Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  Dealing with Arab “mulishness,” the choices come down to the stick and the carrot. Or there is the third alternative: the Texas mule tamer, who ends up killing the mule to get its attention.86 The policy makers’ fundamental error stems from misunderstanding the nature and capacity of their opponents. Before them the U.S. administration does not see a part reflection, an “enemy in the mirror,” but something alien, at worst a dark chimera, less than human, an evil incarnate. This distorted vision more or less guarantees political failure.

  In the real world, as in the game, another approach might prove more productive. It involves making unpalatable but necessary assumptions. For example: recognize rather that these evildoers (to use President George W. Bush’s term) could be supple, resourceful, creative; assume they may be endlessly adaptive in their remorseless challenge; accept that in pursuit of their fell cause, they might possess both the intellect and confidence that make them strong where the Western world is weak. And finally, be certain that they will readily use the instruments of modernity when they choose, for they disseminate their ideological product by “viral marketing.” This viral analogy is relevant to the spread of terrorism, for infective viruses cannot be controlled by traditional antibiotic methods.87

  The measures adopted by the president and most of his main advisers against the “evil enemy” have attacked only the symptoms and not the underlying condition. The Bush administration, viscerally predisposed toward a war on evil, has looked only to destroying the bodies that house the infection. But they are blind to the true nature of their opponents. The ancient language and ideology of evil has predisposed the U.S. government to see their enemy only as some crude, inflexible, quasi-medieval relic to be extirpated with fire or the sword. In their minds, he is a savage wearing a turban. Osama bin Laden aptly fulfills that stereotype, as did Saddam Hussein, in all his many costumes. Try as they might, the administration cannot escape from a gut reaction, for “turban” symbolizes all those primitive impulses described earlier in this book.88

  Nevertheless, the U.S. government has always been adamant that there is no question of a religiously inspired Western attack upon the Islamic world. This is plainly right. There is no “war of the cross” with President George W. Bush caucusing like a twenty-first-century Urban II. But crusading is not so much a technical definition as an attitude of mind, and it is easy to find many examples of that way of thinking in Western nations. I shall deal with the outspoken General Boykin, who knows his own mind, in the next chapter, but he is probably not the only U.S. official who thinks the same way yet sustains the political vow of silence as necessary for the national strategy. To the degree that this kind of doublethink is widespread, it will impede any attempt to find an appropriate and effective response to an elusive enemy.

  The United States confronts a remorseless opponent, like a virus endlessly changing its shape and mutating to counter the strengths and qualities of the most powerful nation on earth. But are there alternatives to attacking it in the political language of evil? Experience suggests that current quick-fix strategies will never remove this subtle and resourceful enemy. Nevertheless, the West can respond effectively, by developing a slow-acting antiviral. This would first require a shift in both attitudes and language. A starting point might be found in Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the section of the United States Declaration of Independence which contains the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” His original draft was more comprehensive, but the phrase “pursuit of happiness” survived editing and redrafting, rather as “axis of evil” survived into President Bush’s State of the Union address. The language of happiness was a common political discourse at the time that the declaration was compiled. It has been considered so inclusive as to defy precise definition.89 Such objectives were not unique to the United States but no other nation made it a founding principle of its existence. Moreover, it was clear that happiness was not an otherworldly objective, to be achieved in the hereafter, but something that related to the conduct of everyday life.

  In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1801, after a fiercely contested election, which eventually tied at thirty-seven electoral college votes with his opponent Aaron Burr, Jefferson warned of a crabbed and constricted political imagination: “And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” The success of the young United States depended, in his view, upon a “sacred principle”: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle … If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”90

  Is this just another of the sententious platitudes that often figure in Enlightenment public rhetoric? I think not: here is a uniquely powerful, combative idea. Reason, in Jefferson’s view, is a weapon that will undermine or neutralize “error of opinion.” It is more adaptable, more resilient, and more dangerous to “error” than the blind certainties of faith. Lurking in these words, it seems to me, is the germ of the antiviral, a powerful ideology more than capable of resisting this new “viral” enemy. Maledicta or a “crusade against evildoers” is a decrepit and antiquated response to an enemy who might appear to take an ancient shape, but who is in reality infinitely adaptable, more postmodern than modern. The alternative is to follow the language and ideology implicit in Jefferson’s resonant phrases.

