Edinburgh 2002

Book Festival

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
& Ziauddin Sardar
Eye on America: East and West, Thursday 15 August

Peter Rossi

Ziauddin Sardar, author of 'Why do people hate America?', and Professor Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of 'Cloak and Dollar', attempted to justify today's prevalent anti-Americanism to a packed marquee.

Jeffreys-Jones was the more moderate of the two, stating that he is not 'anti-American' whilst Sardar loves and hates the country in equal 'measure'. They were right to discuss intelligence agency meddling in foreign countries as a source of antagonism, and equally correct to highlight the bungling relations with Arab nations. For example, there were no Pashtun speakers in the intelligence community at the time of 9/11. This is especially surprising as America is a nation of migrants, who should have been able to provide the cosmopolitan aspect that the agencies were missing. Instead, according to Jeffreys-Jones, the CIA recrutied mainly from Ivy League universities and the recruits' language skills were provided by their wives who had gone to finishing school in Switzerland.

Another pertinent point is the huge defence budget in the US that plays an important role in the economy. In turn, the US government has to maintain this spending and does so by creating enemies, the latest of which is the 'axis of evil'. Whilst I am not sure that the US economy would collapse without wars, as Sardar claimed, the influence of defence lobbying is not generally beneficient.

However, the talk was generally based on the tacit assumption that it is OK to hate America, and that we therefore in some way need to justify this. Furthermore, it was not made clear whether this hatred was aimed at contemporary administrations or at the very ideals that have made the country the power it is. If it is solely the former, it is less of a problem because there are, and have been, serious flaws, not least the manner of George W Bush's election. However, if the criticism is of the principles on which America is based, such as liberty and property, then it is unintelligent at best.

If this is the source of the accusations, we should first look at the backward Arab nations (see the UN Development Report 2002) or "that shitty little country Israel" (alleged to have been said by the French ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard, in 2001). Now these comments are often rejected as racist, yet to use similar language when discussing America is somehow acceptable. I do not find any of the above comments racist, I am only highlighting the hypocrisy of the criticism heard this morning.

Another issue, which the chair Claire Fox tried to raise, is the accusation of arrogance, made particularly by Sardar. The Americans are arrogant, that is why we everyone hates them, is the sum of this unenlightened view. However, surely Americans can be proud of their country's acheivements and self made status in the world without being accused of arrogance? Do they have to succumb to the stupid notion of equality?

This raises the question as to whether jealousy is actually at the base of anti-Americanism. There are some intelligent critiques of current American practice, as found in The Last Empire by Gore Vidal (2002), that rise well above base jealousy. Unfortunately, these opinions are far outnumbered by nihilistic hatred in Arab nations which is the product of their predicament of corrupt rulers, oppression of half of their populations and the pernicious consequences of religious dictatorship.