Any effective approach to eradicating terrorism must include an examination of its root causes. According to Dickey, the anger animating Iraqi resistance has its mirror here at home. Left to fester, and taken to its logical conclusion, this anger could lead to Civil War II. TWT
The Politics of Indignity
When proud people feel like afterthoughts they get angry, whether in restive Iraq or rural America. And some get violent
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Nov 28 — Thanksgiving is not an Iraqi holiday. So maybe it’s not surprising that few Iraqis were in evidence when President George W. Bush made his gutsy whistle-stop at the darkened Baghdad airport on Thursday. He was there to share turkey with the troops, after all, not with the people they liberated. Security considerations are great. The natives are restless. Bush managed to meet briefly with four local officials, but to paraphrase an earlier maxim of campaign strategy, “It’s not about the Iraqis, stupid.”
EXCEPT, OF COURSE, in the mind of the Iraqis themselves, whose wishes, interests and dignity have taken a back seat to Washington’s agenda ever since this crisis began. No wonder so many are so restive.
Harvard professor Jessica Stern, in her wise and thorough new book “Terror in the Name of God,” argues that humiliation is a core motive for many who join violent movements around the world. “They start out feeling humiliated, enraged that they are viewed by some Other as second class,” Stern concludes. “They take on new identities as martyrs on behalf of a purported spiritual cause. The spiritually perplexed learn to focus on action. The weak become strong. The selfish become altruists, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in the belief that their deaths will serve the public good. Rage turns to conviction.”
L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, has learned this lesson the hard way since May, as resistance to the U.S. presence has grown ever more bloody, effective and widespread. In Bremer’s address to the Iraqi people on Nov. 7, at the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, he bluntly admitted “the indignity of occupation.” He tried to assure his audience that the humiliation would end, precisely, when Iraqis elect their government over the next year or so. In a kind of oracular incantation, he argued that the “evil doers” fighting the Americans were the ones trying to take away Iraqi dignity, while the Americans are essentially fighting to restore it. Bremer repeated the word “dignity” 27 times in a five minute speech, in fact, and Bush himself picked up the theme yesterday. He called on the largely absent Iraqis to “seize the moment and rebuild your great country, based on human dignity and freedom.”
The Americans profess too much. The Iraqis aren’t convinced. Every day, reports from the field offer tragic evidence of festering resentments. In one horrifying story out of Mosul, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins recounted the way Iraqi firefighters on the U.S. payroll had cheered when a mob stripped off the watches, jackets and boots of two American soldiers who’d been shot in the head and killed last Sunday. “Everyone was happy,” one of the firefighters told Filkins. “The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave.”
In the last few weeks, as I’ve driven around the United States and read through the hundreds of emails sent to Shadowland@newsweek.com, I’ve discovered an awful lot of anger at home, too. It’s far from the savagery encountered in Mosul, thank God. But it’s plenty intense. And a lot of the American anger, like that of average Iraqis, comes from the feeling that Washington treats them as second-class, as afterthoughts in the Establishment’s great scheme of things, as pawns in someone else’s game of kings.
This home-grown fury isn’t directed only at the Bush administration, but at the whole Washington scene, with the daily tragedies in Iraq and the known excesses of the Patriot Act contributing to the anger. A reader in Atlanta, for instance, wrote an apoplectic letter after he discovered that only six U.S. Senators were present on the floor when the $87 billion for Iraq was passed with a simple voice vote—no roll call—at the beginning of the month. “Those that supported the bill didn’t want to explain to their constituents why they supported it, and those that were against it didn’t want to be painted as unpatriotic,” wrote D.B. from Atlanta. “These soul-less, ball-less cowards don’t even want their votes recorded. How would you feel if you were in Iraq seeing your buddies die every day knowing that your leaders are too chicken-s—- to even say whether or not they support you?”
Many emailers raised the possibility of armed resistance to any Federal encroachments on their rights (including the right to bear arms.) At the same time, they feel their real economic problems have been ignored.
“I live near Waynesburg, PA,” wrote C.M., a woman whose e-mail was one of the most articulate that we received, and one of the more frightening. “It’s a small town, insular in its thinking, with its own brand of amusing and not so amusing politics, a lot of hunters, and snakes-in-the-basket kinships, old grudges: pull a tail here and a head over there hisses.
“One day years ago, I was down at the local Agway getting feed ground, and there had just been an article in the nearest metropolitan paper (Pittsburgh) about how Greene County had been designated an endpoint for evacuation for all the city people in the event of ... whatever. I was talking about this to the miller, and a couple of good ol’ boys said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just blow the bridges.’
“This was not an idle threat. This is coal-mining country, farming land, and practically everyone has access to explosives, or knows about ANFO [a blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil used for blasting]. Because of hilly terrain, creeks and streams, there are a lot of bridges between here and Pittsburgh. We all know the back roads. But incoming strangers? I don’t think so.
“The federal government has developed an unfortunate habit of thinking of us out here in Greater Boondock about the way farmers think of livestock: We see to their feeding, their general well-being, but if they’re invited to dinner, they’re on the table, not at it.
“Beltway mentality, like tunnel vision, is a failure of awareness. I suspect it will get its comeuppance, and maybe not too far down the line. I’m not interesting in having the American future poured down the rathole of Iraq, either.
“As to the ‘Patriot Act,’ a piece of misnomenclature if ever I’ve heard one, you know the aphorism, ‘Man proposes, God disposes’? It may well come down to ‘Fed proposes, we shoot poseurs.’ Would the military actually fight guerrilla warfare in its own back yard, with its own friends and relatives? Government lacking the consent of the governed is apt to have poor longevity.”
No, I don’t think we’ll see the midwestern equivalent of the Sunni Triangle any time soon. But Washington would do well to remember, before rage turns to conviction, that “human freedom and dignity” isn’t just a convenient catch-phrase at a daring photo-op. The Iraqis know that. And so do most Americans.
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