Sometime after writing Sphere of Influence, I was contacted by Dr. Emad El-Din Aysha, an Egyptian political science professor, who was interested in where I came up with my idea for the book (it related to the connection between terrorism and the international narcotics trade.)

We struck up a friendship and he’s helped me a great deal with research and perspectives relating to the Middle East. Oddly, one of his most fascinating emails was a review of the movie Tears of the Sun that he wrote for an Egyptian newspaper.

While I’m not exactly a touchy-feely pacifist type, it makes me wonder if some focus on cultural understanding might go a long way.

I’ve posted excerpts from his review below, with the responses I sent him interspersed in italics.

Thursday • September 11 • 2003

Tears of the Sun: The next ‘Quiet American’?

Waters (Bruce Willis’s character) comments that God forgot these people. There is also a scene where the priest tells one of the nuns that a thousand problems don’t create doubt in the existence of God or His mercy; then they’re butchered. Which tells you that the decision to protect these people, through strength and not merely faith, is
doing God’s work. This becomes even more apparent when you discover
that the commander of the rebels that go about raping and pillaging has a
Muslim-Arab name, Colonel Idris Sadick.

There is also a reference to how the rebels are prepared to kill anyone
from a different ‘church’, a very Christian name for religion. And, of course,
the president’s son has a noble Christian name, Arthur (of the Round
Table), and the Christian that rats on the group of refugees to Colonel
Sadick is named Gideon. When Arthur reveals his identity to Waters, he
says his father was butchered because of his commitment to
democratising Nigeria. When they reach safety at the end of the film and
people gather round him, Arthur says ‘Freedom!’ (boo, hiss).

Interestingly, I don’t think most Americans would recognize Idris Sadick as a Muslim-Arab name. In fact, Americans put no stock at all in the meaning or etymology of names. We name our children based on fads or by sound (i.e. to avoid rhymes, alliterations, etc.) The vast majority of Americans named Sara, for instance, probably wouldn’t know that was a Biblical name and might not even be Christian. The names Arthur and Gideon are not a religious statement, but a concession to an American audience that struggles with those consonant-laden African names.

I think it’s hard for Arab-Muslims to understand that religion just doesn’t loom that large in American life. Amongst our Christian community, the most consistent worshipers are the Catholics with church attendance hovering at fifty percent but in significant decline. The second most consistent worshipers are the Anglicans with attendance levels of only 12 percent. While we have some fairly vocal right wing Christians in this country, we are a very secular country on the whole.

It seems to me that the average Arab-Muslim sees everything through a filter of faith, whereas the average American sees everything through a filter of money. If anyone tells you that we are on some kind of religious crusade against the Muslim people, do not believe it. The very idea of interfering in someone else’s method of worship is abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans.

Leaving aside the kind of post-11/9 US rhetoric evident here, what we’re
seeing is something much more serious and frankly a lot uglier: a return
to the kind of naïveté that characterised America’s involvement in Vietnam,
hence the reference to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American.
Given how unemotionally quiet (and annoyingly smug) Bruce Willis is in
the movie, I think the comparison between his character and Alden Pyle in
the novel is more than adequate.

In the novel, that takes place in the late 1950s before America’s full entry into the war, we are introduced to the young, idealistic and thoroughly well-intentioned character of Pyle through the eyes of the wily, more experienced British war correspondent who
narrates the story. Pyle is in search of a third ‘democratic’ force to help
free Vietnam from the twin evils of Communism and the remnants of
French colonialism. In the process, he throws in his lot with a renegade
Vietnamese general in an effort to do just that, paralleling what the
Americans did with Ngo Dinh Diem. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The tribal Ibo heir to the throne and his deposed father before him,
President Azuka, the wise man who is ahead of his people, have a vision
for its democratic future. The fact that he is a tribal (unelected) king, that
his son will undemocratically succeed him, and that his tribe is in charge
of the country for no good reason, seems to pass the Americans by. Much
the same was true of US co-operation with the anti-French Ngo Dinh
Diem, who was later deposed through an (undemocratic) military coup
organised by the Americans, bringing to power people who were even
less democratic, all in the cause of ‘God and democracy’, not to mention
introducing development according to the US economic model.

I would strongly argue that Vietnam was not an example of cultural imperialism but an example of ultimately unfounded communist paranoia. The Domino Theory was very much in our collective consciousness at the time.

Americans have a very strong missionary streak that does lead them to
help other nations out of good intentions, but they do it in a
condescending top-down way that ignores the lessons of history and the
realities of the particular situations they’re in. Just look at the monumental
cultural blunders America is making in Iraq.

Unfortunately, I cannot argue with this assessment.

The choice of the name Alden, incidentally, is probably a reference to John
Alden (1599-1687), one of the pilgrim founders of the Plymouth colony,
people who later massacred the Indians after escaping to America for the
sake of religious ‘freedom’. (NB: Pyle is probably a reference to pylons, in
this case the kind of pillars found in temples).

Be careful to not give Hollywood too much credit for veiled historical references. I would be surprised if there’s a single person working in the movie industry who knows who John Alden is. I didn’t and I read a lot on the subject of history.

