Truth and Consequences

After watching GWB’s press conference, I decided to go work out my frustration and weed the garden. As I worked, the stupid little phrases spoken by Our Dear Leader kept popping into my head. “Stay the course”, “Mission Accomplished”, “Bring it on”, etc. Then I got to “They hate us for our freedom”. I kept turning that over in my head, trying to pinpoint which freedoms “they” find so offensive. The rights to bears arms, one man one vote, free speech – nothing really stood out.

Then it struck me, that insidious little phrase really means nothing. It is just a convenient response to the question of why so much of the Muslim world dislikes us so intensely without having to actually dig into the issue. The idiom absolves us of having to question American policy decisions that affect the Arab and Muslim world so profoundly. We are free – they hate us for it. Simple.

The genuine reason why they hate us is our policies and their inherent hypocrisy. When we spend billions a year propping up corrupt and anti-democratic regimes such as Iran under the Shah, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, why in the hell would they believe any of this talk about freedom in Iraq? When we condemn from the rooftops suicide bombings by Hamas but not decry with equal fervor the Israeli bombing of a civilian power station in Gaza, how can trust us to be fair-minded in trying to resolve that conflict?

In short, they can’t and they won’t. Take our old buddy Osama. Bin Laden’s militancy originally grew out of a hatred for the Saudi regime. While he never liked the US, his focus, initially, was to bring down the house of Saud; a government that he viewed as decadent and crooked. That focus shifted to the US during the first Gulf War as we poured massive numbers of troops into the Arabian Peninsula with the long term goal of maintaining permanent bases there. In his eyes, we were infidels occupying the Muslim holy land. That policy created the pretext for the first World Trade Center bombing and the rest is history. Here was a guy that spent the previous decade killing Russians (with our help) after they invaded Afghanistan. How do you think he was going to deal with a situation where we use our military to defend a government in his home country that he found illegitimate? It is not our freedoms people; it is the choices that we, as a nation, make.

Now I know there are some geopolitical realities that prevent us from giving a full-throated condemnation of Saudi Arabia. For all intents and purposes, they have us over an oil barrel. Pressing Egypt to have a free and fair election might very well bring the extremists into power. The same goes for Pakistan. So the big question is where do we go from here? Do we push repressive nations to be more democratic and gamble on the outcome or maintain the status quo and hope things work out? Is there another option? I am not sure. But we need to be more honest about the situation and how we got here. Otherwise, we will never be able to get beyond meaningless platitudes. I don’t advocate making policy decisions based solely on how they are going to be viewed in the Muslim world. We should not be surprised, however, when these choices bite us in the ass.

(Sidebar: I am a big supporter of Israel. They have been something of a fair weather friend to the US but I firmly believe that the state of Israel is necessary. I do not believe, however, that we should sit idly by when they do something as horrible as destroying a power plant in the middle of the summer in one of the most overpopulated places on the planet. It is not going to take much to push Gaza into a full scale humanitarian disaster. Without power, there is no potable water and no functioning sewer system. Cholera is a very real possibility. Go read Wolcott for the summary of the situation. I don’t agree with everything he has written but he is a helluva lot smarter than I am.)