House of Eratosthenes

…some Americans, including many in the press, honestly feel that the Bush administration is evil and its policies have led to Abu Ghraib and now to Haditha.

You’ll see this line of thinking all over the place in the coming weeks, but that’s like saying if one child turns out to be a criminal, the entire family’s bad. Most honest people acknowledge that the U.S. military has performed heroically and humanely under extremely difficult circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since President Bush is the commander in chief and Donald Rumsfeld’s in charge of military operations, don’t the heroics of our service people reflect well on them? If you blame Bush and Rumsfeld for the bad stuff, shouldn’t you praise them for the good stuff? Wouldn’t that be fair?

Now I suppose you could say no, Bill, it wouldn’t be fair; the heroics of the military forces are credited to those military forces alone. But then it’s awfully hard to intellectually support that the White House is to blame if/when those troops are caught torturing prisoners or murdering civilians. The point is, intellectual sturdiness demands either both or neither — hair-splitting finds a comfortable home only in the nurturing of a politicized agenda, not in the making of a reasoned argument.

It should be noted, however, that the anti-war left is two steps ahead of O’Reilly on this one. The evil that men do lives on long after them, so to speak, while the good is buried with the bones. The bad stuff leaves a far deeper imprint. Because of scandals like Abu Ghraib and Haditha, so goes the argument, America is seen as an agressor. As a tyrant. As a conquistador. This argument is easily understood.

Less easily understood is who is doing this seeing. We are seen…by whom? Who are those people seeing us this way?

I don’t mean to imply that such people do not exist. What I mean to do, is simply to ask the question that logically must be asked before the argument is admitted into what may be seriously considered. I mean to question, simply, who the “seers” are. It’s a reasonable question, since the argument is demanding I let those people decide everything, and resolve that anyone having a different viewpoint, is allowed to decide nothing.

To “google” the phrase “We Are Seen” is an interesting experience, somewhat akin to sipping from a fire hose. On May 13, this blogger said the following:

Now, in Somalia, al-Qaeda linked Islamicists are seen as the nations only hope against the civil wars of the warlords. The Islamicists are seen as they only chance for stability and we are seen as a destabilizing force.

Who sees us that way? To consider the point seriously, as I said above, we must know. Is it all of someone or a majority of someone? The blogger does not say.

A reader writes to the Times-Herald Record, New York, on May 7,

This administration has created an atmosphere in which we are seen as the imperialistic bully to many of our one-time allies – our soldiers are portrayed as torturers.

The author of the letter does not say who sees us that way.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, helped on March 28 to solve the mystery for me. The entity that sees us this way, are “alarming numbers of people”:

After 9/11 there was an outpouring of sympathy from every corner of the globe. Today, we are seen by alarming numbers of people as an aggressive, occupying bully that locks up innocent people indefinitely, humiliates and physically abuses them, and denies them the right to even know what they are accused of.

This is problematic. Alarming numbers of people hold viewpoints that are illegitimate, faulty, lacking in potential, and just plain wrong — all the time. Ask anybody who’s ever been in the minority about any issue.

Alice Slater, the anti-nuke activist, commenting on the 60th anniversary of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, said…

Breaking our promises for good faith efforts for nuclear disarmament in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, refusing to submit the Comprehensive Test Ban to the Senate for ratification, trashing the Anti-Ballistic Treaty to clear the way for dominating and controlling the military use of space–and spurring a new arms race to the heavens, developing new more useable nuclear weapons and planning to replace all the thousands we already have, we are seen as the nuclear bully, lawlessly menacingthe world with our might like some mad cowboy nation from the Wild West, while actually going to war without legal authority and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians under the false premise that Iraq was a nuclear threat to America.

Again, we’re a “bully.” Ms. Slater didn’t say specifically who sees us that way.

“Zero Political Capital” commented on July 15, 2005,

Not surprisingly, the world opinion of the United States is still pretty negative. We are seen throughout the Muslim world as a bully and a threat to Islam, and while the numbers aren’t as horrific as they were two years ago when we first invaded Iraq, they are still cause for concern.

Ah, we have a specific now: the Muslim world. How much of the Muslim world? “Thoughout” could mean 80%…it could mean 20%. The number must be something measureable — the text says so — but I don’t know what it is. How do we know what the number is? Was a poll taken? None that was discussed here.

