Date

September 18, 2012

America’s bias towards Muslim interests has been forgotten.

AS religious protesters, claiming Koranic inspiration, attack US embassies and their staff, with the demonstrations taking an Australian form in recent days, how are we to understand their motives?

The standard explanation is that the West generally and the US specifically is reaping a whirlwind. Having supported Israel for too long and assorted Arab autocracies too expediently, ‘the Arab street’ has finally had enough.

Humiliated by years of military occupation, perceived Western economic exploitation and Israeli prosperity, now even half-baked American amateur movies inspire a violent reaction.

While I do not want to discount such sensitivity as an explanation for the rage among a small minority of Muslims, I think the wider cognitive dissonance on which it rests deserves mention.

The demise of the British Empire, which loosed Arab nationalism and contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, was acquiesced in, and often actively supported, by Washington.

The US was a key agent in the fall of British power across the developing world – baulking only when these newly liberated states looked like going communist, not when they became more Islamic.

The US has not always supported Israel. In 1956, then president Eisenhower refused to aid Israel, France and Britain in their war against Arab Egypt – setting the stage for a rebirth of pan-Arab nationalism. Saddam Hussein rode this wave to power in Iraq and created an Arab dictatorship that the US went on to support in the 1980s.

President Nixon in 1973 forced a peace deal on Israel that saved the Egyptian Third Army from almost certain destruction by Israel. Thereafter, Egypt became one of the chief recipients of US aid (alongside Vietnam, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan).

In the disastrous Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), President Reagan supported Arab Iraq against Persian Iran. Before Iraq became the enemy, it was America’s ally against Iran.

Simultaneously, the US covertly funded the Islamist mujahideen in their successful war against the Soviet Union.

Without US support, the rise of the Taliban and their subsequent support of al-Qaeda would likely not have happened.

In 1991, a US-led coalition liberated the small Arab monarchy of Kuwait from Baathist, socialist Saddam Hussein. US troops were thereafter deployed to Saudi Arabia to protect it from possible attack from Iraq.

After the Cold War, the US extended this Muslim bias beyond the Middle East. In 1995, NATO forces bombed Christian Serbs to the negotiating table in Dayton, Ohio. The creation of an ethnically Muslim state in former Yugoslavia – Bosnia Herzegovina – was the direct consequence of US military force. Many European leaders were content to see the Serbs win; Bill Clinton was not.

In 1999, he repeated this approach. Kosovo would almost certainly not have become an independent, Muslim-majority state had America not guaranteed its viability by, again, bombing Christian Serbs, this time targeting Belgrade. Within months, the virulently Islamophobic Slobodan Milosevic was on trial in The Hague.

Such American foreign policy did not elicit Islamist approbation. Rather, in perhaps the first indication of the cognitive dissonance we see today, jihadists plotted and planned 9/11. Nothing the US did was enough to shift an Islamist caricature of America as an anti-Islamic power.

If such actions on behalf of Arab/Muslim interests were insufficient to appease jihadists, how can better American public diplomacy be expected to do that? And yet this was the pretext of President Obama’s initial rapprochement with the Arab street – engagement and soft power would bring gains that hard, military power had not.

Soft power, however, has had a decidedly marginal influence, as we saw last week.

Like Bush before him, Obama soon found himself at war in a Muslim country (Libya), the success of which stimulated the Islamist rage, so long retarded by Muammar Gaddafi, that is currently burning US flags and murdering US diplomats. How do we explain the enmity of the liberated against their liberators? Cognitive dissonance.

It is a psychosis that leads men to march in Sydney with banners demanding the decapitation of those who deny Islam is a religion of peace, to applaud the brave nineteen Arabs who brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11 while maintaining it was the Jews who did it, and to condemn the West for its feminism, abortion rights and pornography, ignoring the fact it affords Muslims greater freedom of religion and opportunity than any state with a nominally Muslim government.

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the holding of two or more conflicting cognitions simultaneously. It is a psychosis that lies beyond the power of any US president to resolve.

But remembering history more accurately would be a good place to start.

Dr Timothy Lynch is a senior lecturer in American Politics at the University of Melbourne.