From Husain Haqqani’s “Why Muslims always blame the West“, International Herald Tribune, October 16, 2004:

“The Palestinian issue and the pre-emptive war in Iraq have undoubtedly accentuated anti-Western sentiment among Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. But the conduct and rhetoric of Muslim leaders and their failure to address the stagnation of their societies has also fueled the tensions between Islam and the West. Relations between Muslims and the West will continue to deteriorate unless the internal crisis of the Muslim world is also addressed.

“…Instead of hard analysis, which thrives only in a free society, Muslims are generally brought up on propaganda, which is often state-sponsored. This propaganda usually focuses on Muslim humiliation at the hands of others instead of acknowledging the flaws of Muslim leaders and societies. The focus on external enemies causes Muslims to admire power rather than ideas. Warriors, and not scholars or inventors, are generally the heroes of common people. In this simplistic “us vs. them” worldview, both Musharraf and bin Laden are warriors against external enemies.

“…Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. …The Muslim cult of the warrior explains also the relatively muted response in the Muslim world to atrocities committed by fellow Muslims.

“While the Muslim world’s obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to “restore” Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply. …Ironically, Western governments have consistently tried to deal with one manifestation of the cult of the warrior - terrorism - by building up Muslim strongmen who are just another manifestation of the same phenomenon.”

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“The Islamic doctrine of apostasy is hardly favorable to free inquiry or frank discussion, to say the least, and surely it explains why no Muslim, or former Muslim, in an Islamic society would dare to suggest that the Qu

“There’s a sort of corrupted idealism about the insanely innocent Wolfowitz plan for the Middle East, the domino theory in reverse, the spreading of democracy like a germ across the Middle East. Just invade Iraq, lop off the monster’s head, and the people of Iraq will want to create a democracy. It’ll be like Connecticut on the Euphrates, and this germ of infection will spread to neighboring countries, irresistibly, because everybody wants to be Americans. Everybody wants to dream of democracy.

“And there’s a germ of truth in that, too. But the way in which it was conceived by Wolfowitz and those guys: They knew nothing about its culture; they knew nothing about its political divisions, its religious divisions. They went blind into this place, simply seeing it as a bunch of people under a dictator — take the dictator away and then there would be some sort of natural reversion that would take place to democracy, as if that were what people reverted to. Actually, as it’s becoming plainer and plainer, if you had a democracy in Iraq, what the democracy would almost certainly be, with the majority of Iraqis being Shiites, would be a theocratic state, with close ties to Iran. This completely seemed to evade Wolfowitz’s thinking — it’s extraordinary. But it was presented as a kind of idealism: America doing good in this world.”

–Jonathan Raban, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)

“No other major social structural distinction (certainly not that between the classes) has received such massive reinforcement as the ideological separation of the modern form of the non-modern world. International treaties and doctrines dividing the world into multinational blocs serve to dramatize the distinction between the developed nations and the lesser ones, which are not thought to be capable of independent self-defense. Modern nations train development specialists, organizing them into teams and sending them to the underdeveloped areas of the world, which are thereby identified as being incapable of solving their own problems. The giving of this and other forms of international aid is a sine qua non of full modern status, a dependence on it is a primary indicator of a society trying to modernize itself. The national practice of keeping exact demographic records of infant mortality and literary rates, per capita income, etc, functions in the same way to separate the modern from the non-modern world along a variety of dimensions. The domestic version of the distinction is couched in economic terms, the

“It is not the story that is not getting expressed: it’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town, the smell; the thousand, thousand elements of reality that are part of the event you read about in 600 words in your morning paper.

“You know, sometimes the critical response to my books is amusing. There are so many complaints: Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary.”

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“Like the theologians of Hamas, the ideologues of the [Israeli] settlement movement have stripped their religion of all love but self-love; they have placed themselves at the center of God’s drama on earth; and they interpret their holy scriptures to prove that their enemies are supernaturally evil and undeserving of even small mercies. And, like Hamas, which would build for the Palestinians a death-obsessed Islamic theocracy, the settlers, if they have their way, would build an apartheid state ruled by councils of revanchist rabbis.

“American leadership seems to be required even in cases — such as Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 — where the British and their fellow Europeans had the means to resolve the crisis unaided. The US is cruelly unsuited to play the world’s policeman — Washington’s attention span is famously short, even in chronically troubled regions like Kashmir, the Balkans, the Middle East, or Korea — but it seems to have no choice. Meanwhile everyone else, but the Europeans especially, resent the United States when it fails to lead, but also when it leads too assertively.”
–Tony Judt, “Its Own Worst Enemy“, from the New York Review of Books, August 15, 2002

“In the post-September 11 world, even leaving aside Iraq and all the distortions, half-truths, and lies used to justify the invasion, even leaving aside the cataclysmic impact of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, I believe America would have attracted significant wrath simply in doing what had to be done in routing out the Taliban in Afghanistan, in reorienting its foreign policy to try and tackle international terror networks and breeding grounds. That is why I come back time and again in my mind to the tactical brilliance of Al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks: If America hadn’t responded, a green light would have been turned on, one that signaled that the country was too decadent to defend its vital interests. Yet in responding, the response itself was almost guaranteed to spotlight an empire bullying allies and enemies alike into cooperation and subordination, and, thus, to focus an inchoate rage against the world’s lone standing superpower. Damned if we did, damned if we didn’t.”
–Sasha Abramsky, “Waking up from the American Dream“, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2004