Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

attempt to relieve the persecution of another.”

crisis of Israel and the Arab world with varying analyses and prescriptions that didn’t involve an Islamic revival.

After the missionaries came the oil speculators.

“The Americans were something completely new and strange,” Munif writes, “in their actions, their manners and the kind of questions they asked,

not to mention their generosity, which surpassed that of all previous visitors.”

“Why were they barred from going near an American house, even from looking at the swimming pool or standing for a moment in the shade of one of their trees? Why did the Americans shout at them, telling them to move, to leave the place immediately, expelling them like dogs?”

while for Munif, the discovery of oil and the American occupation of Arabia “was a breaking off, like death, that nothing and no one could ever heal.”

Time and again, the Americans saw nationalism as support for Moscow, not an assertion of independence.

Eisenhower would eventually turn his back on Nasser, and Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination, completely.

When Nasser died, citizens around the world wept. The antagonism of Arab nationalism by the Americans helped to open a social vacuum for Islamism, and, in Egypt, for the Muslim Brotherhood.

the Americans wanted the Egyptians to accept a degradation of their own military prowess in order to elevate Israel as the dominant force in the region. The foreign minister of Egypt said afterward: “I almost died of disgrace, disgust, and grief as I witnessed this tragedy unfold.”

The era of the 1950s when Europeans and others embraced American goods slid into an era of unease about the new corporate imperial onslaught.

products and imperialism when I visited a small museum in Istanbul

horror. Imagine a military coup in the United States staged by China or Russia or Iran. Imagine the imposition of political and cultural ideas completely antithetical to your own. Imagine the outrage, and the paranoia one might have, forever suspecting that some incalculably

forever. Imagine this as an American, for whom the definition of one’s identity is to be forever impervious to such an unimaginable fate.

Britain was a much freer society: they were okay with having a history, veiled women on the street, punks protesting the state, conservatives and leftists in the parliament, etc. Back in Istanbul, it was all clean and military-like and soulless and dead. The coup made us all self-repressors.

The long-oppressed Kurds, the ones who rebelled against Atatürk’s daughter Sabiha Gökçen, who could not legally speak their language or watch Kurdish television shows, and who suffered from discrimination in the workplace, on the street, and in school, began agitating for independence. Many Kurds joined a militant group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. When I moved to Istanbul, in 2007, most of the Kurds I met had a family member who had, as they said, “gone to the mountains,” to join the PKK and fight the Turkish state.

“It has always been like that,” he replied. “The United States prefers the large states more than the people without power.”

especially in Egypt, where, by the time of the invasion of Iraq, the period of forced political and economic submission had become unbearable.

“Coercion is not exercised directly by the hand of the colonizer but at the hand of his local agents.” Thus the schemes of modernization theory through right-wing dictatorships that had been drawn up at the most esteemed educational institutions in America had succeeded in vanquishing human will.

clash of civilizations is that it dismisses grievances against the West that are completely genuine: its blind support for Israel, its propping up of dictators, its brutal economic policies, and its stunning carelessness with Arab lives. “Bin

“The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers,” he said, “is that they all hated America.”

He meant the bombs of 1991, which nearly destroyed Baghdad and killed thousands of people, and he meant the support for Saddam in the 1980s, which prolonged the Iran-Iraq War. And he meant the sanctions, which destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, “We think the price is worth it.”) The sanctions were still in effect when we invaded Iraq in 2003, but I remember hearing little about them. The Iraqi man said he despised America for the sanctions above all else.

It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.

While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality.

But such was our sense, rooted in modernization theory, that all other nations were decades behind us and thus needed our interference, all of these fantasies we held on to even as America’s own infrastructure—its airports, its roads, its hospitals, its schools—deteriorated.

It was because we did not see Iraqis as humans that we did not know that “democracy,” a word by then sucked of most of its meaning by the American century, might have mattered less to most parents than the ability to feed, house, educate, and protect their children.

struggled with the binary universe Americans created—wouldn’t someone want to resist it merely because of the hypocrisy? You can be free as long as you want our freedom.

But ISIS was born from the Iraqi occupation; it came from the Americans.

