New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

AL-AZMEH: After the Fact 27
properly take place in a university seminar, but suggesting you listen to
reflections by a particular reader on the description of U.S. democracy by
a Frenchman. A multiplicity of overlapping perspectives are possible for
a reader such as myself who, being at once a Syrian Arab of European
nationality and an Old European of Arab origin, might be able to conjoin
two largely concordant Arab and European views of America, of its
democracy, and of its foreign policy. “Reading Tocqueville” refers us to
Europe and an older America, while the view from Baghdad updates him,
and might stand here emblematically for looking at America from the
Arab world, particularly “after the event” – this event being of course the
dangerous drift in U.S. policy after 9/11, manifested in the Arab world
at once by the invasion of Iraq, and by unlimited, tail-wags-the-dog
support for the systematic Israeli destruction of all possible elements of
Palestinian statehood. Israel has destroyed the Palestinian economy,
housing, and agricultural land, as well as the administrative and educational
infrastructure, and has also been responsible for the murder
or incarceration of virtually the entire political elite of the Occupied
Territories, the relentless dispossession of Palestinian land and water
resources, and the implantation of colonies for immigrants from Cincinatti
or Birobidjan. There has also been wide-scale murder of civilians
(which adjusted to population figures would equate to a quarter of a
million American deaths and to four million wounded).
This is a dangerous drift indeed. That there has so far been no
catastrophic failure for the occupying coalition in Iraq is no evidence of
impending “success,” however sophistically this may be described, and
the signs grow daily more ominous and are indeed tending towards a
catastrophic outcome. It is unsurprising that America’s credibility, once
extraordinarily high in the Arab world, is at rock bottom. The recent
report by distinguished diplomat Edward P. Djerejian on U.S. “public
diplomacy” is evidence that many Americans have become aware of this,
though it is not sufficiently realized that hostility to the United States in
the region is only in very small measure the concern of Islamic political
forces. I do not have time now to speak of such forces, and most saliently
of the radical, nihilistic wing of bin Laden and his associates, until
recently favoured allies of the U.S.A. But let it be said here, as a
cautionary remark, that Arabs cannot, if one is to have any measure of
realism, be described simply as Muslims – this commonplace is a fatal
categorical and historical error made by Ambassador Djerijian and his