Notes on a Foreign Country
Page 31
“American officials were given authority”: Quoted in Robert V. Keeley, The Colonels’ Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat’s View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011), xvii.
“no cameras to expose the ravaged faces”: Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, 93.
“an omnipotent Communist Party taking orders”: James Becket, Barbarism in Greece (New York: Walker, 1970), 10.
“In the Cold War lexicon”: Marton, The Polk Conspiracy, 143.
“I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick”: Quoted in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Anchor, 2008), 107.
“Public opinion in the U.S.”: Quoted in Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 257.
“a shock wave of anti-American feeling”: Alex Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011), 56.
“You do not want Walt Whitman”: Quoted in Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
“capitalism”: Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 107.
“the obedient army”: Quoted in Von Tunzelmann, ibid., 42.
“Do nothing to offend the dictators”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 185.
“Vietnam is the place”: Quoted in Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 229.
“The key question is to pass beyond the facts”: Quoted in Gabriel García Márquez, “The CIA in Latin America,” New York Review of Books, August 7, 1975.
“The kid who owns the ball is usually captain”: Quoted in Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 9.
“a controlled disintegration”: Quoted in Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur (New York: Zed Books, 2013), 100.
“This smells like Indonesia”: Quoted in Neni Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens: The Story of the Greek Left (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 133.
“involvement in torture went beyond simply moral support”: Becket, Barbarism in Greece, xii.
“unpleasantness”: Lieven, “US/USSR.”
“between Turkish labor and anti-communist”: Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 56.
“economic rather than political”: Quoted in ibid., 56.
whom a CIA officer once tried: Marc Edward Hoffman, “As Big as Mount Ararat,” The Nation, June 24, 2010.
“from the disgust of other nations”: Quoted in Charlotte Wolf, Garrison Community: A Study of an Overseas American Military Colony (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 41.
“Fuck your parliament”: Quoted in Gary Younge, “Obama’s Dilemma Is America’s Appetite for Power but Aversion to Risk,” Guardian, September 7, 2014.
“It was widely believed that the military”: Maureen Freely, Enlightenment (New York: Overlook Press, 2008), 26.
5. MONEY AND MILITARY COUPS: THE ARAB WORLD AND TURKEY
“freedom”: Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 15.
In the fall of 2011, six months after the revolution: Suzy Hansen, “Egypt’s Mean Queen,” Newsweek, January 2012.
“It makes me turn your question round and round”: Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), 117.
“to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible”: Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), 19.
“openly blaspheme or insult”: Ibid., 29.
“I cannot tell you”: Ibid., 39.
“literate, scientific”: Ibid., 65.
“Sarruf and Nimr extolled”: Ibid., 70.
“Roosevelt should act”: Ibid., 84.
“Here was the man of the Fourteen Points”: Muhammad Haykal, quoted in Manela, The Wilson Moment, 149.
“To place the brunt of the burden”: Quoted in Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 178.
“The Americans were something completely new and strange”: Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (New York: Vintage, 1989), 44.
“Why did they have to live like this”: Ibid., 595.
“insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative”: John Updike, “Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns,” The New Yorker, 1988.
“ruthless and efficient”: Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (New York: Verso, 2014), 23.
“Nasser may have fallen”: Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 299.
“I almost died of disgrace”: Quoted in Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 152.
“a perpetually dependent market”: Kandil, ibid., 161.
“Phillips, Toshiba, Gillette”: Sonallah Ibrahim, The Committee (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 18.
“While the words used for God and love”: Ibid., 18.
“Merak etmeyin”: Quoted in Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals’ Coup: An Inside Story of 12 September 1980 (London: Brassey’s, 1987), 172.
“Should we not hang them?”: Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Kenan Evren, 97, Dies; After Coup, Led Turkey with Iron Hand,” New York Times, May 9, 2015.
“The policy was not necessarily to kill you in jail”: Ibid.
“Your boys have finally done it!”: Quoted in Birand, The Generals’ Coup, 185.
“We admire the way in which order”: Quoted in “From the Editors,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), Summer 2016.
“more subtle, more cunning and terrifyingly effective”: Quoted in “Mr. Allende Follows Outlines of Speech,” New York Times, December 5, 1972.
“We lived in a country totally isolated from the world”: Quoted in Claire Sadar, “I Only Remember Fear,” Muftah.org, September 11, 2015.
“the collective well-being of the nation”: Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 212, quoting Timothy Mitchell in “Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of Your Desires,” MERIP 279, Summer 2016.
“Simply because we are forced to say yes”: Galal Amin, Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubarak (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 169.
“Since the rejection of the West”: Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 9.
“Bin Laden rejected the secular”: Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 340.
“The one thing that everybody in the prison”: Quoted in David Kirkpatrick, “U.S. Citizen, Once Held in Egypt’s Crackdown, Becomes Voice for Inmates,” New York Times, August 28, 2015.
