A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| The return of the Ugly American |
|---|
| jaihoon |
| 03/24/02 at 02:43:11 |
| The return of the Ugly American ONLY IN AMERICA / CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2002 12:43:40 PM ] t’s now nearly half a century since the publication in the 1950s of the political bestseller The Ugly American, a searing expose of American arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence that immortalised the title of the book. Based on an account of US policies in a fictional South East Asian named Sarkhan (which could easily have been Vietnam or Cambodia), authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick describe how American diplomats and government workers in foreign countries often have no connection with the local population. Living behind high embassy compounds, zipping around in fancy cars to diplomatic parties, and proffering expensive projects, they often ignore the immediate and basic local needs, and are hopelessly isolated from the local population. Ironically, the "Ugly American" is the book’s hero, not the villain. Homer Atkins is a physically ugly American who rolls up his sleeves, hops on to a bicycle, and pedals off into the countryside to work on the everyday problems of the locals. He befriends a local Sarkhanese named Jeepo, and together they design a bicycle-based water pump to irrigate the terraced rice fields on the hillsides. This simple practical device earns the American more gratitude than all the guns and butter his government has planned for in its foreign aid budget. It is not the American who is ugly but America which is ugly. Widely hailed when it was first published, the book briefly held up a beacon of light for the Eisenhower administration and helped understand why Washington was rapidly losing ground to communism in the region. The lessons were never fully learnt, and before long, Washington was wiped out in many areas for the next several decades. But communism and socialism too failed to provide all the answers, and towards the late 1980s, America was back in business everywhere it had lost ground. The question is, had Washington learnt its lesson? On the face of it – no. There could have been several sequels to The Ugly American with some real countries – Panama, Peru, and Pakistan, for instance – substituted for the fictional Sarkhan. In almost every instance, well-intentioned US aid rarely ever reached the local population. Often, the aid was in the form of military supplies aimed at keeping the local dictator or military ruler and his cohorts happy. When it was in the form of developmental aid, it was hijacked by the elite. There was still the occassional ugly American marching off into the countryside on a bicycle, but the defining image was still the isolated American behind the high embassy compound. Washington now faces a terrible dilemma. The September 11 catastrophe has once again highlighted the need for deep and basic US involvement with the disaffected people of poor nations. At the same time, fear of the same people is forcing Washington to make the compound walls higher and more secure. The predicament is most graphic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the US is pumping in more and more aid and at the same time is becoming more and more secluded and isolated from the local population. Part of the problem is that US foreign policy is based not on morals but on expediency. There is also very little institutional record or memory, and even less inclination, that can help US mandarins learn from past mistakes. When the White House administration changes, cabinet officials take away all the papers with them, leaving behind a one-page summary for their successors. So it comes as something of a shock when they learn that the United States spent millions of dollars in the 1980s promoting the very jehad it is now fighting against. It transpires that at the height of the Cold War, it was Washington that supplied Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with talk of jehad and illustrated with pictures of guns, soldiers and landmines. Even the Taliban used the same textbooks. Today the same America is spending millions more scrubbing out all the references to jehad. Some 4 million textbooks, with US-prescribed instructions, are being trucked into Afghanistan. Washington is also overseeing the formulation of the new syllabus for the madrasas education system in Pakistan. Elsewhere, George Bush is talking of linking foreign aid to poor countries’ willingness to fight terrorism, reform their economy, and help their own people. Fine sentiments no doubt, except for one small problem. The US has very few Homer Atkins to be one with the locals and see this through. As Washington discovered to its horror when it stepped into the Afghanistan landmine, it did not have a single Pashtun or Dari speaking American in the region to tell the mandarins back home what the hell was going on on the ground. Local spooks fed Washington what the US wanted to hear. The problem was illustrated in a defining moment in The Ugly American. The US unloads tons of American wheat under a foreign aid program to Sarkhan. At the port, local communists simply paint "with best wishes from the people of Soviet Union," on each bag of wheat, erasing all reference to the United States. There isn’t a single American around who can read Sarkhanese. Ugly America needs more ugly Americans. |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |