by Barry Rubin
In this context, then, anti-Americanism was more of a weapon than a grievance, with different forces in the Arab world and Islamist Iran using it in various ways. For Saddam's Iraq, anti-Americanism became a tool in its battle to escape sanctions and rebuild its military might. America, not Iraq, it told neighbors, was the real threat to their wellbeing. For Iran, anti-Americanism was used to discredit domestic demands for reform by claiming that moderates were U.S. agents and that fighting the American threat took precedence over internal changes. For Syria, anti-Americanism was a substitute for economic or democratic reform, a rationale for the country's dreadful state.
For Palestinian leaders, anti-Americanism concealed their own rejection of peace offers and resort to violence. By sponsoring antiAmericanism, Egypt showed it was no U.S. stooge and asserted its leadership as protecting the Arab world from American control. And the Saudis joined bin Ladin, their sworn enemy, in decrying America so as to prove their own radical Islamic credentials, while trying to attribute all U.S. criticisms of Saudi support for terrorism to malevolent antiMuslim motives.
Finally, there is a truly remarkable factor, unique in the Middle East, of trying to use the promotion of anti-Americanism as a means of blackmail to gain rewards from the United States. Arab governments frequently tell the United States that a popular anti-Americanism over which they have no control threatens both their ability to cooperate with America and U.S. interests themselves. Consequently, they-and those who believe them in the West-insist that the United States must change its policies to be more to their liking or face disaster.
All these tactics were major parts of the Middle Eastern response to the September ii, 2001, attack. While individual Arabs and Iranians saw the tragedy as a cause for reevaluating their own countries' policies and societies, this was a distinctly minority standpoint. Much of the postSeptember i1 anti-Americanism concealed or justified the attackers' openly stated motives-to spark an Islamist war against an alleged American attempt to destroy Islam and take over the Middle East.
Instead, the attackers and their supporters or apologists declared it to be a defensive act in response to the fact that a corrupt and evil United States was attacking Arabs and Muslims. This argument fit with what the Arab masses had long been told. Seeing bin Ladin act on this idea brought it to life and won adherents for a more systematic, high-profile anti-Americanism. The U.S. measures taken in response-attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, efforts to battle terrorists elsewhere, and even the American public information campaign and changes in domestic lawswere then portrayed as proof of the very imperialist expansionism, antiArab intentions, and anti-Muslim motives against which the attacks were a supposed reaction.
A good example of this indictment came from Ali Uqleh Ursan, head of the Syrian writers' association and himself the faithful servant of a repressive dictatorship that had sponsored terrorism, occupied its neighbor, Lebanon, and killed thousands of its own citizens:
The fall of the symbol of American power reminded me of the many innocents whose funerals we attended and whose wounds we treated.... I remembered the funerals that have been held every day in occupied Palestine since 1987....I remembered Tripoli [Libya] on the day of the American-British aggression, and the attempt to destroy its leader's house as he slept; then, his daughter was killed under the ruins.... I remembered the oppression of the peoples in Korea and Vietnam....
[I felt] tremendous bitterness, revulsion, and disgust towards the country that, in the past half-century, has racked up only a black history of oppression and support for aggression and racism."
The Americans, he argues, should get back the kind of treatment they have given all of the world's people, especially the Arabs. Feeling as if he was soaring above the corpse of the World Trade Center, the "symbol of arrogant American imperialist power," is what he describes as the greatest moment of his life.-"
This false, if passionately held, sense of victimization by America was why so many exulted at the September n attack. Few took up arms, but many articulated the basic tenets of anti-Americanism. They had been driven to it, they claimed, by U.S. behavior. America, explained one Palestinian militant, "offers me one of two choices: Either I submissively accept perpetual enslavement and oppression ... or become an Usama bin Ladin."52
By showing that the United States could be hit and wounded, the attack seemed to promise revenge and even ultimate victory. An Iraqi newspaper declared, "The myth of America was destroyed with the World Trade Center in New York.... It is the prestige, arrogance and institutions of America that burn.... It has dragged the dignity of the U.S. government into the mud and unveiled its vain arrogance."
