to follow any Western intervention in Syria —
or Iran.
As in Southeast Asia in 1975, the limits of both American
firepower and diplomacy have been exposed. Financial leverage, or baksheesh,
can work only up to a point with leaders struggling to control the
bewilderingly diverse and ferocious energies unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Although it’s politically unpalatable to mention it during an
election campaign, the case for a strategic American retreat from the Middle
East and Afghanistan has rarely been more compelling. It’s especially strong as
growing energy independence reduces America’s burden for policing the region,
and it’s supposed ally, Israel, shows alarming signs of turning into a loose
cannon.
All will not be lost if America scales back its politically
volatile presence in the Muslim world. It could one day return, as it has with
its former enemy, Vietnam, to a relationship of mutually assured dignity.
(Although the recent military buildup in the Pacific — part of the Obama
administration’s “pivot to Asia” — hints at fresh over-estimations of American
power in that region.)
Republicans calling for President Obama to “grow” a “big stick”
seem to think they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt. Liberal
internationalists arguing for even deeper American engagement with the Middle
East inhabit a similar time warp; and both have an exaggerated idea of
America’s financial clout after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.
It is the world’s newly ascendant nations and awakened peoples
that will increasingly shape events in the post-Western era. America’s
retrenchment is inevitable. The only question is whether it will be as
protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly
assertive Asia and Africa. September 23, 2012
*Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The
Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.”
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