Anti-Americanisms in World Politics

7. Anti-Americanisms in the Arab World

7 Anti-Americanisms in the Arab World M A R C LY N C H 196 The findings of the  Pew Global Attitudes Project survey that the bottom had fallen out of support for the United States in the Muslim world galvanized official and popular attention around the threat to national security posed by rampant antiAmericanism in the Arab world. Does this crisis of anti-Americanism really exist? As Timothy Mitchell puts it, most analysis of anti-Americanism in the region portrays it as “something elusive and yet ubiquitous . . . elusive because we are given no concrete evidence of it.”1 Marching crowds of protestors burning American flags tell us little about their motivations or the real depth of anger (protests could be manufactured by regimes for their own purposes, or they might be veiled protests against the regime itself using the only publicly permissible language). Public opinion surveys in authoritarian societies are fraught with methodological difficulties, ranging from the natural suspicion of strangers asking sensitive political questions to the conflation of different sources of anger. Editorials in most Arab newspapers are shaped by particular political interests and restrictions, in such a way that anti-Americanism in the Egyptian press could reflect an official regime strategy as easily as a genuine popular outrage. Complicating this further is an American tendency to interpret all political activity through an American lens, so that everything—Lebanese protests against Syria, Egyptian protests against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Islamist railing against sexual imagery on television—must somehow be about America. Analyses of Arab anti-Americanism have long been trapped in an unproductive standoff between explanations that consider it essentially a rational response to U.S. For helpful comments, I thank Dale Eickelman, John Bowen, Charles Hirschkind, Shibley Telhami, the participants in workshops at Cornell University and Stanford University, and especially Peter Katzenstein and Bob Keohane. . Mitchell , . policies and those that consider it essentially irrational, explainable by some cultural, political, or civilizational pathology. Barry Rubin suggests that the disconnect between Arab perceptions of U.S. policies and American self-conceptions can only be explained by some pathology of Arab political culture. Fouad Ajami argues that anti-Americanism in the region stems from a cultural backlash against the modernity embodied by the United States, driven by the resentments engendered by civilizational failure (“the envy of the failed for the successful”) and the stifling realities of domestic economic and political stagnation.2 On the other side, many analysts argue that Arab anti-Americanism is a rational response to specific U.S. policies and that changing those policies would fairly quickly burst the anti-American bubble. Both views are unsatisfying. If policies have nothing to do with anti-Americanism, then why did such sentiments spike in , in direct response to U.S. policies such as support for the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank, President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq? If U.S. policies alone explain anti-Americanism , then how do we explain its persistence (among at least some sectors) across different administrations with what appear to be very different policies (Clinton’s honest brokering of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations versus George W. Bush’s vocal support for Ariel Sharon)? The two might be reconciled by considering the role of the schemas through which Arabs interpret political developments. Arab public discourse is dominated by a well-entrenched narrative identifying America as generally hostile, aggressive, and untrustworthy. It is grounded in historical memories of specific U.S. policies and fueled by ongoing grievances with those policies. The deeply rooted distrust of American intentions is nicely captured by the opening words of one February  al-Jazeera television program: “Who believes America?”3 This distrust is not a permanent and unchangeable feature of Arab culture. Arab attitudes toward the United States were quite positive in earlier eras, especially after the Suez crisis when the United States was seen as a powerful force against European colonialism. It has, however, become increasingly entrenched in recent years, spilling over into almost every domain. Even more crucially, fear of American power is increasingly embedded within a deeply ingrained narrative at the heart of Arab identity. Anti-American attitudes are therefore more than simply “political opinion,” which could be expected to change relatively fluidly with political events. But these attitudes also demonstrate sensitivity to changes in U.S. foreign policy that would not be expected if there were a fully ingrained “bias...