  Conclusion

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Better Angels of Our Nature

  THIS BOOK ENDS FAR FROM WHERE IT STARTED: THE TRAIL THAT began in the Old World—the Levant—ends in the New. This is not an arbitrary conclusion, for the United States has been involved with the world of Islam from the first years of its independent existence. There were trade agreements signed with the North African pashas from the 1790s, and a short war in 1805, when the Stars and Stripes were raised over a captured Tripolitanian citadel. Later in the nineteenth century the history of American relations with the Ottoman Empire developed quite differently from those of the European states, largely because of the success of American missionaries among local Christians.

  The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810, became effective in winning converts in the Ottoman heartland, especially among local Armenian Christians.1 The board poured money and resources into sustaining these Christian communities, often isolated clusters within a larger Muslim population. Missionaries became a powerful influence on U.S. foreign policy, providing a constant flow of information on conditions in these distant “mission fields.” Significantly, they secured the appointment of U.S. consuls in many areas of the Ottoman lands, and consuls and missionaries together presented an image of oppression and atrocity; much of this evidence was effortlessly transmuted into savage anti-Ottoman (and anti-Muslim) propaganda.

  The killing of Ottoman Christians in the 1890s and the mass murder of 1915, both events profusely and horrifically documented, had a long-lasting effect on American perceptions of the Middle East. This modern savagery reinforced the older and more remote memories that have appeared in earlier pages.2 The Armenian slaughter stimulated a galvanic reflex, similar to the British response to the Bulgarian atrocities of 1875–76, described in chapter 1. Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador at Istanbul from 1913 to 1916, told the engineer of atrocity Mehmed Talaat Pasha:

  You look down on Christian missionaries but don’t forget that it is the best element in American society that supports their work, especially their educational institutions. Americans are not mere materialists, always chasing money—they are broadly humanitarian and interested
in spreading justice and civilisation through the world … Our people will never forget these massacres. They will look upon it as nothing but wilful murder and will seriously condemn all the men responsible for it … You are defying all ideas of justice as we understand the term in our country.3

  The Armenian massacres affronted the founding principles of the United States. Morgenthau was describing his nation’s yearning to become the “virtuous republic,” created from the 1770s with aspirations much higher than mere moneygrubbing materialism. But he knew that this ideal coexisted in the same body politic as the rapacity, acquisitiveness, and brutality that he abhorred. Like the Roman god Janus, his nation had two faces—one sometimes noble and the other always ignoble—and both faces were presented to the world.

  The young United States was like no other state that has ever existed in the history of the world. Recent comparisons with other imperiums, ancient and modern, are both futile and misleading.4 But though it is rich and successful today, it is worth recalling that the United States was born out of revolutionary violence and much blood. The grimmer realities of that revolution are remembered less than the fine words about nation and liberty which still resound. Jefferson, of course, knew the brutal facts, but he kept them for private letters rather than his public rhetoric: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”5

  This new nation was quick to manufacture its myths and heroes. When the first president, George Washington, died in 1799, Congress’s eulogy began, “To the memory of the Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” It genuinely reflected popular feeling, a sentiment objectified in the enormously popular print by John James Barralet in 1802. This presented a kind of apotheosis, as the First Citizen was borne up to heaven by Time and Immortality.6 Later, in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the painter Constantino Brumidi decorated the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., with a vast fresco. There, “the first President sits in majesty, flanked on the right by the Goddess of Liberty and on his left by a winged figure of Fame sounding a trumpet and holding a palm frond aloft in a symbol of victory. Thirteen female figures stand in a semi-circle around Washington, representing the thirteen original states. On the outer ring of the canopy, six allegorical groupings surround him, representing classical images of agriculture, arts and sciences, commerce, war, mechanics, and marine.”7

  Like all national histories, the American past has always been artfully nipped and tucked to meet the needs of the moment. Underlying that serene surface presented by Brumidi lies what you would expect to find: vain ignorant men, greed, crass stupidity, and vaunting self-interest, much as in other nations. This is the other face of the United States. Yet, unusually among nations, there has also been a serious attempt to think and behave ethically, to honor the nation’s founding myth. Among the long list of American presidents and statesmen, we can find a few who successfully joined reason with realpolitik, showing how power could be exercised without remorse, and also without rancor. While hatred and maledicta were deeply embedded in the new nation, there were those who set their faces against it. This was what Abraham Lincoln meant, in his first inaugural, by “the better angels of our nature.”