Bin Ladin's great "accomplishment" of September ii, then, was a defining moment in making anti-Americanism the central issue on the regional agenda. This was the front that bin Ladin identified as the top priority for his global Jihadist strategy. For a quarter-century since Iran's revolution, Islamists had put the emphasis on efforts to overthrow Arab governments but had failed in such places as Lebanon, Egypt, and Algeria. Now, bin Ladin proposed a new strategy. Instead of attacking fellow Muslims, an unpopular tactic, Islamists would try to appeal to the masses by killing foreign and infidel Americans. After all, since they were rejecting an "American" paradigm for modernization and change, why not go after the United States, directly to the source of that despised program?
Contrasting with the official statements of regret by governments after September 11 were scores of responses like that of Saudi cleric Safar bin Abd al-Rahman al-Hawali: "A tremendous wave of joy ... was felt by Muslims in the street, and whoever tells you otherwise is avoiding the truth."54 Many of his countrymen passed out candies, slaughtered animals for feasts, or sent congratulatory text messages to each other on mobile telephones." In Bahrain, a journalist wrote, "The United States now is eating a little piece from the bread which she baked and fed to the world for many decades."56 A Lebanese man in the street exulted, "We're ecstatic. Let America have a taste of what we've tasted."57
A University of Lebanon lecturer explained that people were rejoicing because the attack had been carried out against the headquarters of American colonialism:
No one thought for a moment about the people who were inside the tallest of the world's towers as they burned; everyone thought of the American administration and rejoiced at its misfortune, while its leaders scrambled to find a place to hide.... Can anyone really believe that a people of whom the United States has killed hundreds and thousands times the number of people killed in New York ... is sorry, and is not happy, when he witnesses this smack to the face of its most bitter enemy?58
But what had the United States actually done to any of these people or nations, compared certainly to what they had been told it had done to them? The Americans had not really killed 300,000 or 3 million Arabs, the statistical claim that this college teacher was making. What was this gigantic grudge based on if not the falsely implanted belief that American imperialism had been responsible for their problems and was trying to seize control of their destinies?
In Saudi Arabia, the country from which bin Ladin originated, the United States was seen as the key promoter and model of modernization, a process opposed by the powerfully conservative opinion there. Since the government had gone along with some U.S. policies in the Persian Gulf, bought American arms, and permitted a U.S. military presence on its soil after the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, it was a target for traditionalist Muslims and revolutionary Islamists alike. In August 1996, when bin Ladin published a "declaration of war" against America and the Saudi royal family, his main grievance was the claim that the army of the "American crusaders" had occupied the most sacred of all Muslim coun- tries.59
Perhaps the specific issue most mentioned within the Middle East as promoting anti-Americanism-though it had been rarely mentioned by bin Ladin himself-was the Arab-Israeli conflict. One Lebanese observed after the September a attack, "People are happy. America has always supported terrorism. They see how the inn
ocent Palestinian children are killed and they back the Zionist army that does it. America has never been on the side of justice."60 A Palestinian insisted, "This is the language that the United States understands and this is the way to stop America from helping the Zionist terrorists who are killing our children, men and women everyday."61
Yet September ii occurred only shortly after the United States had spent eight years trying to broker a peace agreement that would have ended any occupation and created a Palestinian state, only to have its proposals rejected by the Palestinian leader and given almost no backing by Arab states. Arab governments and media had not informed their citizens of these facts, and instead systematically distorted the U.S. role and efforts in order to provoke the maximum anger against it.
