I read this interesting exchange at the Alas Babylon yahoo group.

Muslim Hatred of USA

A.Darimont
Alas Babylon

I am amazed that some in the US do not realize the peril you face. I would be afraid if President Bush didn’t crank up the war against Iraq specifically. If Iraq acquires nuclear weapons there is a fairly likely chance that they will be used against the US; Saddam seethes with revenge and hatred of the US.

Oh, and the rest of the world doesn’t hate the sitting president so much as they just hate the US. CNN published an interesting poll yesterday – 15% of those polled in Muslim countries felt that the Sept. 11 attacks were morally justified. The Muslim world has about 1 billion people, so that means that 150,000,000 Muslim people feel that the attempted murder of 50,000 plus innocent Americans was morally justified. That level of hatred is not influenced by political party affiliation!

Here’s another interesting statistic – only 28% of Kuwaitis have a favourable opinion of the US. Amazing! It was only a decade ago that the US saved their country. During that decade US foreign policy was pro-Muslim in Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia (forget Black Hawk Down and remember the primary mission which was to prevent the starvation of hundreds of thousands).

One more interesting statistic – 77% felt that US military action in Afghanistan was morally unjustified, only 9% felt it was justified. Never mind that the action removed a repressive hated (locally) regime or that the US was after the greatest mass murderers of Americans in history. One may conclude that the use of any force by the US for any reason is hated and resented.

What will happen when that level of hatred is coupled with weapons of mass destruction?

My Response

Tom
Alas Babylon

I acknowledge your point about the intransigent and often completely irrational hatred of the US among the muslims of the world. But US policy in the middle east has not been quite as benign as you present it.

During the Iraq war, for example, well over 135,000 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered by US bombing, and some 500,000 Iraqi children have since died due to the economic sanctions and continued bombing of the last 10 years. And however totally evil Osama Bin Laden is, recall that George Bush is, by many reliable estimates, already responsible for as many innocent deaths in Afghanistan as Bin Laden was in New York. If we go to war in Iraq, that number will simply increase. So while the Afghani intelligentsia in Kabul are no doubt grateful to have a pestilentially oppressive fundamentalist regime removed from their shoulders, I doubt that the same sentiment is shared among the simple and devout peasants throughout the countryside who have been dodging a hail of bombs and starving to death in a ruined world. We just don’t hear about them on Pentagon-filtered CNN.

This whole idea that “we’re good, they’re evil” is precisely akin to the kind of thinking you deplore (as I do) in the Muslim fundamentalists themselves. And it will lead to nothing but mayhem.

What is the solution? I wish I knew. But I’m quite sure that going on the warpath against any and every Muslim country that has the capacity to build big weapons is not exactly going to increase our security…It will have quite the opposite effect, I fear; for every time we turn another innocent civilian into “collateral damage,” we have assuredly created, in all their kin, potential new recruits for Al Qaeda…

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