In the past, I’ve raved, or at least praised, Pankaj Mishra and his book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. In his book, Mishra quotes a testy Egyptian on the original liberators of the benighted East, the army of Napoleon Bonaparte: “It is their custom not to bury their dead but to toss them garbage heaps like the corpses of dogs and beasts, or to throw them into the sea. … Their women do not veil themselves and have no modesty … The French have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa.” On top of that, according to Abd al-Rabman al-Jabarti, the French also wore funny hats and urinated in public.
Sound familiar? Osama bin Ladin, among others, had similar complaints about American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, following the first Iraqi war. The location of these troops goes a long way to explaining why 15 of the 18 terrorists who died on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, although you’ll listen a long time before you hear any American official acknowledge that fact.1
It’s a mistake we keep making, in Iraq II, in Afghanistan, and in Libya as well. We keep pissing in the street, and the locals keep getting pissed. Hillary Clinton, I fear, thinks the problem is a shortage of porta-johns. As we used to say in the sixties, “When will they ever learn?” But I guess Hillary’s forgot that.
- As Christian Alfonsi explains in his excellent, excellent work, Circle in the Sand, the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia was well aware that the U.S. presence was a leading reason for the continuing terrorist campaign that al-Qaeda began waging against the U.S., but Washington found it inconvenient to listen. ↩︎