One good example of the type of knee-jerk hostility that prevails regardless of what the United States does or says was the response to an al-Ahram op-ed piece written by U.S. Ambassador to Egypt David Welch on the September ii attacks' second anniversary. Welch's article praised Egypt but asked in the politest of terms for one small favor: that the (state-controlled) media stop claiming American or Israeli forces carried out the attacks, pointing out that bin Ladin had even claimed respon- sibility.62
The response was an outpouring of anti-American hatred, including a petition by dozens of Egyptian intellectuals, authors, and journalistswho regularly are told by their own government "how to think and write"-demanding the ambassador be removed because he allegedly
spoke as if he were addressing slaves or the citizens of some banana republic, not those representing the voice and conscience of the Arab nation whose roots lie deep in history and whose culture is ... the cradle of the conscience of the entire world.... It is odd that the ambassador of any foreign country, whether it be America or Micronesia, should dictate to free Egyptian intellectuals and journalists how to think and write, and [tell them that they] must believe everything America and its media think, even if it is lies. ... Even if America thinks that it has conquered the globe, it will not succeed in conquering and subduing the free wielders of the pen.... We advise the U.S. ambassador to try to salvage his country's reputation, shamed by its silence on Israel's crimes, which are in no way less than Hitler's crimes. If he has time to advise and interfere in Egypt's domestic matters, we say to him ... that it would be better for him to return to his country.63
There are many ironies in this situation. Governments declare themselves friends of the United States on a diplomatic level at the same time as they encourage hate campaigns against it. Behavior gives the lie to rhetoric. If, in fact, the United States was really the swaggering, imperialist bully these governments portrayed, they would not be so quick to defy and denounce it.
Nevertheless, Saddam, bin Ladin, Iran's leaders, and thousands of journalists, professors, and intellectuals in the region argued that America could be defeated by the proper methods. Khomeini had once said America "cannot do a damn thing" to stop Islamist revolution.64 Saddam urged Arabs to battle the United States. Bin Ladin insisted that a small group of terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives would prove America's vulnerability. The perception of American weakness inspired as much or more anti-Americanism than did that of its great power.
But in its broad outlines and despite the many differences in details or emphasis, the modern form of anti-Americanism in the Middle East was quite parallel to that elsewhere in the world, including Europe, a doctrine predicated on the belief that the United States wanted to conquer the world politically, militarily, economically, and culturally. As in Europe, the Cold War's end and the Soviet Union's collapse was seen as paving the way for America's global primacy as the sole superpower.
Such factors as the indispensable U.S. role in preserving Gulf security or achieving Arab-Israeli peace, its military might, the pervasiveness of its cultural products, and the lack of any other power able to match its strength were taken as meaning that the United States could create a world empire. But very few would ask-or be allowed to contestwhether this was an accurate depiction of American motives, deeds, and intentions. While at least in Europe there was a real debate over these issues and a long history of contrary standpoints, in the Middle East those who had the loudest voices and a virtual monopoly on communications presented only evidence of America's guilt.