  These noble beliefs were not held by saints and scholars detached from the realities of life, but by leaders who faced the ultimate political test of war and lesser conflicts. It is easy to be ethical in the abstract, but the United States has in the past produced presidents who succeeded without recourse to the corrupting language of hate and evil. How and why they did so is the subject of this last chapter. The three I have chosen—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were closely interlinked. The young man John Hay, who was one of Lincoln’s secretaries, and listened as he delivered his address at Gettysburg, later served in his old age as Theodore Roosevelt’s trusted and revered secretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt presided at the wedding of his niece Eleanor, whom he gave away in marriage to his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Franklin idolized his older kinsman Theodore. None of these were weak or irresolute men. Not one of them flinched at taking the harshest decisions, yet to adapt Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite phrase, they succeeded while speaking softly. This might seem counterintuitive, for the harsh tones of the demagogue seem so much more potent and effective. Yet they knew better, and I hope to explain why. How they succeeded has a direct bearing on the politics of the twenty-first century.

  ON MARCH 4, 1861, AT A MOMENT OF SUPREME CRISIS IN THE NATION’s history, the recently elected President Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural. He concluded by directly addressing those who were determined to secede from the Union:

  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  Realpolitik made it clear that civil war was likely if not inevitable, but on this most public occasion Lincoln insisted on speaking in terms of reason. The “better angels of our nature” existed on both sides of the divide between union and secession. He asserted, and spoke of, a common humanity and nature. He did not openly demonize his opponents, although he abhorred their actions. A little over two years later, in his address delivered on the battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, he again declined to contrast an evil enemy with his own “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here.”8

  This magnanimous tone was a matter of careful judgment.9 Lincoln personified the enemy as if in a mirror, human like himself, fallible and capable of error. He abhorred vituperation, but for practical and political reasons. The ranks of the secessionists were no more uniform or monolithic than his own supporters. He believed that Confederate diehards were a minority in the South, and that once the war was won, he could rebuild a new and united society with the support of the uncommitted majority. In his second inaugural, he was implacable in continuing the war “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” But he also insisted that this was “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Lincoln’s rhetorical skill, his plain speaking, was to lay the grimmest necessities of war alongside the insistent voice of reason. It was this combination, each element bound indissolubly to the other, that rendered his message so potent. Conversely, he exposed the limits of maledicta.

  Lincoln’s pragmatism was rooted equally in the harsh reality of politics and in an acute understanding of human nature. He knew what was said and how it was said limited (or expanded) the political possibilities for the future. The two later presidents recognized the same pragmatics. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt reported the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he condemned it with cold contempt as an “unprovoked and dastardly attack,” as “treachery,” and spoke of “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.”10 Unlike Lincoln, FDR sometimes selected a harsher register. In April 1943 he described Japanese executions of American aviators a year earlier as “barbarous,” talking of Japanese “depravity” and of “killing in cold blood.” The Japanese, he declared, were “savages.”11

  In each case he chose his public words with the greatest care: the head ruled the heart. Out of the public eye, maledicta actually corresponded much more closely to the president’s personal feelings about the nation’s enemies than the measured tone of his Pearl Harbor speech. In private he told his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., formerly a farmer and stockbreeder, in words reminiscent of Spanish speculations on the Morisco problem centuries before: “You have either got to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them so that they can’t go
on reproducing the people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”12 But in his set-piece speeches like the State of the Union, Roosevelt eschewed the harshest language of atrocity and evil. He chose instead a public idiom of reason and argument, seeing it as appropriate for the effective conduct of a war in a democratic society.

  His cousin Theodore, TR, had been the youngest-ever president, taking office (as vice president) after the murder of President William G. McKinley in 1901. The elder Roosevelt is hard to pin down. He was a polymath: articulate, with a frantic zest for life, a war hero. But if we wanted a single word that embraced all his aspects it might be “word-smith.” Being an author extended across every period of his life: from the sickly youth; the unsuccessful rancher; the great white hunter; the feisty young politician in New York to the mature, bull-like Rough Rider, Colonel Roosevelt, commanding his own regiment of volunteers; and ultimately the leader of his nation.13 Roosevelt never stopped writing. Between 1882 and 1918, he published more than twenty substantial works, plus a mass of shorter works, articles, pamphlets, speeches, letters, and journalism.14 His natural domain was words.

  For all his impetuosity, Theodore Roosevelt achieved an inner discipline, and nowhere was this more evident than in his language. Many things that he said or wrote now seem outrageous or provocative, but they most often occurred in conversation or in a private letter. His abhorrence of profanity was Victorian, but this natural restraint was also well judged. In public he spoke to engage the hearts and minds of his audience. Part of his political success lay in widening his appeal and constituency, and this was achieved as much by what he said as by what he did.