Where America and the Muslim world meet

I just read Ross Douthat's thoughtful column about two different conceptions of what it means to be an American. It struck a chord, particularly as I'm halfway through (and thoroughly engrossed in) Richard Perlstein's Nixonland, a nearly 900 page tome that traces the widening fissure between these two Americas during the Nixon years.

Douthat uses this lens to look at the current controversy over the proposed mosque that would be located near the World Trade Center site:

The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.

But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.

I agreed over the weekend with President Obama's comments about the mosque and its planners' right to build it. The president, however, is also pursuing a course with respect to a mostly Muslim part of the world which I don't support: a secret, shadow offensive against America's enemies--as he defines them--that relies on drones and cruise missiles rather than American boots on the ground. This approach can't be a long term path to U.S. security: it can only recruit the next generation of those willing to attack us.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties....

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

And the more I read about the insanity of the Vietnam war in Nixonland, the more I see parallels in Afghanistan: billions of dollars spent on an objective made nearly impossible by the fact that it's an American, and not Afghani, one.

ONE OF THE MOST INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS I've heard recently about America's security in this post-911 world is this Talk of the Nation interview with former CIA official and historian Graham Fuller. From his book A World Without Islam, which argues that our relationship with the Middle East wouldn't be significantly different in the absence of Islam:

Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the "immaculate conception" theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.

There is a further irony here: How can a nation like the US, which expresses such powerful outpourings of patriotism and ubiquitous unfurling of the flag on all occasions, seem quite obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries? Washington never fared very well in the Cold War in understanding the motives and emotions of the nonaligned world; it dismissed or even suppressed inconvenient local nationalist aspirations, thereby ending up pushing a large grouping of countries toward greater sympathy with the Soviet Union. This was a kind of strategic blindness that viewed other nations’ interests and preferences as something that needed to be hemmed in, or isolated. We have been obtuse toward nationalism and identity issues in the Middle East and have lumped it all into the basket of "Islam."

And this:

History did not begin with 9/11. Our dealings with the Middle East go back a long way. The attack on 9/11 was a violent, extremist, and outrageous act, but it was also almost a culmination of a preceding chain of events over many years. If we choose to see history beginning at 9/11 — whereby we suddenly become the sole justifiably aggrieved party, now authorized to bring vigilante justice to the world — then we will continue to do what we have been doing all along, with disastrous consequences evident to all.

Those words--history did not begin with 9/11--stuck in my head even before I began reading Nixonland. I'm a child of the 60s. My parents were hippies. I think I have a decent grasp of history. But over the last few days I've started to flesh out in my mind events that were remarkably hazy for all of their proximity to my childhood. The Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the '68 Democratic convention, for example, aren't just signposts anymore. And I have a clearer picture now of why issues like gun rights carry so much significance for conservatives.

I've long been familiar with the events of the 60s, yet I think I operated in a common illusion, one that most people experience. It's similar to the one that Fuller describes when he speaks of his "immaculate conception" theory of how governments see the world.

Deep down we all sort of imagine that history began with us.