John Dear wrote, in a column that appeared July 10, 2005,

Half the world considers the United States the leading terrorist in the world, by our public spokespeople remain clueless about what�s really going on. We are seen as terrorists by many around the world because we bombed and killed 100,000 people in Iraq in 2003, and because we have over 20,000 weapons of mass destruction, (many of them in my neighborhood in New Mexico), which we are willing to use on any nation that does not support “U.S. interests.”

There’s that magic phrase again, about us being seen a certain way. This time the entity so envisioning us, seems to be “half the world.” Zowie! That’s some kind of a poll! Well, nobody asked me.

Just before the elections of 2004, Manuel Valenzuela, writing for the Dissident Voice, said

Rightly or not, the last four years under the House of Bush have imputed Americans of all creeds, colors and classes with the personality of the man who expropriated the White House away from democracy, freedom and liberty. Worldwide, we are now seen as a nation of attention-deficit robots devoid of world knowledge or concern for anything beyond our borders. We are seen as selfish, gluttonous warmongers and imperialists concocting wars for profit, empire building and market colonialism, all at the expense of the rest of the world. Americans have become, in the eyes of the people of the world, easily manipulated and controlled beings living lavish lifestyles, distracted by bread and circus, and having cheap products through developing country slave labor and resource exploitation and pilferage.

The people of the world. There’s that worldwide poll again.

Perhaps Valenzuela was drawing for inspiration from Jesse Jackson’s comments on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling:

Our moral authority is born of the last 50 years of successful struggle by human rights and civil rights organizations. We were trapped on our own perverse use of power. In the Second World War we began to gain some. We were seen by the world as rescuers; now we are seen as invaders and occupiers and conquerors. We are choosing might over right. We are losing something dear. When I went to meet with the president of Sudan to challenge him about the humanitarian crisis � about 1.5 million people will die unless something happens quickly, and we need the U.S. to help � they said, “We don’t need your help. Based upon your presence in Iraq you don’t have the authority to tell us what to do. You invade and occupy and now you seek to conquer, you bomb thousands and you call it collateral damage, you cannot tell us what to do.”

Okay, now we have another entity to attach to this: the President of Sudan. Fine, the President of Sudan has an opinion, the President of the United States has a different opinion. Cool. Everybody has opinions. Why is it that the President of Sudan has an opinion, and suddenly, his viewpoint becomes the viewpoint of “the world”?

Stephen Bosworth, Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts, included in his address on the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the following:

In addition to what our response to September 11 has meant for us internally, I am even more concerned by what is happening to the relationship between ourselves and the rest of the world. In the weeks after September 11, there was a tremendous outpouring of grief and sympathy for the United States from virtually the entire world. Now, just two years later, that has changed dramatically and everywhere there has been a surge of anti-Americanism. We should, it seems to me, ask ourselves why this has happened and what we might do about it. We are seen as almost unimaginably powerful. But we are also seen as being frightened and therefore unpredictable. That combination is in turn frightening to the rest of the world, and the United States is now feared to an extent never before experienced.

There’s that “rest of the world” again. It sounds so much like someone took the time to go knocking door-to-door, which obviously could not have been the case.

There’s still more. And now, you see something interesting start to take form as you move further backward in recent history.

According to this blogger, sometime before March of 2004 the mideast editor of Newsweek had another epiphany about how we are “seen”:

A certain number of “facts” are apparent, but they have to do with sandstorms, troop movements, unforseen attacks by paramilitary Iraqi loyalists and unexpected events. The war is clearly more difficult than it was made out to be beforehand, and we are seen by many Iraqis as imperialist invaders rather than as humanitarian liberators. The mideast editor of Newsweek pointed this out last night on the NBC news.

“Many Iraqis.” Okay, that’s a specific, but the conclusion drawn has some problems. By this time, the opinion of “Iraqis” was acknowledged, by pro-war and anti-war people, as being mixed; Iraqis thought we were aggressors, and others thought we were liberators. Is it possible one of these mindsets can be completely legitimate and the other one is so much poppycock? I suppose it is, but not if you’re establishing a viewpoint as legitimate, just on the strenght of “many Iraqis” upholding it. Either that’s a sound test, or it isn’t. Obviously, to say “Idea A is a good idea when ‘many Iraqis’ sign onto it, but Idea B still sucks no matter how ‘many Iraqis’ agree with it,” is to push a political ideology — not to seriously and fairly consider the merits of A and/or B.

