Euroblogger

Pop-Tarts or Freedom?

January 16, 2005
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN





In the wake of U.S. aid to help Muslim and other victims of
the recent tsunami, Colin Powell suggested that maybe, now
that the Muslim world had seen "American generosity" and
"American values in action," it wouldn't be so hostile to
America.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a thank-you card. If the
fact that American soldiers have risked their lives to save
the Muslims of Bosnia, the Muslims of Kuwait, the Muslims
of Somalia, the Muslims of Afghanistan and the Muslims of
Iraq has earned the U.S. only the false accusation of being
"anti-Muslim," trust me, U.S. troops passing out bottled
water and Pop-Tarts in Indonesia are not going to erase
that lie. It is not an exaggeration to say that, if you
throw in the Oslo peace process, U.S. foreign policy for
the last 15 years has been dominated by an effort to save
Muslims - not from tsunamis, but from tyrannies, mostly
their own theocratic or autocratic regimes.

It clearly has not made much of an impression. So you will
pardon me if I say that I don't care whether the state
media in Saudi Arabia - whose government gave far less to
the Muslim tsunami victims ($30 million) than the amount
spent by King Fahd's entourage on his last two vacations in
Marbella (reportedly $100 million) - say nice things about
us.

I believe the tensions between us and the Muslim world stem
primarily from the conditions under which many Muslims
live, not what we do. I believe free people, living under
freely elected governments, with a free press and with
economies and education systems that enable their young
people to achieve their full potential, don't spend a lot
of time thinking about who to hate, who to blame, and who
to lash out at. Free countries don't have leaders who use
their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all
of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Ah, you say, but the Europeans live in free-market
democracies and they have become very anti-American. Yes,
some of them. But for Europeans, anti-Americanism is a
hobby. For too many in the Muslim world it has become a
career.

I am sure that young Taiwanese, young Koreans, young
Japanese, young Poles and young Indians have their views on
America, but they are not an obsession. They want our jobs,
not our lives. They live in societies that empower their
young people to realize their full potential and to express
any opinion - pro-American, anti-American or neutral.

So I don't want young Muslims to like us. I want them to
like and respect themselves, their own countries and their
own governments. I want them to have the same luxury to
ignore America as young Taiwanese have - because they are
too busy focusing on improving their own lives and
governance, running for office, studying anything they want
or finding good jobs in their own countries.

The Bush team is certainly not fostering all this when it
mismanages a war it launched to liberate the people of
Iraq. Its performance has been pathetic, and I understand
anyone on the right or the left who wants to wash his hands
of the whole thing. Speaking personally, though, I am still
hoping that these Iraqi elections come off - out of respect
for the Iraqis who have been ready to risk their lives for
a chance to vote, out of contempt for the insurgents who
want to prevent that and out of a deep conviction that
something very important is at stake.

No, these elections won't change Iraq or the region
overnight, and Thomas Jefferson is not on the ballot. But
they will at least kick off what the Iraq expert Yitzhak
Nakash calls "a real, Iraqi political process run by and
for Iraqis."

That Iraqi political process "has to begin now to enable
the U.S. to get out sooner rather than later," added Mr.
Nakash, a Brandeis professor and currently a fellow at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center. "The U.S. must go
ahead with the elections in Iraq, accept the likelihood
that Shiites and Kurds will do well, and leave the door
open to Sunnis to join as partners in writing the Iraqi
constitution. We want a system there that answers to the
aspirations of Iraqis, not Americans. That is the key to a
legitimate Iraqi government."

Before the war, I said of Iraq, "We break it, we own it."
Today, my motto is, "If they own it, they'll fix it."
America's standing in the Muslim world will improve, not
when we get a better message, but when they have more
control. People with the responsibility and opportunity to
run their own lives focus on their own lives - not on us.
More of that would be a very good thing.