Get some balls, Democrats. I understand, liberal politicians in D.C., that you have been browbeaten since the late 70's, and so you're major league whimps. But the fact is there's A LOT more of you than there are of them. And there's a lot more of us than of conservatives. And there's a lot more pragmatists than ideologues.

We've got solutions, implement them.

A Review of the new book "How They See Us: Meditations on America", edited by James Atlas and John Oakes

I begin with the payoff: this is an excellent book well worth reading. The books’ content, 21 essays from writers around the world, is at turns saddening, heartening, anger-inspiring, informative and insightful. It teems with tremendously well thought out and well written pieces that will educate even the studious about The United States’ place in the post 9/11 and post-Iraq war world.

Cleverly, the title of the book both hides and hints at its central conceit, the issue many of the writers focus on in their analysis: The title’s use of the commonplace ‘America’ to refer to the United States of America and the grouping pronoun ‘they’ to refer to roughly 6 billion people of wildly different backgrounds are emblematic of the apparent obliviousness of the American people in general and the willfully dismissive nature of American foreign policy over the last 30+ years. In short, the authors are quick to remind us that ‘America’ is much more than The United States of America and that the world, though enamored by American popular culture, is not a stage on which our country may play alone.

The irony of the book’s title given its goal of enlightening us to what’s happened to the country’s reputation since 9/11 and Iraq may give some pause but the lessons it contains are just too important to overlook. Among the things that struck me are the authors’ reports that we are seen overwhelmingly as ‘militarist’, and the extent to which our government is reviled not just for the Iraq debacle but for our hand in creating and supporting the Pinochet government in Chile, something about which I embarrassingly know little.

I think even most liberal and anti-war Americans would be as surprised as I was to learn we are thought of as militarist given how the post-Vietnam era has evinced that Americans and American politicians have repeatedly claimed a lack of political will to risk even one American life for places as worthy of intervention as, e.g. Kosovo and Rwanda. Even the first gulf war required a lot of selling – and international assurances – to get done. Indeed, the George W Bush years withstanding, an American of a certain age might be forgiven if they thought that Americans and liberal politicians genuinely disliked going to war. These people, who it may be said make up the majority of the country, might point out that conservative elements in our government made intervention in Kosovo and Rwanda impossible and the Iraq war possible. Yet it is made evident here that in the eyes of the world this internal struggle does not mitigate what they see as our militarism.

This brings me to the one real criticism I have of the piece, it has to do with the only contribution that tries to give an ‘Iraq perspective’ on the effect the Iraq war has had on America’s image. Given that the post 9/11 world has been in many ways dominated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and so many authors make clear that this move was the main cause in the U.S.’s loss of the sympathy and empathy it received from the rest of the world after 9/11, having an essay with a perspective “from Iraq” was mandatory for this book.

The piece, written by an Iraqi-Canadian, must be looked at from two vantage points – the writer’s intention with the essay and the merits of its inclusion in a compilation of various authors. The author appears to have intended to write a “shock and awe” piece, something that would smack the oblivious among us into awareness and shame even those of us who acknowledged from the start that the Iraq war was unnecessary, immoral and probably illegal – and thus protested and voted accordingly. The author has a talent for dramatically simplifying the political landscape of the country and the moral problems involved in being the citizen of a large Republic. And in the piece she shows little patience for the vagaries and intrigue of global politics. It may be that the reader will find these simplifications and lack of patience are virtues. To me, they are incongruous with the thoughtful and studied analyses and subtle anger, disappointment and sometimes hope offered in other essays within this collection and thus lead me to question why it was selected by the editors.

Perhaps the inclusion of this piece is a subtle nudge to the readers by the editors. Perhaps they are reaching through the pages to tell us that while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a horrible blunder, it might not be the sole criterion or final word on which to judge our nation – its people or its government. To do so out of rage is to be a bit careless, a bit loose in one’s thinking and destructive rather than to be constructive with one’s moral indignation. In the end, this is not a major problem because other pieces offer much more on Iraq. And as a concerned reader I’m grateful and encouraged to know that so many thoughtful people took the time to delve so deeply into themselves regarding how they perceive ‘America’ and express themselves so beautifully and authentically in these pages.

A couple of quotes from two of the pieces, the first from Palestine and the second from Venezuela, help sum up the thinking put in making and the benefits of reading this book. The author from Venezuela summarizes the negative but intellectually deep spectrum of this work explaining that his

trip to Iraq was the only thing capable of giving me back the measure of doubt I needed to fully abandon the myth of the United States as a nation capable of contributing to peace (262-263)

while the Palestinian author, representing a people who may have as much reason as any to hate the United States, offers a well considered “positive” balance, offering that

hysterical calls to condemn anything American are the product of second-rate analysis and miserable over-simplification. Such calls are part of the problem and not part of the solution (208)

Both positions, and others, are given a solid defense in this book and if that were its only virtue it would command your attention.