Moving back in time further, closer to the September 11 attacks themselves, we see something interesting. It seems a lot of this “seen” stuff comes from a sentiment that prevailed soon after the September 11 attacks, from the school of thought of indigenous guilt, the “we had it coming” mindset. Don Belt, senior editor of National Geographic magazine, touched on this in an interview from early 2002:

I think that we are seen as arrogant and bullying in our approach to the Muslim world and especially the Arab world. A number of the stories in The World of Islam touch on that point. The story on Pakistan in 1991 that Bill Ellis wrote…is an excellent reminder that a lot of times this tendency to blame the United States for the evils of societies�whether it’s impoverishment or whether it’s hopelessness�is a pervasive factor in these countries and has to be dealt with.

Google reveals that this isn’t a pervasive factor just in those countries, but in Portland, OR as well. There is this sermon from the First Unitarian Church just a couple weeks after the attacks:

Just as we are called to find the goodness that has come in response to the attacks, we also have to at least try to know what has caused a group of people to do these horrible things. One of the awakenings for me has been how we as Americans are so terribly isolated from the rest of the world and these attacks have been a wake-up call to see how at least some people in the world view us. We are seen as the big rich bully with all of the power. Our actions in the past have played a part in what is happening now.

There is a point to all this, and it isn’t a pretty one. When you say something is “seen” a certain way, you may pack a powerful punch in intimidating people toward your point-of-view, but you prove very little. What you’re really saying is that someone, somewhere, whether you name them or not, has a certain opinion. And this says, precisely, nothing. That’s the long and the short of it — nothing. Back in the olden days before we invaded Iraq, it was an important ramification to be considered, or at least, might have been. In my view, it was a realistic, pragmatic approach to say “think twice about invading Iraq, because we are seen as xxx and the message sent will make this a lot worse.” I still agreed with invading Iraq. I still agree with it now. But I agreed then, and agree now, with taking into account what the perception would be from outside. There was wisdom in this. A lot of bad decisions, have it in common with each other that they became bad decisions when someone forgot to consider the messages sent in executing them.

With that decision a thing of the past, this principle has fallen away into irrelevance. The “seen” argument has lost all meaning as a tool of diplomacy, and retains use only as a tool of inference: We must be invaders, and we must be bullies, because that is how we are “seen.” Well, moose feces on that.

Whether you’re generalizing over a world, part of a world, a country, a faith — it’s wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy to say people within the class you’ve defined “see” things a certain way. Five people will have five different perspectives — five thousand, will have that many more. To define a single perspective to which all in your defined class will cling, is a foolhardy ambition, one which reality is sure to confound. That’s the first problem. Second problem is, human history is just one big chronicle of people seeing things other than the way those things really are. Human affairs are recognized for what they are, even by those you would think to be close enough to assess them accurately, about as often as a football bounces rightside-up. As an indicator of what’s going on, human perception…pretty much sucks.

Give me an opinion, no matter how nonsensical you make it out to be, someone, somewhere, has that opinion. To point out simply that someone has it, therefore, is tantamount to saying nothing at all. Not that someone isn’t willing to waste time and breath pointing it out anyway. I have an impressive collection up there of “we are seen” quotes. It is just scratching the surface, believe me.

My point is simply this: It’s past high time someone was called to account for who is doing all this “seeing.” I mean, given how much weight the rest of us are being expected to put on these opinions, nurtured as those opinions are, by people we’ve never met.

Thing I Know #50. The decisions we make out of a sense of fair play, an appreciation for fun, a sense of responsibility, a sense of concern, and even a sense of entitlement, we sometimes remember fondly. The decisions we make out of guilt, we never do.

Great post. Keep up the good work.
- Good Lieutenant | 06/02/2006 @ 05:57
[…] Sixteen years later, we have been dutifully fed our talking points that the United States is seen by our “allies” as an oppressor. Most people who believe this uncritically, fail to […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 04/05/2008 @ 11:07

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