“Baghdad University in the 1980s”: Tariq Ali, “The New World Disorder,” London Review of Books (April 9, 2015): 19–22.
“The Arabs were once a great civilization”: David Riesman, introduction to Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 13.
6. LITTLE AMERICAS: AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, AND TURKEY
“reverse the momentum and gain time”: Quoted in Helene Cooper, “U.S. Eyes New Target: Heartland of Taliban,” New York Times, February 26, 2010.
“do the things we thought the Americans”: Qais Akbar Omar, “Where Is My Ghost Money?” New York Times, May 4, 2013.
“Afghan people’s right to freedom”: Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire.”
“public floggings and hangings”: Ibid.
“By the mid-eighties”: Kamila Shamsie, “Pop Idols,” Granta 112, September 2010.
“Please explain”: Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire.”
In 2009, General McChrystal had promised: Suzy Hansen, “The Nowhere War,” Bookforum, June 2014.
“carried out raids against a phantom enemy”: Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 110.
“As the soldiers approached a home”: Ibid., 220.
&n
bsp; “All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures”: Quoted in Vanessa Gezari, The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (Simon & Schuster, 2014), 24.
“What we need is cultural intelligence”: Ibid.
“If you could have found a way to project”: Ibid., 198.
“aimed at propagating a strict religious fundamentalism”: Banu Eligür, The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113.
“improvement of our relations”: Ibid., 116.
“an inextricable part”: Ibid., 116.
“Both ‘red imperialism’ and ‘capitalist imperialism’”: Julia Alexandra Oprea, “State-Led Islamization: The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis,” Studia Universitatis “Petru Maior,” issue 1, 2014, 131–39.
“useful tool for creating citizens”: Eligür, The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, 93.
“tactically opened up a social and political space”: Ibid., 24.
“His dream was to make Turkey another America”: Sedat Laçiner, “Turgut Ozal Period in Turkish Foreign Policy,” USAK (Uluslararası Stratejik Araştırmalar Kurumu) 2 (2009): 153–205.
“Of course Uncle Sam isn’t sending you”: United States Department of Defense, A Pocket Guide to Turkey (June 11, 1953), 3.
“All I knew was that I was stuck”: George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 236.
7. AMERICAN DREAMS: AMERICA, IRAN, AND TURKEY
“the standard by which this nation’s commitment”: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 425.
“Has the American dream been achieved”: James Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” New York Times, March 7, 1965.
Dr. Shirley was a rabble-rouser: Suzy Hansen, “Hope in the Wreckage,” New York Times Magazine, July 2012.
“instill panic that the country was sliding towards a communist takeover”: Christopher de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia (New York: Harper, 2012), 221.
“Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?”: Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Root of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2008), xxv.
“undemocratic independent Iran”: Quoted in de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia, 254.
“one of the great symbols of postwar liberal development”: David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 231.
“as time passed and the numbers grew”: Quoted in Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.
“We found ourselves wondering”: Quoted in ibid., 81.
“Whoever fell into the grip of that organization”: Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs (New York: Knopf, 2014), 46.
“The Iranian who has been harassed at work”: Ibid., 76.
“casualty to what was looked upon as medieval fanaticism and religiosity”: Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997), ii.
“You understand that these are Americans”: Quoted in ibid., xv.
“connected in the popular mind with foolish spending”: Ibid., 30.
“A nation trampled by despotism”: Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs, 113.
But Istanbul’s era of regeneration and repair: Suzy Hansen, “Diary: Istanbul,” London Review of Books, May 2015.
“America tried to shape and orient the Turkish labor movement”: Ralph H. Salmi and Gonca Bayraktar Durgun, Turkish-U.S. Relations: Perspectives from Ankara (Boca Raton, FL: BrownWalker Press, 2005), 82.
EPILOGUE
What was more disturbing to me: Suzy Hansen, “Corruptions of Empire,” The Baffler no. 33, 2016.
“Empires rot from the inside”: Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The End of Empire,” New York Times, November 9, 2016.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the advice, love, and support of others. As a journalist and an American abroad, I have been privileged to meet so many incredible people—they invited me into their lives, gave me their time, and answered my endless questions. Their wisdom has been a gift. I am also indebted to hundreds of writers who informed this book.
A special thanks to the Institute of Current World Affairs, and particularly Steve Butler, for choosing me for the incomparably generous and thrilling ICWA fellowship, even though I couldn’t pronounce the word “Erdoğan.” It changed my life forever, and you will always have my gratitude.
Over the years, so many editors have nurtured my articles and much of this book into fruition: Chris Lehmann, Lidija Haas, Lindsey Gilbert, Hugo Lindgren, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Christian Lorentzen, Sarah Goldstein, Jonathan Shainin, Tom McGeveran, Josh Benson, Taylor Antrim, Rebecca Dana, Emily Biuso, Allen Freeman, Chloe Schama, and Rachel Morris. I am especially grateful to Dean Robinson, Bill Wasik, and Jake Silverstein, and to Cynthia Cotts and the heroic New York Times magazine fact-checking staff, who save us all from ourselves.
