Toilet Flushing

I've been doing a bit of to-and-fro on Democracy Arsenal discussing Abu Ghraib with Joseph Britt who is a kind of standing stand-in for my friend Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch (I believe Greg considers himself a conservative but we met collaborating on a task force report on UN reform). A bizarre incident this week may help sharpen how we look at the impact of anti-Americanism. Newsweek magazine reported that American interrogators at Guantanamo bay goaded a suspect by flushing a copy of the Koran down the toilet. The revelation triggered a rash of deadly anti-American protests in 17 Afghan provinces and the violence has now spread to Pakistan, Sudan, Indonesia, and the Palestinian territories, resulting in at least 14 deaths. The thing is, as far as the Pentagon can tell, the offending incident may never have happened. Newsweek did not disclose its sources. It's clear that the alleged desecration of the Koran was not the only cause of the anti-US unrest. In Afghanistan, some rabble-rousers have cited a recent agreement between Presidents Bush and Karzai that would provide for permanent US military bases in country, and others have complained about the treatment of Afghan detainees at Gitmo. While there's no question deeper issues were at play, it seems equally clear that the toilet report was the proximate cause of the riots. This reminds me of the Philip Roth novel, The Human Stain, in which an innocent remark provokes a racial furor that sets in motion events including a woman's death and the unraveling of several other lives. As may have happened this week, Roth's novel details how an incident that does not even occur (or barely occurs) winds up igniting simmering fury and unleashing mayhem. Its hard to know how to react to this week's upset in the Muslim world. On the one hand, given that the trigger may literally have been a non-event, there's some temptation to to question how America or the Administration could be in any way to blame. The argument goes something like this: if these people are so rabidly anti-US that they will rush to judgment and take to the streets at any provocation, they are beyond reason and there's little or nothing the US can do. This form of anti-Americanism thus gets classed in the category of "unaddressable." Its a sort of irremediable layer of anti-US attitudes that come with the superpower territory and that we cannot do anything about. Secretary Rice can go on record stating the obvious about US policy toward the Koran, but that's about it. After a week together it probably won't surprise you that I am not so quick to discuss the significance of what's happening in Kabul and elsewhere. The psychology of countries is in many ways like the psychology of people, marked by jealousies, insecurities, and resentments that lie just under the surface. The situation the US faces now fits a pattern that can bedevil powerful people. Two prominent recent examples are Howell Raines, the ousted former Editor of the New York Times and Larry Summers, the embattled President of Harvard. Both men are highly talented, forceful and by at least some standards effective. Both have also attracted widespread dislike within the institutions they led. Because of their strengths both men seemed anything but vulnerable. Yet it took just one slip for Raines to be fired and Summers to lose a faculty vote of no confidence. For Raines it was a scandal involving a flagrantly dishonest reporter, and for Summers it was an ill-advised comment on the place of women in science. Neither incident was serious enough to have threatened a leader who enjoyed stronger support among underlings and colleagues. But in both cases people from all quarters of the organizations smelled blood and came after leaders who they had long disliked. About two months ago I wrote this: There's reason to fear that the Bush Administration may be similarly vulnerable. The rest of the world for the most part dislikes Bush; anti-Americanism is at an all time high. Yet the U.S. is powerful enough and Bush has racked up sufficient accomplishments that he seems invulnerable. The question is what happens if a bad mistake gets made - a more serious version of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade or the shoot-out involving the Italian journalist and her bodyguard. Would the U.S.'s detractors all pounce, with the result of an outsized blow to America's image and influence? If there's any analogy to Summers and Raines, the signs are ominous. See here for the rest of the post. This toilet flushing meshugas is a case in point. Whether it happened or not, the report itself energized throngs of anti-American activists to trot out their grievances and urge others to do the same. The ground was fertile to breed the worst possible conclusions based on even the muddiest facts. It would be nice to think the outburst was orchestrated by one small faction, but there's apparently no political movement with the capability of mounting street action across such a wide swath of Afghanistan. That suggests that each and every province lying in wait for some kind of American misstep, or even an unsubstantiated report thereof. Both Raines and Summers could claim to have been swept up in events - and surrounding media scrutiny - outside their control. But in both cases it was less the incidents that occurred than the underlying attitudes toward those leaders that caused the controversies to spiral. Likewise this week, we need to face that it is because of the backdrop of anti-American attitudes that the Newsweek report lit such a firestorm. Lert's hope we wind up like Summers - with the hostility palpable but ultimately under control - rather than like Raines, who wound up getting sucked under.