What's So Great About America Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA

  CHAPTER ONE - WHY THEY HATE US

  CHAPTER TWO - TWO CHEERS FOR COLONIALISM

  CHAPTER THREE - BECOMING AMERICAN

  CHAPTER FOUR - THE REPARATIONS FALLACY

  CHAPTER FIVE - WHEN VIRTUE LOSES ALL HER LOVELINESS

  CHAPTER SIX - AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  For Danielle

  Who Will One Day Understand

  PREFACE

  A FUNERAL ORATION

  Pericles’ Dilemma, and Ours

  In 430 B.C., shortly after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles delivered a funeral oration to the people of Athens.1 His dilemma was the classic one faced by free peoples throughout history: how to articulate the blessings of freedom which are usually taken for granted, how to communicate to citizens the necessity of making sacrifices—including the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life—in the name of freedom, and how a society accustomed to the pleasures of private life can prevail against a more militaristic regime inured to hardship whose fighters are cheerfully willing to endure death.

  Sound familiar? This is what Pericles said: “Our system of government does not copy the institutions of its neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others, than of our imitating anyone.” Athens, in other words, has a unique civilization that holds itself up as a universal model for civilized peoples everywhere.

  What are the ingredients of that civilization? “When it is a question of settling disputes, everyone is equal before the law. When it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership in a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.” Equality and meritocracy are, in Pericles’ view, two of the defining characteristics of ancient Athens.

  Moreover, “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way. We are free and tolerant in our private lives, but in public affairs we keep to the law. That is because it commands our deep respect.” Athens is a freedom-loving society, but its liberty is within the bounds of the law. Free people choose to obey the law because they see it as legitimate and for their benefit, rather than arbitrary.

  Athens is also a commercial civilization that trades freely with its neighbors. “The greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us, so that it seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products.” There is an easy traffic of peoples across state boundaries. “Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodical deportations in order to prevent people observing or finding out secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy.”

  This liberality of mind and policy, Pericles concedes, makes Athens vulnerable to enemies who seem leaner, hungrier, and hardier. “The Spartans, from their earliest boyhood, are submitted to the most laborious training in courage.” Even so, Pericles emphasizes that the Athenians “pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are.”

  The reason is that “others are brave out of ignorance, but the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.” Pericles calls upon the Athenians to recognize that theirs is the city that makes the quest for wisdom and the good life possible, for themselves and for their children, and he calls upon citizens to develop an eros for their city, a deep and abiding love that will justify and make possible the sacrifices that must be made to preserve Athenian liberty and the Athenian way of life.

  “What I would ask is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her.” The greatness of Athens as she really is. Even as he presents a somewhat idealized view of Athens, Pericles is saying that ultimately we fight for our country not in the name of some abstract theory, not even in the name of founding myths and constitutions, but in the name of the kind of society that we live in, and the kind of life that it makes possible for us.

  America today is in the position of the ancient Athenians, facing in the militants of the Islamic world a new kind of Sparta. What is needed, therefore, is an examination of the source of the conflict, of the nature of the enemy. But what is needed, most of all, is an understanding of the moral basis of Western civilization, of what makes the American experiment historically unique, and of what makes American life as it is lived today the best life that our world has to offer. Only then can we know what is at stake in this war and what we possess that is worth fighting for.

  WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHY THEY HATE US

  America and Its Enemies

  The cry that comes from the heart of the believer overcomes everything, even the White House.

  —AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI

  BEFORE THE TERRORISTS DESTROYED THE WORLD TRADE Center, crashed a plane into the Pentagon, and began their campaign to bring to America the horrors of the war-ravaged Middle East, life in the United States was placid and even a little boring. The dominant issue in politics was the Social Security lockbox, an especially curious subject of dispute since no such lockbox exists or has ever existed. For diversion and entertainment, Americans could follow the Gary Condit sex scandal or watch “reality TV” shows like Survivor. Newspapers devoted front-page reports to such issues as road rage, a man bitten by a shark, and the revelation that overage kids were playing Little League baseball. The biggest issue in the airline industry involved something called “economy class syndrome.” Essentially this referred to rather obese people sitting in coach class and fretting that during long flights their legs became stiff.

  All this triviality and absurdity was swept aside by the hijackers. In an act of supreme chutzpah, coordination, and technical skill, nineteen men seized control of four commercial jet planes, crashed two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and rammed one into the shoulder of the Pentagon. The fourth plane did not find its target—possibly the White House or Camp David—but crashed into the woods of Pennsylvania. In a single day of infamy—September 11, 2001—the terrorists had killed more than three thousand people.

