Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

America, the war on terror and the 
non-Western world
As we have seen in Chapter 10, the possibility of a ‘clash of civilizations’ of
some kind is very real, even if the spatial account of civilization developed
by the originator of the phrase, Samuel Huntington, is not very helpful.
How has the reaction to 9/11 and the declaration of a war on terror
changed this situation? In most respects, it has to be said, it has changed
things for the worse, amplifying most of the recent trends that have led to
a deterioration in relations between the developed and developing world
and dampening some of those that pointed towards amelioration.
This deteriorating situation is much against the wishes of the US admin-
istration. President Bush and his colleagues have gone out of their way to
deny that the war on terror is in any sense a war against Islam; Muslim cler-
ics have been included in virtually every major state occasion involving the
President in recent years, and the occasional verbal gaffe, such as declaring
the war to be a ‘crusade’, have been apologized for profusely – even though,
one suspects, the President did not have in mind any anti-Muslim imagery
on this occasion; after all, was not the Second World War widely described
as a Great Crusade? Still, the hypersensitivity to Muslim feelings this
episode illustrated makes the failure to convince the Islamic world of the
good faith of the US even more disappointing to the Administration – how
is this failure to be explained? And why is it that the US declaration of a war
on terror has generated so little support in the rest of the non-Western
world?
The most obvious explanation can be summarized in one word – Israel.
There is good reason to think that a great deal of anti-Israeli sentiment in the
Muslim, especially Arab, world is generated by reactionary governments
US Hegemony and World Order
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who seek to divert popular rage away from their own political and financial
corruption towards a convenient foreign enemy. The lack of practical assis-
tance given by rich Arab regimes to their Palestinian brothers over the last
fifty years is striking, especially when compared with the virulence of their
anti-Israeli rhetoric. Still, and even though Israeli oppression has killed far
fewer Arabs than have regimes such as Assad Senior’s in Syria, or Saddam’s
in Iraq, Israel has certainly given the Arab world good reasons to oppose its
policies, and the US has been, and is, very much tarred with the Israeli
brush. In fact, most of the time, the US has done its best to restrain Israel
from resorting to force, and its ability to control Israeli policy is widely
overestimated, but still its commitment to the survival of Israel is more or
less unconditional – moreover, this commitment spans most of the political
spectrum in the US; historically, the Democrats have been even more pro-
Israel than the Republicans. Unfortunately for US policy, this commitment
is widely regarded in the Arab world as providing the Israelis with carte
blanche for whatever policies they deem appropriate; this is not how either
Israel or the US sees the relationship, but that is unimportant by compari-
son with how the relationship is perceived by outsiders. Conversely, the US
tends to regard anti-Israeli positions as being explicitly or implicitly anti-
Semitic, which they often are, although, in principle, it is quite possible to
be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic, as many Jews have demon-
strated. The common European (and British) habit of referring to the pow-
erful pro-Israel lobby in the US as a Jewish lobby simply reinforces general
American hostility, implying as it does that to be Jewish is to be Zionist,
which is clearly untrue, and that Jews as a religious group exercise improper
political power, which is not simply untrue but despicable.
The situation is made worse by the fact that as well as supporting Israel,
the US also, rather confusingly, supports the reactionary and authoritarian
leaders who have done so much to whip up anti-Israeli sentiment. There is
a genuine irony here: one of the strongest planks of the neoconservative polit-
ical programme in the 1990s was that the US should promote democracy in
the Middle East – it was traditional conservatives who believed that figures
such as the Saudi royal family and the Egyptian leader, Hosni Mubarak,
should be kept in power for fear of something worse, a position echoed by
the so-called ‘Camel Corps’ of old Arab hands in the British Foreign Office.
However, when the neoconservatives found themselves (temporarily) domi-
nant after 9/11, the politics of the war on terror meant that they found them-
selves obliged to support authoritarian regimes who were reliably opposed
to radical Islam. The result is that ordinary Arabs continue to see the US as
both the backer of Israel and supportive of most of their own oppressive
rulers. None of this helps the US to clarify its position on the Arab world.
In the non-Arab Muslim world many of the same negative dynamics
apply. Islam requires of its holy men that they learn Arabic and read the
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