My agent, Amanda Urban, took a chance on an unformed idea and offered me guidance, friendship, and love—Binky, it is a privilege to know you. I am also lucky to have the best editor in the world, Eric Chinski, who seemed to know exactly what this book was, even before I did. He made every word of it better, and the last few years a total pleasure.
Thank you, too, to the wonderful people at FSG: Jonathan Galassi; Jeff Seroy and Sarita Varma; the very patient Laird Gallagher; Rob Sternitzky and Debra Helfand, for handling the manuscript with care; and Richard Oriolo, for his beautiful design. Thank you to Julie Tate for her eleventh-hour fact-checking.
My reporting abroad would not have been possible, period, without Caner, Arif Afzalzada, Iason Athanasiadis, Olga Alexopoulou, and Mandi Fahmy.
My brilliant and loving friends read this manuscript carefully and improved it immeasurably: Pankaj Mishra, Mary Mount, Jessica Alexander, Hillary Frey, Sarah Topol, Olga Alexopoulou, Alex Travelli, Jenna Krajeski, Aslı, Rana, Nichole Sobecki, Gloria Fisk, Caroline Finkel, Tobias Garnett, and Izzy Finkel, whose critique was so comprehensive, it practically came in book-length form. Dawn MacKeen, Sarah Goldstein, Catherine Steindler, Yasmine Seale, and Lidija Haas also went above and beyond. To Meg Sylvester, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Mark Lotto, Lydia Polgreen, Anna Louie Sussman, the New York Observer crew, Laura Miller, Stephanie Zacharek, Charley Taylor, Maria Russo, Amy Reiter, and my favorite Jersey girl, Meghan Johnson Womack—with whom I have been having a conversation for twenty-five years—I am forever grateful to you all.
My years in Turkey have been a dream only because of so many Istanbullular. The Aydıntaşbaş family—Aslı, Defne, Figen, Mert, and Garo—welcomed me before I even arrived and embraced me with love. Aslı, thank you for teaching me everything about Turkish politics and for your unwavering friendship. I also learned immensely from Gül Tuysuz, Özsel Beleli, Zehra Altaylı, Zeynel Gül, Özge Kelekçi, Naciye Çitil, Fatoş Minaz, the brilliant Kristin Fabbe, and countless others. For fun and friendship: Maddy and Ansel, Sabrina Tavernise, Nichole Sobecki, Kathryn Cook, Patrick Legant, Lynsey Addario, Jed Boyar and Gloria Fisk, Bicey and Izzy. Elif Batuman, Jenna Krajeski, and Sarah Topol have been the most loyal and entertaining of late-night companions, as has Olga, who taught me all things Greek. To Marc, my favorite debate partner, and to Sibel, for her shrewd analysis of all things. To Caner, who still answers my thousand questions. To Rana, who still makes Istanbul magical. And to the beautiful people of Turkey: thank you for sharing with me your wondrous country.
Jessica Alexander and Hillary Frey—your friendship, love, and humor have been the great comforts of my life. Thank you both for being there, every day, in that ever reassuring little corner on my computer screen. I love you.
Peter Kaplan taught me how to exhaust every angle of an idea fo
r hours, and then—just when I thought I had come up with something new to say—to look at it slightly sideways. It was in a messy office in New York that I learned how to think. His words of encouragement were like fairy dust. I miss him every day.
Pankaj Mishra and Mary Mount listened patiently to me every time I came out of Istanbul, eager to tell them of my very American realizations about it. I wanted to write a book about Turkey; Mary said, “Your book is about America.” Pankaj, our conversations, and your endless book recommendations, were my entry into a world of ideas, and indeed into the rest of the world. Thank you both for your faith and generosity.
To my father, who braved the roads of Cappadocia and who loves to argue with me; to my brother, who told me to write every day and to notice the trees; and to my mother, who took me to the library, bought me the college books, and cheered me on with curiosity and humor—you never asked for my ten-year absence, but it is all of you who made this life possible.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
abortion
Acheson, Dean
Actors Studio
Adana
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adıvar, Halide Edip
Adorno, Theodor
Afet (Atatürk’s adopted daughter)
Afghan Chamber of Commerce
Afghanistan; contractors in; Soviet invasion of; U.S. occupation of
AFL-CIO
African Americans
Aga Khan Foundation
Agee, Philip
Ahmet (Turkish miner)
AIDS
Ailes, Roger
Air Force, U.S.
Akbil
AK Party
al-Infitah
al-Muqtataf
al-Qaida
Albania
Albright, Madeleine
Algeria
Ali, Tariq
Allende, Salvador
Altan, Ahmet
Altınay, Ayşe Gül
America America
Americanah (Adichie)