  Not since Pearl Harbor, which provoked American entry into World War II, had America been directly attacked in this way by a foreign power. But even that was different. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii, not on the American mainland. Moreover, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a military operation directed against the U.S. Navy. By contrast, the terrorists struck New York City, and most of the people they killed were civilians. One would have to go back more than a century, to the Civil War, to count such large numbers of American casualties on a single day. As for civilian casualties, the citizens of the United States had never endured such mayhem. Historian David McCullough called September 11, 2001, the worst day in America’s history.

  Now, amidst our grief and sad memories, we find ourselves at war against the forces of terrorism. It is an overt war, such as we saw in the overthrow of the Taliban regime, as well as a covert war, with secret campaigns to identify and destroy enemy networks and cells. It is a war that has come home to America, as people cope with fears of further attacks, including those involving biological, chemical, and—God forbid—nuclear weapons. Moreover, this is a new kind of war against an enemy that refus
es to identify himself. Our enemy is a terrorist regime that inhabits many countries, including the United States. It is made up of very strange people most of whose names we do not yet know and whose motives and inspiration remain unclear to us. And the enemy conducts its operations in the name of Islam, one of the world’s great religions and a very old civilization that has somehow now become an incubator of fanaticism and terrorism.

  Know your enemy, Clausewitz instructs us, and then you will be able to fight him. Despite our early success in Afghanistan, it is not clear that we understand our enemy very well. Indeed, America’s incomprehension of the enemy became apparent in the days immediately following September 11, with the insistence of our leaders and pundits that the terrorists were “cowards” or “faceless cowards.” President Bush first used this term, which was then repeated by many others. The reasoning is that the terrorists cravenly targeted women and children. But of course the terrorists did no such thing. They didn’t really care who was on the hijacked planes or in the World Trade Center. As it happened, most of their victims were men. Their targets were the symbols of American capitalism and of the American government. One of them was the Pentagon, by any reckoning a military target. Usually we consider people who pick on women and children cowardly because they are trying to avoid harm to themselves. But in this case the terrorists went to their deaths with certainty and apparent equanimity. Like the Japanese kamikazes, the terrorists were certainly fanatical, but cowards they were not.

  A second enduring myth about the terrorists is that they were poor, miserable souls who performed these terrible actions because they were desperate or more likely insane. Several commentators argued that the terrorists are drawn from “the wretched of the earth.” In this view, they strike out against the affluent West because they have nothing to live for. Television host Bill O’Reilly carried this logic even further. He could not consider the terrorists brave, O’Reilly said, because they labored under the illusion that they were going straight to heaven, where they would be attended by countless nubile virgins. This, in O’Reilly’s view, was simply “nuts.”

  But these theories do not square with the facts. Indeed, it is irrational and reckless to dismiss the terrorists in this way. O’Reilly’s lunacy theory can be tested by releasing a bunch of mentally handicapped people from one of our asylums. Could they have pulled off what the terrorists did? Of course not. The unnerving reality is that the terrorists were educated people who knew how to fly planes. They had lived in the West and been exposed to the West. Some of them, like Muhammad Atta, were raised in secular households. Many came from well-off families. Indeed, the ringleader, Osama bin Laden, had a reported net worth of more than $100 million. Normally men with bin Laden’s bank account can be found in Monaco or St. Tropez, sailing yachts with beautiful women on each arm. Bin Laden, by contrast, spent the past several years living in a cave in Afghanistan.

  What motivates such men? One vital clue is the diary composed by Muhammad Atta and circulated to the other terrorists prior to the attack. The FBI found it in Atta’s apartment. Out of respect for Allah, it says, clean your body, shave off excess hair, wear cologne, and “tighten your shoes.” Read the Koran and “pray through the night” in order to “purify your soul from all unclean things.” Try and detach yourself from this world because “the time for play is over.” Keep a steadfast mind because “anything that happens to you could never be avoided, and what did not happen to you could never have happened to you.” On the morning of the attack, “pray the morning prayer” and “do not leave your apartment unless you have performed ablution.” Pray as you enter the plane and recite verses from the Koran. Ask God to forgive your sins and to give you the victory. Clench your teeth as you prepare for the attack. Shout “Allahu Akbar.” Strike your enemy above the neck, as the Koran instructs. Moreover, “if you slaughter, do not cause the discomfort of those you are killing, because this is one of the practices of the prophet, peace be upon him.” Finally, “You should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.”1

  These are not the instructions of cowards or lunatics, but of deeply religious Muslims. They were armed with an idea, and their colleagues have the weapons, the strategy, and the ruthlessness that are required to take on the United States and the West. It is a mistake to regard them as “suicides” in the traditional sense. A suicidal person is one who does not want to live. These men wanted to live, but they were prepared to give their life for something they deemed higher. This in itself is not contemptible or ridiculous; indeed, it raises the question of what we in America would be willing to give our lives for. No serious patriotism is possible that does not attempt to answer that question.

