WHY THEY DON’T HATE US: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil
by Mark LeVineOneworld £16.99 pp430
America, it is now clear, had no sane or viable political programme for post-war Iraq. Indeed, it had no sane or viable programme for the invasion itself. Having supported the idea, at least, of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, I knew within 24 hours of the war’s beginning that it would fail. Where were the field hospitals treating Iraqi children? Where were the diplomats, lawyers, PRs, even film and music stars mounting visible programmes of co-operation? Where was the hearts-and-minds campaign that should have been the point of the whole exercise? Where, most importantly, was the humility?
They weren’t there because they weren’t thought necessary. Deep within the American administration’s psyche was the belief that, if you hit any system hard enough, it will flip into liberal democracy — “the end of history” — as if following some hitherto undiscovered law of physics. The ensuing, bloody debacle is the only possible outcome for such a view. But what, then, is the sane and viable alternative when dealing with the economic failure, political ineptitude and/or brutality of the states of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region of Muslim states? The question should, of course, be addressed to the inhabitants of that region. Thanks to terrorism, it is now also our own urgent concern.
Essentially, the belief that Iraq could be flipped solely by the judicious application of shock and awe sprang from the neocon/neoliberal ideology that, in turn, had its roots in the monetarist and free-market economics of the 1970s. These were all redefinitions of conservatism as a utopian programme. Previously, conservatives had defined themselves as pragmatic and anti-utopian, not least because of the catastrophe of left-wing utopianism in the Soviet Union. But, for the new right, this pragmatism had become too tainted with soft, postwar socialism and so, from Milton Friedman to Francis Fukuyama, the right reformed around the utopian notion of the West’s discovery of the end state of politics and economics, a discovery which was now to be propagated, like penicillin or McDonald’s, across the globe.
Iraq — “the chaotic epicentre of militarised neoliberal globalisation”, as Mark LeVine describes that country — was bound to reignite the largely smothered intellectual fires of the utopian left. And here they are, burning as brightly as ever, in this well-informed, polemical, infuriating, ill-written, poorly organised and, occasionally, lucid and sensible book.
LeVine is a California-based Middle Eastern academic. He has also been a professional rock musician, an experience that informs his analysis in ways that I am not sure I can fully explain. Perhaps his problem is that his favourite bands are the ineffably dull Led Zeppelin and Santana, a revelation that made me think of Randy Newman’s line about Mick Jagger — “He’s dead but he don’t know it.”
Why They Don’t Hate Us is an attempt to take on the big minds behind the neoliberal globalisation programme — Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Thomas Friedman, Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz and so on. Its title is intended to subvert both the rhetoric of the Bush administration and the right-wing intellectuals’ conviction that there is some fundamental war we are destined to fight. The main title is a mistake because the book, in fact, provides some very good reasons (primarily colonialism) why they should hate us and none, that I can see, why they don’t, even though he makes a reasonable case that they don’t. The subtitle is also a mistake because he doesn’t deal with North Korea.
But there are important positives about this book that should be celebrated. First, LeVine is absolutely right and, indeed, quite brave to insist on the reality of complexity. Terrorism and war both tend to simplify world views and, without doubting their intellectual status, so do the utopians of the new right. LeVine has direct and regular contact with the culture and life of the MENA region and he knows and shows that it does not form one homogenous bloc of vicious terrorism-inclined anti- Americanism. Perhaps his book’s greatest virtue is that it introduces both the many shades of opinion and cultural complexity of the, largely, Arab world. In addition, LeVine is absolutely right to insist on the importance of culture. Behind the neo-liberal programme he so despises, there is, indeed, a usually unspoken assumption that McDonald’s, Levis and Bruce Willis are what people really want once they can be persuaded to drop their allegiance to chest-beating, suicide bombing and hummus. This is folly — demean people’s culture and their pieties, and some psychotics will indeed see a reason to saw off our heads.
Finally, on the positive side, LeVine detonates the uneasy but nonetheless profound complacency that seems to have invaded politics, certainly in our country. Wealth and stability are not spreading uniformly across the globe. World Trade Organisation figures about growth are rigged and self-serving. And there can be no doubt that nuclear weapons programmes are increasingly being seen as the only possible response to the unipolar world order.
Having said all of which, LeVine is, in spite of the confidence of his polemic, at a loss precisely because he is as much of a utopian as are his enemies. Much of this book is about the organisation of a global peace-and-justice movement based on phenomena such as the anti-globalisation riots in Seattle. As a result, LeVine’s prose often reads like 1960s student rhetoric, even down to the sound of Led Zep twanging away in the background.
The problem is that any form of utopianism, even one as apparently harmless as global peace and justice, is, by its nature, bound to fail before the innate tribalism and violence of human nature. LeVine’s posture is that we are all, basically, the same and that we can, therefore, be brought together under the same benign banner if we can just throw off the shackles of the ideologues. Well, we are, indeed, all the same in that we are tribal. That means we make ourselves different. It is our destiny, therefore, to defend what we are from what we cannot be and to be hated as often as we are loved. It’s not pretty, it’s not rock’n’roll, but it’s life.
ACROSS THE DIVIDE
LeVine’s solution to the problem of mutual antagonism between the West and Islam is to call for an Axis of Empathy, one that will draw, not on the anti-Americanism of activists such as the post-9/11 Pakistani protestors above, but on the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims. Such a movement, he admits, will demand “spiritual maturity” from the West and “would involve much more than reading The Idiot’s Guide to Radical Islam”.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 on 0870 165 8585
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