Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Blowback

On what was predicted to have been a quiet 9/11 anniversary, rioters in several Libyan and Egyptian cities attacked U.S. diplomatic missions, resulting in several deaths. 

The worst of these was on the Benghazi consulate, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.  The protests have spread to Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and India over the past two days, and these are just the major incidents.  There have also been demonstrations reported in Europe and North America. The cause of all the commotion: An online trailer for a poorly made web film titled The Innocence of Muslims, which purports to depict the life of the Prophet Mohammed in a manner deemed blasphemous by Muslims. 

For several days, the filmmaker’s identity was a mystery.  At first claimed to be one “Sam Bacile,” a man for whom no information could be found, it turns out the auteur was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Egyptian immigrant.  Nakoula is something of a colorful fellow, with convictions for bank fraud and drug dealing.  Apparently bitter over the treatment of his people by Egypt’s Muslim majority, and knowing he could capitalize on America’s kneejerk Islamophobia, Nakoula produced a crude work of religious slander. 

There are two tightly interwoven reasons for the reaction The Innocence of Muslims provoked.   The first is the West’s century-long economic exploitation of the Middle East and its support of corrupt and repressive regimes.  The second is a Western animus toward Muslims, regardless of ethnicity, that ranges from casually dismissive contempt to open hatred. 

In the United States, anti-Muslim prejudice is bound up with the belief that the American people and the American way of life are indisputably superior to all others, anxiety over America’s perceived decline as a world power, and our dependence on imported oil.  As a child in the 1970s, I remember the adults around me railing against the goddamn Arabs who were driving up gas prices.  The Iran hostage crisis—a backlash against Western abuses that should have sent a clear message that a change of attitude was in order—merely fueled the aggrieved anger.  The patriotic fervor surrounding the 1991 Gulf War reflected frustrations over decades of Middle Eastern unrest.  The popular reaction to 9/11 needs no explanation.

It’s a cheap shot to chalk this xenophobia up to the facile observation that Americans are just dumb.  Given the breadth and depth of information available to them, as well as the affluence that would enable travel, this assertion nonetheless contains a sliver of truth.  Less than a third of U.S. citizens hold a passport.  When we do travel, it’s usually to countries with amenities similar to home.  If we vacation in poorer countries, it’s to visit lavish resorts that tell little about how the locals actually live.  Even in those instances where Americans have contact with non-Western cultures that knowledge is clouded by distinct cognitive filters, the travels of evangelical youth groups and Mormon missionaries for example.  It is unlikely that many Americans who have travelled in Muslim countries have come away with a positive impression due to their insular worldview.

The democratization of media ushered in by the digital age has burdened us with ideological blinders.  One result is that in our desire to be told what we want to hear, we often confuse opinion with fact.  The conservative blogosphere is rife with the libel that the Prophet Mohammed was a pedophile because he took a child bride.  It doesn’t matter that child marriage was a common practice in many cultures, including those of medieval Christendom, and were normally contracted to cement alliances and not necessarily as sexual unions; nevertheless, the insinuation of deviance alone is enough to condemn a whole swath of humanity.  (The histories of each of the Abrahamic religions contain numerous episodes at odds with modern mores.  It’s probably just as well not to dwell too much on the idea of God impregnating an adolescent Virgin Mary, for instance.)    

An overlooked dimension to right wing anti-Muslim hostility is the memory of the Nation of Islam’s militancy during the Civil Rights Movement.  This experience surely informed subsequent popular anger over Middle Eastern anti-Americanism.  The thought of dark skinned people professing a strange faith that gives them the courage to stand up is enough to strike fear and loathing into heart of any redneck, whether “those people” (sarcasm intended) are at home or ten thousand miles away.  

This is the heart of the matter.  Americans can be frustratingly small minded and paranoid.  And yet it has much in common with its proclaimed enemy.  How is spending every Sunday morning in a cavernous Wal-Mart-style megachurch listening to the ravings of some bucktoothed ignoramus any different from the devout Muslim who faithfully goes to mosque to receive the dicta of the imam?  Is the person in Jackson, Mississippi who wishes death on Islamist militants all that dissimilar from the Afghan villager who wishes the same on American soldiers?  How much moral space really exists between the Palestinians who publicly celebrated upon learning of the 9/11 attacks and the red-blooded American patriot who takes satisfaction from the bombing of innocent civilians?  There is ugliness to spare on both sides.