  It is difficult for those of us who live in a largely secular society to understand that people would willingly—even happily—give their lives for their faith. When a few people show such tendencies, we deem them extremists; when large numbers of people do, we convince ourselves that they have been brainwashed. They say they are acting in the name of Allah, but we insist that this is not their real motive; they are being manipulated by elites. They believe they are martyrs, but we pronounce that they are not really Muslims. President Bush even suggested that they were betraying their faith. British prime minister Tony Blair has said he regrets the term “Islamic terrorists” because the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists.2

  True Islam, many pundits noted, is a religion of peace. As Nada El Sawy, an Arab-American, wrote in Newsweek, “Muslims who kill in the name of their beliefs are not true Muslims.”3 Advocates of this position point out that the term jihad does not mean “holy war”: it refers to a moral struggle to conquer the evil in oneself. So if Islam wasn’t the driving force behind the attacks, what was? The New Yorker comfortingly concluded, “This is a conflict that pits all of civilized society against a comparatively small, essentially stateless band of murderous outlaws.”4

  These statements may have been made for the political purpose of isolating the terrorists and keeping together an alliance against terrorism that includes several Muslim countries. But they are profoundly misleading. Political unity is important, but so is mental clarity and honesty. If we misunderstand what is driving our enemy, then our strategy in fighting him is likely to be inadequate. Despite the early success of the U.S. military campaign, it is not clear that America has a well-conceived long-term strategy for getting rid of terrorism. Moreover, honesty, together with an informed sense of history, obliges us to admit that the things that we have been saying about Islam are half-truths, and dangerous half-truths at that.

  Tony Blair is right that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but it is equally a fact that the vast majority of terrorists are Muslims. Indeed, most of the states that the U.S. government classifies as “terrorist” or “rogue” states, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan, fall within the Muslim world. While Americans insist that the terrorists are fringe figures—similar perhaps to our Ku Klux Klan—the evidence is that they enjoy considerable support in their part of the globe. Immediately following the attack, bin Laden became a folk hero in the Islamic world. The actions of the terrorists were cheered in Iraq, Libya, and among many supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Gaza, for example, a poll showed that 78 percent of Palestinians supported the attacks.5 Another poll showed that 83 percent of Pakistanis sympathize with bin Laden’s al Qaeda group and oppose the United States’ military response.6 Even the governments of Muslim countries that are allied with the U.S. in the war against terrorism have proved very reluctant to involve themselves in the fighting. Nor have the leading authorities of any Muslim country condemned the terrorists as acting in violation of the principles of Islam.

  The reason for such waffling is that our allies know that terrorism and anti-Americanism have substantial support among the population in the Islamic world, even in so-called moderate Arab countries. Virtually the entire Muslim world has, over the past f
ew decades, experienced a religious resurgence—what we may term the revival of Islamic fundamentalism.7 The authority of the fundamentalists is not confined to a few countries, such as Iran and the Sudan. Of the twenty-two nations of the Muslim world, none is exempt from fundamentalist influence. This movement is powerful enough, in numbers and in political intensity, to threaten the stability of countries allied with the United States, like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the leadership of those countries is constantly on the defensive against the militants; it is they—not the terrorists or the militants—who are under suspicion for betraying Islam.

  The terrorists and their supporters don’t have to prove their bona fides. They do what they do in the name of jihad, a term that literally means “striving.” Some Muslims, especially in the modern era, understand jihad as a form of internal warfare in the soul against sin. But the Koran itself urges Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Seize them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.”8 In his classic work, The Muqaddimah, the influential Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun asserts, “In the Muslim community, holy war is a religious duty, because of the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”9 These passages convey how Muslims themselves have usually understood their religious mission. Historian Bernard Lewis writes that the traditional Islamic view, upheld by the vast majority of jurists and commentators, is that jihad usually refers to an armed struggle against infidels and apostates. Lewis writes:In the Muslim worldview the basic division of mankind is into the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). Ideally the House of Islam is conceived as a single community. The logic of Islamic law, however, does not recognize the permanent existence of any other polity outside Islam. In time, in the Muslim view, all mankind will accept Islam or submit to Islamic rule. A treaty of peace between the Muslim state and a non-Muslim state was thus in theory impossible. Such a truce, according to the jurists, could only be provisional. The name given by the Muslim jurists to this struggle is jihad.10