The Democracy Center On-Line
Volume 53 - May 25, 2004
LOOKING AT AMERICA FROM FAR AWAY


Dear Friends:

Many, many words have flown across the Internet in the past month about the events in Iraq. I’ve been reluctant to add mine to the blizzard. I am an American but I live my life abroad. Since President Bush began America’s adventure in Iraq I have spent time working with citizen groups on every continent but Australia and Antarctica. Everywhere I go I get an earful and along with it some insight into my country and how it is thought of in the world – probably more than I would if I was still living in California. I know this is an emotional issues on all sides. Here in this difficult moment in the world, are some reflections about looking at my country from far away.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center


LOOKING AT AMERICA FROM FAR AWAY

In the autumn of 1862 President Abraham Lincoln was presiding over a war that was not going well for the Union. Casualties were mounting, costs were climbing, and no clean ending appeared in sight. According to one of his biographers Lincoln turned to God, prayed, and made a deal with the almighty. Show me a sign that we are on the right track, that our cause is just and I will act. Weeks later Lincoln reportedly took the Union victory at Antietam as that sign and kept his deal by announcing his intention to issue a Presidential Proclamation freeing the salves of the confederacy.

President Bush, by all reports, considers himself a devout Christian. It may well be that he has offered up the same kind of “show me a sign” prayer that Lincoln did. If so, it is hard to imagine how many more signs the President needs to understand that God is not smiling on the US occupation or Iraq.

President Bush launched the US into a war based on the warning that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened us. Most of the nation and the Congress took him at his word, only to find out later that no such weapons existed and that the intelligence upon which that warning was issued was “cooked” by Iraqi exiles who had their own reasons for wanting US soldiers on the streets of Baghdad.

Then the President told us that, even if Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, our real motive all along was to support freedom and democracy there. A year later freedom and democracy looks like 5,500 Iraqis (many of them children) killed by violence, Americans torturing prisoners in one of Saddam Hussein’s jails, the suspension of the Geneva Convention, more than 700 US soldiers home in coffins that we aren’t allowed to see on TV, and a one year bill high enough to have given every Iraqi family of four $14,000 in cash, more than a year’s worth of income.

The US spent most of the weekend denying that we had accidentally bombed a wedding, which we mistakenly thought was a camp of armed insurgents. In the meantime the Associated Press found a videotape from the wedding in which the faces and clothing of the happy guests matched the bodies found at the scene of the US bombing.

To modify an old line, there are three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies, and official statements by the Bush Administration. If all these events are not a sufficient answer to a Presidential prayer for a sign, than they must certainly be a message to the rest of us that the US occupation of Iraq is an ugly, bloody error getting worse.

I saved a clipping a few months back about a hearing before the US Senate in which a panel of diplomats reported that the “bottom had fallen out” of support abroad for the United States. I am an American who has lived outside the US since 1998. One of the recommendations was that the US needed people who could speak Arabic and make the case for US policy on Arab TV. In other words, it isn’t our policy that is the problem but bad marketing. How do you market bombing a wedding?

Last year I got my first glimpse of Arab TV, Al Jazeera, in a cheap hotel room on the Islamic island of Zanzibar. I didn’t understand much of it. I did understand the program blaring out of a small TV propped up on a chair in an ancient plaza, surrounded by men dressed in white robes drinking strong coffee – an episode of Friends with Arabic subtitles. Maybe the State Department could get the actors from the show to explain the war to people in the Arab world. I hear they ate less busy now.

A while later I sat on a beach getting an earful from a former Tanzanian official, a Muslim, that I happened to run into. This was weeks before the US started the Iraqi war. “Number one idiot!,” is what he called President Bush. Tony Blair came in number two. Rabid, unchangeable anti-Americanism? He then went on to sing the praises of former President Bill Clinton. “President of the world,” he told me. “Look at what he did for peace in Ireland, between the Palestinians and Israelis.” Who America is and how we are seen – it could be so different. Not so long ago it was.

I see it here in Bolivia, US arrogance. It isn’t hard to spot. In October when the whole nation, including the Vice President, had decided it was time for the President to go (after he sent out troops that killed more than 70 people) the Bush administration propped him up with statements of support. He finally did leave a week later and the deaths of thirty people killed in the interim can be planted squarely on the shoulders of the US government. I know a woman, a close friend of ours, who was jailed here for almost two years with her baby son, an innocent but handy statistic in the US war on drugs here.

I think Kurt Vonnegut, that sage old writer of science fiction, got it right when he wrote a few weeks ago that the Bush administration’s approach to bringing democracy to the Arab world was starting to look like the way the Spaniards brought Christianity to the Indians of the Americas. Sometimes evangelism is not pretty, especially when you have to kill thousands of people to make your point.

The point here is not to Bush bash, or to add another “I told you so” to the rising chorus of US concern about the “mother of all big muddies” that the US finds itself in now in Iraq. The point is that who the US is in the world was once very different and can be and has to be again.

What is America? Looking at my homeland from abroad, and through the eyes of the people I live with in Bolivia and with whom I have worked with these past few years in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, I have come to this conclusion. The United States of America is still one of the greatest promises ever made in the world.

“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.” True, those words were written by a slaveholder. Yes, they were the opening lines of a nation (as a minister friend of mine once put it), “founded on the genocide of one race and the enslavement of another.” But the two centuries and a quarter since have been filled with one noble effort after another to hold America to that promise. Lincoln invoked it when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Martin Luther King invoked it again a century later when he stood on the steps of Lincoln’s memorial.

What the US is doing in the world at this moment is no march to stand true to the nation’s grand promises. We have not been asked to evangelize the rest of the world in our image, under our armies, and managed by our corporations (In Iraq that same Bechtel that did such a bang up job with Bolivia’s water).

As an American living in a foreign land I have always found these three rules to be the best wisdom. First, always assume that you don’t understand what the hell is going on. That assumption is almost always likely to be more right than wrong. Second, listen before you talk. Third, whatever you do, do it with humility. These rules wouldn’t make a bad basis for US foreign policy. There are plenty of Americans all over the world doing good works and who represent how a wealthy nation ought to reach out to those with less. There are plenty of Americans at home who think it is time for our actions abroad to live up to the nation’s promise and not some warped version of it dressed up in a red, white and blue lapel pin.

America needs “friends” in the world in this moment, and not just the ones in syndication with Arabic subtitles. We will win them not by what we say are our intentions but by the reality of our actions.

My thanks and my best wishes to all of you at home who are doing something, anything, to help bring my country back from its dance with madness.

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