Perhaps it’s somewhat simplistic, but the ugliness on this side has an easily identifiable cause: The quotidian American’s lack of worldliness and cultural sensitivity.  The American’s responsibility in this respect is greater than that of other peoples because we came to the Muslim world, not the other way around.  It is incumbent upon us to understand the problems and popular attitudes of the Muslim peoples because our country has meddled in, manipulated, and distorted their sociopolitical lives for over six decades.  Our history with the Muslim world did not begin on September 11^th, 2001.  It began much, much earlier, and the sooner we truthfully confront the United States’ role as an imperial power the sooner we can move toward some semblance of reconciliation.

Ignorance is never bliss, even if you are an American.

                 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Breaking Points

We now have a name to go with the deed. 

After several days of withholding his identity, the Pentagon has announced that the alleged perpetrator of last week’s massacre in Afghanistan is a soldier named Robert Bales.  We’re told that Bales, an Army staff sergeant with eleven years’ service, left his base camp without authorization on the night of March 11^th, went into the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, Panjwai, Kandahar Province, and murdered sixteen civilians in their homes.  Another five were reported wounded in the attack.    

Most of the news accounts I’ve read and watched this week have been concerned with the attack’s potential consequences for U.S.-Afghan relations and future NATO operations in Afghanistan.  Never mind the human rights of the victims; already they have become abstractions in our foreign policy calculus.  To be sure there are diplomatic causes for concern not least of which was the surreptitious spiriting of Bales first to Kuwait, then to the United States.   The Panjwai massacre may very well be the breaking point in our relations with Afghanistan.  The Taliban have already broken off negotiations with the Karzai administration over the incident, further setting back prospects for peace and the Obama Administration’s objective of withdrawing U.S. combat forces by 2014.   

But, back to Robert Bales.  News reports state that he had served three previous deployments, all of them in Iraq.  Assuming that the deployments were at least a year in length, Bales’ time in war zones nearly equals that of America’s involvement in the Second World War.  When you consider that the majority of our World War II service members never saw anything approaching that much time in combat, this fact takes on a certain significance.  Add to this the knowledge Bales had suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD, and he becomes an object example of the human toll of our post-9/11 wars.

None of this excuses his crimes.  But I can already see how this is going to play out in the arena of public opinion.  Our political and military leaders will do their best to minimize the incident as an aberration.  The mainstream media is already framing Bales’ acts as the tragic-but-inevitable consequence of a punishing operational tempo and inadequate military medical and mental health services.  There will inevitably be more than a few self-proclaimed “patriots” who will portray Bales as a wronged hero.  But I think the incident will quickly fade from our collective consciousness.  In the coming days and weeks, other news stories will claim our attention.  I doubt that the people of Afghanistan will forget quite as soon.    

We cannot simply write off the Panjwai killings as the deeds of a man pushed past his limits or as something out of character for us as a people.   Even though Bales’ acquaintances say he wasn’t prejudiced against Muslims, our culture reflected a strong anti-Muslim bias long before the September 11^th attacks.  When you consider our mindless propensity for conflating the words “Muslim” and “terrorist,” the spate of civilian murders by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years was probably inevitable.  As it is, our faith in our national superiority causes us to take a dim view of other cultures.  When we are armed and among people we have been conditioned to hold in contempt, it takes little provocation to produce a tragedy.  

Considering the larger implications of Panjwai, it’s little use at this juncture to speak of our image in the Muslim world.  The United States, along with Britain and France, squandered its credibility there generations ago.  I suspect the most galling thing for people in the Middle East and in Central Asia is the glaring disconnect between Western democratic ideals and Western actions.  Americans like to claim they are bringing democracy to the oppressed.   Yes, Afghans were oppressed by the Taliban.  It’s true that the Taliban’s harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda posed a threat both to the region and the rest of the world.  But a decade into our occupation of Afghanistan, can we really say its people are any better off?  Has anything fundamentally changed to make our conception of democracy a reality in Afghan society? Outside of Kabul, traditional ways continue as they have for centuries.  Pashtun culture is rooted in local custom and familial ties, rendering the kind of state-building pushed by the U.S. and its allies ineffective.  (The fate of the 1980s communist regime after the Soviet withdrawal is a grim example of what might befall Karzai’s after ISAF departs.)   Regardless of whether or not the Taliban ultimately return to power, there are timeless qualities in Afghan society which militate against exogenous change.  Perhaps it’s best that we finally learn the lesson the Afghans have been trying to teach the West since the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century and leave them at last to their own affairs.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Afghan Unrest

More than a decade into the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan, it seems we're still learning (or relearning) hard lessons.  This time it's the alleged burning of the Koran by troops at Bagram airbase, and the results have been tragic.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind...

A Few Thoughts on Triumphalism and the Other

Two news items in as many days have spurred uneasy thoughts concerning the war on terror and our views of the Muslim world.