When we revert to the final solution of kill or be killed, all warring parties in the name of clan tribe nation religion violate the first law of civilization—that human life is precious. In this general collapse, one of the first victims is language. Words are deployed as weapons to identify, stigmatize, eliminate, the enemy. —JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

the correspondents’ voices, the concern for the fate of other countries. They had a necessary belief in the importance of journalism, not only because it was among the ways they could justify why they imperiled their bodies. These Americans had a purpose for living I had not yet glimpsed in my generation, and I suspected that the snide remarks often made about war journalists—that they were self-important—likely came from a place of profound envy and longing to do something for the greater good of the world. But what power did journalists have? How often did we hurt the very people we claimed to represent with our own muddled vision of the world, of America, of ourselves?

The contemporary occupations would instead become temporary containment strategies for chaos, market economies for occupation, a dream factory of empire.

workers, businessmen, journalists, and other civilians flourished in the base of the bowl-like city. Kabul, landlocked, ringed with improbably steep mountains, felt like a defiant fortress with its inhabitants peering out into the wild. A fragile, jagged peace saturated the everyday life, as if the manic effort to house, feed, and protect the executors of the war mostly amounted to staving off the chaos outside.

Walls obscured everything, so the streets felt like hallways—like a massive, mazelike skateboarding ramp, or a mental institution. You saw only the walls and the checkpoints and

lied to their Western patrons about their true opinions, refraining from leveling criticism out of courtesy. Americans took everything at face value. Communication broke down for cultural reasons. I was told this, yet for my first days in Kabul, part of me still believed one thing the Afghans said—that despite our many failings, they hoped the West wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t help it; they all said the same thing.

She had a lot to say about what was happening in Kabul. To her, Afghanistan—its apples rotting on the ground, its factories rusting, and its lapis lazuli mines inactive—was a kingdom of untapped wealth that hadn’t become much improved with the influx of aid projects. If Afghans in the countryside complained about bombs, Afghans in Kabul complained about USAID.

In the post-9/11 years, the United States spent $67 billion on civilian-aid programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Afghans like Syed knew that much of this money went to America’s own companies.

When the windows in the clinic didn’t close in winter, was it the responsibility of USAID or of some corporation they outsourced to?

There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.”

wasn’t sure how to explain to her that most Americans didn’t know whether or not their taxes had been raised to fund this war; that in America there was no draft; that in America we had an army staffed by farm kids and ghetto boys; that in America wars were waged because in America wars were easy to wage.

Eikenberry had brought up the same aid problem that Syed had: foreigners were not buying Afghan products. To rectify this, the American embassy had recently launched a new program called Afghan First.

Everybody in Kabul loved the phrase “capacity building.” Everyone talked about capacity building, building capacity, getting capacity up, improving, growing, and discovering capacity in the Afghans.

Baldwin and Camus and so many others had described Americans, as people with no sense of tragedy.

“They are just wasting our money.” He flicked his hand at the hotel and the food. “All this waste.”

As early as the 1970s, even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA, the Pakistanis, and the Iranians began funding religious fighters to subvert the Socialist regime in Kabul. Islam, they believed—as they would in Turkey—was the only force strong enough to defeat communism.

through which the United States sent arms to the Afghan mujahideen, and many of those weapons ended up in the hands of criminal groups and others throughout Karachi. “By the mid-eighties,” she says, “Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, and political parties—all armed. Street

Zia, the ally of Saudi Arabia and America. The weapons came with the building of more “Wahhabi mosques and madrasas.” Zia placed Shamsie’s uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. The future of Pakistan was changed forever by this American intervention, not only the political landscape and the possibilities of violence, but the way individuals related to God. As she notes: What was once devotion became fundamentalism.

“Please explain,” Shamsie asks, “why you are in our stories but we are not in yours.” She generously assumes that Americans want to fuse their own national stories with those of others, that they aspire to a greater complexity and understanding of their own motivations and actions. But as would become clear in Afghanistan, that was not at all what the Americans were trying to do.

They served to distract from the more awful truth: America’s killing, in the stale military language of the time, “eliminated” no “enemies”—

killed people and created more enemies. According to the journalist Anand Gopal,