Nation building: We invaded Islam
"You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can't they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?"
Lyrics: Bye Bye Birdie
The United States is the exceptional country. With God's blessing, America does things right. We are the City on the Hill.
We have the right Constitution, the right religion, the right system of market capitalism, the right treatment of women, the right understanding of modesty and dress, the right treatment of minorities within our culture. We have the Bill of Rights. We have sound business practices, honest government, and a solid tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one leader to the next. We have a grand and glorious history that our children should learn and cherish.
Foreigners would be a lot happier it they did it our way. And yet, even when people from shit-hole places are given every good opportunity to learn from us, sometimes they insist on worshiping false gods, continuing inferior cultural practices, choosing poor leaders.
I suspect readers will sense I am being sarcastic and playful, like the Bye Bye Birdie lyrics. But nearly all my readers are Americans, and I suspect most of us feel comfortable in--or at least accustomed to--our way of life here. We acknowledge that America isn't perfect, but feel our system of government is pretty good considering the alternatives, that our culture's treatment of women is certainly better than what we see in fundamentalist Islam, that capitalism is better than communism or whatever else is out there, and that the Afghan government we have been supporting for 20 years is clearly better than the Taliban. Therefore, the collapse of the Afghan government and its replacement by the Taliban is a gigantic misfortune, certainly unwelcome to the Afghani people, who now will face brutal oppression by their own leaders.
And yet, after 20 years of support and instruction, the Afghan government and army folded and turned their weapons over to the Taliban without a fight.
Constance Hilliard is a college classmate, another member of the cohort imprinted by the war in Vietnam and its various lessons. She responded to the comment of Dolf Garcia, a Boston lawyer and yet another classmate. He observed:
Most of what we do is well intentioned, but based on our culture and how we envision life. Most other cultures reject and do not want much of what we want, have, seek and stand for.
Constance Hilliard stayed at Harvard and completed her Ph.D. in history. She studied African and Near Eastern History and is a professor of history in Texas. Her scholarship has examined differences among people and the errors policymakers make when they assume people want and need the same things. Our sense of the "normal average American" misleads us because we imagine an unrepresentative reference group--White Americans, i.e. "us." This led her to insights about the very differing medical needs of people with roots in different parts of Africa, people now living in the U.S. experiencing high blood pressure and dying younger. People whose ancestors adapted to salt-poor places in West Africa have different kidney function than do "regular Americans." They retain salt, a necessary adaption. The American medical and nutrition standards profoundly misunderstood them. American medicine is as ethnocentric and narrow as are policy-makers in assuming the bodies of White Americans set a universal standard.
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
America learned nothing from the Vietnam fiasco because of arrogance and the racist assumption that we're more intelligent than non-westerners. And I was heart sick when the U.S. invaded Iraq, even though my business interests in Kuwait had collapsed on account of Saddam's earlier invasion. Everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment knew that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were ferocious enemies and that such an invasion made no sense. Rather than criminalizing 9/11 and going after the individual actors, which Mideast countries would have supported us in, the U.S. foolishly decided to invade Islam and we got beat.
Regardless of what Eisenhower did or didn't do, he nailed it when he warned us "to beware the military industrial complex." The military is plowing us under with lies. But Trump's election and the MAGA insurrectionists have given me a somewhat different perspective on all of these dishonorable wars we've engaged in since WW II. It is this. At last count, 74 million Americans just so happen to know nothing about world geography and politics and prefer to remain ignorant. However, they are easily persuaded to get out the AR-15s at any real or imagined provocation. Even though Trump's base wanted for us to get out of meaningless wars, they also happen to be the folks who voted in the Republicans that kept us in those wars.
It's not a few culprits, like the military brass plus the Bushes and Cheneys of the world. It's the fascist, racist, know-nothing ethos of at least half of the American population.