U.S. will always have enemies

The real lesson from embassy attacks

By Andrew Coyne

Violent protests outside American embassies, first in Egypt and Libya and now across the Muslim world, have provided a rare moment of agreement for partisans of the right and left: the right, for whom everything is President Obama’s fault, and the left, for whom everything is America’s fault.

The protests, both agree, are not merely expressions of whatever was on the minds of those who showed up on the day, but a broad indictment of American policy in the Middle East, notably in its support (temporizing as it sometimes was) for the so-called Arab Spring. While American indulgence of western-friendly dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was once a bone of contention between the two sides, today there is an odd new entente in favour of letting sleeping Muslims lie.

This is what you get, the right says, for forsaking our allies: not western-style democrats, but implacably hostile Islamists, whether of the Muslim Brotherhood or al-Qaeda strain. Obama’s conciliatory gestures early in his term, they claim, communicated weakness; his passivity in the face of provocation confirmed it.

This is what you get, the left says, for meddling in other countries’ affairs. (Sample Guardian headline: “The west has once again started a fire it cannot extinguish.”) Unless it’s for not meddling soon enough. Or is it for meddling in the wrong way? No matter. Remember, whatever happens, it’s always America’s fault.

It strikes me as rather early days to be making such pronouncements, though you may recall it took scant minutes for commentators to discover the “root causes” of September 11 (whose anniversary the embassy attacks seem intended to celebrate). By an amazing coincidence, the terrorists’ grievances in every case turned out to be identical with those of whichever pundit was flapping his gums. To critics of American foreign policy, it was on account of American foreign policy. To those concerned with Third World poverty, it was about Third World poverty. And so on down the line: every time. It was uncanny.

Still, it was evident to all, even then, that 9/11 was a historic event, whose consequences would be felt for decades: whatever its meaning, its significance was indisputable. The same is not remotely true here. That a few hundred, or even a few thousand, hotheads gather to chant “Death to America,” on whatever pretext, does not mean their countrymen are all of the same mind; that nascent authorities, in societies lately emerged from dictatorship or civil war, have been unable to prevent the mobs from storming the embassies does not, by itself, demonstrate the failure of the experiment in Arab liberty.

Libya may not be the most stable place nowadays, but would its prospects be brighter if Gaddafi were still in power? Or Egypt’s, under Mubarak? As with post-Saddam Iraq or Afghanistan after the Taliban, we should not let their present difficulties blind us to how much better off these countries are now than under the previous regimes, and can hope to be in future.

What the last few days does show, as if we needed reminding, is that a lot of people in the Muslim world still hate America. Even if the proximate cause were, as reported, a crude anti-Muslim video that happened to have been produced in the United States, the crowds’ fury plainly has as much to do with where the film was made as what was in it. The protests have become, if they were not originally, arenas for the venting of rage at the U.S. in general — and at its president in particular. “Obama, Obama, we are all Osamas,” rioters in Tunis chanted. In Jalalabad, Afghanistan, they burned him in effigy.

If this seems a remarkable turn of events, it shouldn’t. The notion that the election of a president with Muslim roots, or the adoption of a more conciliatory tone in American foreign policy, would mollify America’s detractors in the Third World, was always a fantasy. If it is unlikely the protests were caused by Obama’s “weakness” — Mitt Romney’s campaign went so far as to claim they would not have taken place if he were president — then neither, it seems, has his presence in the White House done anything to prevent them. Perhaps there is less anti-Americanism abroad as a result of his presidency, but it certainly hasn’t been extinguished. Which is fine. Because there isn’t anything to be done about it, and no point in trying.

It is a mistake to suppose that hatred of America must have some rational cause, any more than other prejudices. It does not. It is a constant, unlikely to change no matter what propitiatory gestures the U.S. might offer. It has nothing to do with what foreign policy it pursues, or whether the president’s middle name is Hussein. It exists because America exists, and if America did not exist it would attach itself to something else.

Hatred of America is a form of self-hatred, the fruit of frustration and despair in the Muslim world at their relative decline. And not only in the Muslim world. Anti-Americanism will always be with us so long as people need a bogeyman on which to hang the evils of the world. It speaks to all that is small and envious and insecure in us, and unfortunately that, too, is a constant.