Thus, in Lebanon, long beset by intercommunal violence, locally produced terrorism, and a Syrian occupation that had nothing to do with the United States, it was America that was accused of waging a "barbaric onslaught on the nations and countries of the world" because it "is a society of absolute violence and, free from any moral restrictions, scruples, or religious and humanitarian values."65
In Egypt, America's closest ally in the Arab world, newspapers claimed in the aftermath of September ii that the United States had used weapons in the 1991 war against Iraq to cause cancer among Iraqi children, a million of whom had supposedly been butchered by sanctions imposed by the UN but blamed only on America.66 The editor of Egypt's most important newspaper, al-Ahram-who was both the country's leading journalist and a friend of President Husni Mubarak-wrote that the United States air-dropped poisoned food to murder Afghan civilians during its attack on the Taliban in 2001.67 The editor of Egypt's second most important newspaper, Jalal Duweidar of al-Akhbar, explained that the world was now in the hands of a devil called the United States that orders everyone to surrender to its selfish and destructive purposes.68
The 2003 U.S.-led war on Iraq was met with an even more intensive campaign highlighting such themes. In August 2003, Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud wrote in al-Akhbar that the United States was a "primitive, barbaric, blood-letting" country that "destroys, annihilates, and plunders treasure and oil" from others while perpetrating "abhorrent crimes" in Iraq, Liberia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Palestine. Everywhere, evil deeds are carried out by the "children and grandchildren of the gangs of pirates and blood-letters who run [U.S.] policy ... the [descendants] of the original criminals, who plundered North America and murdered its original inhabitants, the Indians, to the last man." There is no basic difference between their "repulsive and loathsome present and their black past, stained with crime and murder." The author concludes by urging the world's people to fight America and kill Americans.69
Three weeks later, an al-Ahram editorial accused the United States of fomenting all the main acts of terrorism in Iraq, deliberately murdering hundreds of Muslims including a key religious leader, as well as bombing UN headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. The fact that those responsible for the incidents were really Saddam loyalists or Islamist terrorists was dismissed as American "propaganda aimed at causing world-wide damage to Muslims." The editorial then called on Iraqis to unite and fight the true enemy, the United States.70
These were not mere idle words but incitements to anti-American violence. To tell Muslims that the United States had deliberately murdered a high-ranking cleric and scores of other Muslims and that it was slandering and dividing Muslims so they would kill each other was to encourage future acts of terrorism and murder against Americans.
The bad will promulgated by these arguments and interpretations showed up in public opinion surveys. In a Gallup poll released in February 2002, 36 percent of Kuwaitis, who U.S. troops had liberated from Iraq in 1991 without trying to exploit the situation to gain any power over them, said the September ii attacks were justifiable, the highest percentage of any country polled, and 41 percent viewed the United States unfavorably. Pakistan, a country the United States had repeatedly supported with aid against India and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was highly antagonistic due to Islamist fervor, with 68 percent unfavorable. Jordan, which the United States had treated generously despite that country's support for Iraq in the 1991 crisis, showed 62 percent unfavorable.
In Saudi Arabia, 64 percent said they had an unfavorable impression of the United States. The figure was 41 percent in Morocco and 63 percent in Iran. Residents of Lebanon had the highest favorable opinion of the United State
s, at 41 percent, followed by NATO ally Turkey with 40 percent. The lowest numbers came from Pakistan, at 5 percent. Twentyeight percent of Kuwaitis, 27 percent of Indonesians, 22 percent of Jordanians, 22 percent of Moroccans, 16 percent of Saudis, and 14 percent of Iranians surveyed had a favorable view of the United States.71
The Iraq war crisis was to raise these negative public opinion figures even higher, since the conflict was put into a context of a U.S. imperialist assault on an Arab and Muslim country. A May 2003 poll showed that anti-Americanism in Jordan peaked so that 99 percent of the people now had a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of the United States. Hostility was also extremely high in the Palestinian Authority (99 percent). Just 15 percent of Turks, 13 percent of Pakistanis, 27 percent of Lebanese, and 27 percent of Moroccans had a positive feeling toward the United States.72
There was, however, one point on which anti-American propaganda was sometimes unsuccessful: most Arabs did not accept the derogation of American society itself. Polls showed favorable views regarding the level of education, freedom, and democracy in the United States.73 This basic distinction between the views of the masses and intellectuals was similar to patterns in Europe and Latin America.
As one writer put it: "Ask anyone in Egypt what country they would like to visit, and they will probably say America. Ask them what movie they would like to see and it will probably be an American film. Ask them what school they would like to attend and they will name an American university. They may disagree violently with American policies, but they don't hate America."74
The highly politicized nature of these attitudes was revealed by the irony that anti-Americanism was declining in Iran. Despite the fact that Iranians had been fed such propaganda for a quarter-century and the United States had invoked economic sanctions against that country, open discontent with the Islamist regime, a more diverse press, the absence of Arab nationalism, and the existence of a strong pro-democracy movement mitigated the factors that pushed anti-Americanism higher in the Arab world.
