Matthew Connelly ("Déjà Vu All Over Again - Algeria, France, and Us", The National Interest, Winter 1995/6) sums up his argument with me over U.S. policy toward Algeria in a single sentence: "Nothing is more likely", he writes, "to make the Islamic revival a united and genuinely dangerous threat than treating it as such." In other words, he holds that the ultimate responsibility for fundamentalist Islam lies not with the fundamentalists but with us in the West.
If that sounds familiar, it should, for it's the old blame-America-for-its-enemies line popularized by the radical left in the 1960s. Just replace "the Islamic revival" with "the Soviet bloc," and the parallel becomes obvious. We turned Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalist, into an ally of Moscow. Belligerent American policies undermined the doves in the Kremlin, spurred the "arms race", and so forth.
These leftist arguments presume two points: that our enemies are at odds with each other until we counterproductively force them to work together; and that, on their own, they are benign, but that Washington's aggression makes them malign.
The blame-America argument, then and now, fails to understand that extremist ideologues (fascists, communists, fundamentalist Muslims) the world over hate the United States as such, whether Washington's policies are soft or hard. And those extremists are right to do so, for by its very existence, this country threatens their visions. It's not just what we do but who we are; not just our objectionable policies but our way of life. As a dynamic, open, affluent society the United States gets in the way of their plans to create a world of stasis, closure, and poverty.
Mr. Connelly also implies that American toughness prompts our enemies to strike at us – and that's flat wrong. To cite just one notable counterexample: Khomeini held American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days of Jimmy Carter's presidency, then let them go at the very hour of Ronald Reagan's inauguration. A resolute defense of one's interests, history shows, works much better in the long term than the appeasement Mr. Connelly advocates.
The National Interest never once presented this blame-America argument when it came to the Soviet Union; why do so now in the Algerian case?
Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