The first was a video showing U.S. Marines allegedly abusing corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.   It’s reminiscent of any number of incidents over the last decade ranging from the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to the circus-like atmosphere of Saddam Hussein’s execution to the Koran desecrations at Guantanamo Bay.  The common element is an offhanded dehumanizing of the enemy, evinced in this case by a marine urinating on a body and walking away with a sardonic, “Have a nice day, buddy.”

The second was the car bomb murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist, the latest of several in recent years.  The assailant or assailants in this and the previous bombings are unknown.  However, it is not too far a leap to ascribe the deaths to the machinations of U.S., British, French, or Israeli intelligence, acting singularly or in concert.  I am not simply echoing Iranian accusations; I am identifying the states with the most to lose should Iran develop a nuclear weapon.  Certainly, the question of halting Iran’s nuclear development program by removing its scientists from the equation has been posed in the past, most notably by right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds in 2007.[1]  But I suspect that in the coming days the media emphasis will be less on the murdered scientist and more on the real and imagined perils of Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” as they are so often called. 

Media coverage reflects how our popular attitudes shape our approach to policy and vice versa.  Our perceptions of the non-Western world are inlaid with a deep vein of xenophobia, tinged with a profound ignorance of its complexity.  When most Americans probably can’t locate Afghanistan on a map or tell the difference between Iraq and Iran, Arabs and Persians, or Sunnis and Shiites, our ability to have an intelligent public debate is lost.  That our news is delivered to us in quick-cut edits and sound bites doesn’t help.         

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, the Western cultural construct of Middle Easterners as “Other,” is useful here.  Western dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia was informed by an image of the region’s inhabitants as weak, childlike, and easily manipulated.  Resistance challenged these long-held assumptions, whether it was Arab opposition to Israel, the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan mujahedeen war against the Soviets, or the emergence of al-Qaeda, among numerous other events over the past sixty years.   And so what began as essentially anti-colonialist struggles for cultural and religious dignity have been consistently portrayed as threats to democracy and global security, which is to say that they are a threat to American supremacy.  Because even in 2012, led by an African-American president, it will not do to have people with dark complexions defy us. 

This has been a particular a sore spot for us since the Vietnam War.  Defeat at the hands of a postcolonial peasant army poked holes in our deeply ingrained belief that America would always prevail.  One result is that as a culture, we have taken a triumphalist attitude toward our country’s recent conflicts.  I first noticed this after the invasion of Grenada.  The following year, President Reagan was running for reelection.  The College Republicans on my campus commemorated the anniversary of the invasion as “National Liberation Day” with a well-attended rally on the quad…all in honor of the world’s most powerful military having defeated a handful of Cuban construction workers.  The occupation of Panama was greeted in a similar fashion.  The high tech media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War was a harbinger of things to come—the emergence of a pervasive belief that war is a push-button endeavor involving faceless adversaries. 

Our faith in automated warfare is a conceit that has only grown with time.  Witness the response to the targeted killing of al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last year: There was scant dialogue in the mass media over the morality of the act or whether al-Awlaki’s due process rights as a U.S. citizen were violated.  He was a problem that could be (and was) solved by anonymous individuals pushing buttons in a room hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

Another legacy of Gulf War I is that, simply put, war has become a spectator sport for Americans.  Consider the reaction to Osama bin Laden’s death.  Interspersed with the pronouncements of anchors and pundits was TV news footage that showed college students, few of whom could have had any clear memories of 9/11, whooping and hollering and dancing around bonfires as if after a football victory.  I half expected to see them holding up huge foam rubber fingers proclaiming, “We’re #1!”  While I won’t shed any tears for the late Mr. bin Laden, I question how we marked his demise.  There wasn’t any reflection on the conditions that gave rise to militant Islamism in the first place or the long-term implications of bin Laden’s death, if any, on the war on terror.  Rather, it was yet another paroxysm of the kind of un-self-conscious jubilation in which we indulge at times like these.

Which brings me back to where I started.  This week’s events reflect and reinforce our underlying attitude regarding our Middle Eastern policy: We will not brook opposition from our inferiors and their deaths are barely worthy of our notice.  Longstanding cultural portrayals of Muslims as alien and malevolent have served to dehumanize them in our eyes.  In such circumstances it’s easy for us to accept defiling the enemy’s dead, it’s easy to feel relief that maybe the Iranians won’t get the bomb as soon as we had feared, and it’s easy to ignore the violent loss of human life in both cases.  The feeling that we’re somehow safe, even if fleeting, is enough for most of us.  And a few days from now, something else will have our attention.  

   

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Jan. 11, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/more_murder_of_iranian_scientists_still_terrorism/singleton/