Innocents Abroad

By GIL TROY

The Forward, NOVEMBER 2, 2001

Day after day, America's latest war looks more and more Orwellian. A coalition whose reason for being is to oppose terrorism includes such long-time sponsors of terrorism as Iran, the Palestinians and the newest member of the United Nations Security Council, Syria. President George W. Bush wants Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists "dead or alive," yet Mr. Bush's State Department condemns Israel's assassination of the Hamas operative who masterminded the murder of 21 teenagers at Tel Aviv's Dolphinarium disco. Meanwhile, playing to the Arab street and the blame-America-firsters, bin Laden embraces the Palestinian cause, while Yasser Arafat desperately tries to distance the Palestinians from bin Laden.

For good measure, Mr. Arafat, the grand-daddy of Middle East terrorism, proclaims in London: "We are against all forms of terrorism, including state-sponsored terrorism," and that "Islam as a religion forbids anyone to harm any civilians, any innocent people, around the world." Mr. Arafat's host, Mr. Bush's ally Tony Blair, keeps silent, while the press dutifully reports Mr. Arafat's words without a hint of irony.

It is too facile to dismiss these dangerous farces as further proof that the world hates the Jews. In fact, something deeper and more quintessentially American is occurring. For all the claims that September 11 transformed the world, America is approaching this new and unprecedented threat in old and familiar ways.

Let's face it. Foreign policy never has been America's strong suit. George Washington's celebration in his Farewell Address of "our detached and distant situation," his hope that "we may defy material injury from external annoyance," still resonates. Whether we are seen as "Ugly Americans" or "Innocents Abroad," Americans are often unsteady overseas. The stereotypical American tourist — miffed that everyone does not speak English everywhere — is an international comedic staple. If they had their druthers, most Americans would have no foreign policy at all. A century after the Spanish-American War launched the American empire, half a century after America saved the world in World War II, isolationism persists.

This isolationist delusion that we can avoid being targeted by others often makes Americans abandon missions when they get messy. American leaders were so sensitive to the deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers in Somalia and the 241 Marines in Beirut precisely because foreign engagement seems optional, not mandatory. Policy makers know they will have to explain to a skeptical constituency, and to grieving mothers, why they chose to put young soldiers "in harm's way."

This instinctive — and often illusory — isolationism shapes one of Americans' most endearing and infuriating characteristics: our innocence abroad. The cry of "Why do they hate us?" welling up these past few weeks speaks volumes. Islamic fundamentalist anti-Americanism may be news to many Americans, but it is not new at all. We saw it in the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. We felt it in the bombing of our embassies in Lebanon, Kenya and Tanzania. We experienced it all too close to home in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

"Why do they hate us" often means "how could they possibly hate us?" We are, after all, America the good, America the democratic, America the just and America the fun. Who, many of us ask, could quarrel with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States? Who in the world could hate McDonald's or Disneyland? We are a nation that wants to be loved, that hates being feared and that apparently cannot get it through our collective head that other countries' fear of us is simply part of being respected.

Our isolationist innocence also sustains an opposing impulse — an idealistic internationalism. Our "shining city on the hill," our "New World," provides a self-conscious model for improving the "Old World." As a result, we seek a foreign policy bathed in idealism and swathed in the warm embrace of alliances. When fighting, we drop breadbaskets along with bombs. That is why Mr. Bush's rhetoric about America-the-good fighting evil sounds remarkably like his father's rhetoric during the Gulf War in 1991 and Franklin Roosevelt's rhetoric in 1941 and Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric in 1914. Different wars, different circumstances, yet strikingly similar talk.

Here, then, are the four "I"s that historically have shaped American foreign policy and that continue to pose challenges to American success in this new and unsought war. Our isolationism leaves us badly prepared us to understand the cultural dimensions of the clash. So our president tries to mount a politically correct war, one that fails to call upon all good Muslims in the United States and elsewhere to do what they need to do to remove the cancer of fundamentalist terrorism from their midst. Our innocence may lead us to pull our punches, worrying that we may end up feared and not loved. Our idealism may muddy our message, making us look like weak social workers airlifting provisions rather than fierce warriors avenging slaughtered citizens. Our internationalism has already led us to the strangest of bedfellows.

Even World War II was a mixed success. America "won." Yet Americans felt more insecure than ever when it ended. The great diplomat George F. Kennan attributed America's failure to "our general ignorance of the historical processes of our age, particularly from our lack of attention to the power realities involved in given situations." America has long been an ambivalent superpower. But if, indeed, we are a superpower, we need to use our strength to crush our enemies single-handedly, if necessary, and without abandoning loyal friends, enduring principles or logic.