Greene makes reference to this American historical ignorance when Pyle talks about his first pet dog, named Prince after the Black Darkness, not knowing that that particular
prince massacred women and children at Limoges. When Pyle is told
this, he says he doesn’t ‘remember’ taking that at school. America today
is very much like the America of The Quiet American, with Congress
pushing for war, McCarthyism and intellectuals with grandiose abstract
ideas who know very little about the countries they’re interfering with.
America, as usual, as always, seems to have forgotten the past, its own
past, and is heading headlong on a collision course with a whole new
league of genocidal dictators out for Muslim blood, with George W. Bush
as their crusading patron saint, Alden Pyle. As for a modern-day York
Harding, the academic that sets Pyle on his path, we have Paul Wolfowitz.
God help us all!

Keep in mind that Bush is enormously unpopular in many sectors of the U.S. In fact, I would say he is one of the most passionately hated presidents in American history. There was (and is) huge opposition to the war with Iraq and I believe he will be voted out based on his hopelessly botched foreign policy. This is a remarkable statement as Americans generally ignore foreign policy. (Author’s note: This was written before the last election. Not one of my best predictions.)

On the topic of Americans remembering their own bloody history, I’d like to
remind the (minority African-American) director that long before ethnic
cleansers went around cutting women’s breasts off in Africa, US-trained
death squads (like the fidaaiyi Saddam) were doing the same in Central
America during the Reagan presidency. And don’t forget the drug-dealing
Contras who funded much of their war through money made from selling
cocaine to black Americans in the States (see Jeffrey St. Clair and
Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press).
Americans always end up working with unseemly characters in their
‘democratic’ forays into the Third World and become dependent on these
people even when they find out how brutal they are, just as Pyle had to put
up with General Thé.

While I’m not necessarily defending specific historical actions, sometimes you have to go with the lesser of the evils.

I’d just like to see them make a movie where American soldiers are willing to fight under a UN flag and UN directions for the sake of the oppressed and the poor, and then we’d see how ‘well-intentioned’ quiet Americans like Bruce Willis are.

As a good friend of mine is fond of pointing out, it’s virtually impossible to get the UN to fight at all.

A great many Americans, I’m sad to say, are really, really full of it. Bruce
Willis being a case in point. He was recently in Iraq earlier this month,
visiting GIs there to boost their morale through (what he calls) singing. He
only had to open his mouth while being interviewed and prattle on about
his own personal in-depth analysis of what America was doing there. First
he said that even though he’d only been there a couple of days he got the
impression straight away that everything was A-okay, with the American
troops being welcomed warmly in the streets and good work being done
to rebuild the country.

There are a few things that I don’t understand about America myself. One is our obsession with celebrities. Bruce Willis, of course, has no expertise in this area, but people still listen to him. I don’t think we’re unique in this, though. Arab countries must have singers/actors who like to talk about politics, too.

Second, Mr. Willis said that kids were finally being inoculated, evidence
that now that military operations were over, the real good that the
American armed forces could do was at last being done. He makes it
sound like Iraq was some famine- and plague-ridden African disaster
zone (and that’s a stereotype itself, given that Africa has a food surplus)

I would argue that massive political failures in sub-Saharan Africa have left an enormous number of people hungry, despite food surpluses in a few select countries. And now land reform in Zimbabwe has reduced food production there by 75%.

where health services didn’t exist till the Americans got there. He seems
to forget that, despite the despicability of the Saddam regime (with the US
heavily implicated in this despicability), Iraq was quite exemplary when it
came to healthcare, education, public utilities, infrastructure and women’s
rights, till the Americans came along and blasted the country’s
infrastructure and government services from here to kingdom come
during the Second (or was that First?) Gulf War.

In the first Gulf War, Iraq invaded a nation friendly to us (and, let’s be frank, who have something we need.) With no reaction from anyone, Hussein would have been free to march across the Middle East (remember our obsession with the Domino Theory), killing countless Arabs and eventually dragging Israel into the fight, which would have been disastrous for everyone involved. We warned him repeatedly to pull back. We very publicly built up a huge fighting force. Still, he wouldn’t back down—instead making childish and utterly moronic statements about defeating us.

Most of the child fatalities in Iraq since that first war have been caused by
the spread of cholera and other epidemics because the water and
sewage systems were very deliberately destroyed by the Americans
during that war. Not to mention the sanctions’ regime that prevented Iraq
from importing pencils because the carbon in them could be used for
WMD purposes! It’s rich talking about the ‘help’ Americans can provide
the Iraqis – help they haven’t been providing the Iraqi people – when the
help is needed to clear up damage caused by the self-same Americans!

Again, I’d argue that the first Gulf War was not our fault, though I am willing to concede that our handling of the subsequent peace has been poor.

Shades of The Quiet American here too, the scene in the movie version
when Pyle says the damage and deaths caused by General Thé’s
bombing campaign against civilians (sound familiar?) wouldn’t matter in
the long run because they would win the war against the Communists
and the French colonialists, leading to a rehabilitated, modern and
developed state (on the American model, which has lousy illiteracy and
poverty rates, and an extortionary healthcare system).

Now that just seems inflammatory. The US has the highest literacy rate in the world, poverty for a family of 4 is defined as under US$18,000 (an amount that would make them wealthy virtually anywhere else) and even the poorest Americans enjoy health care that is far superior to most of the rest of the world.

Third, Willis complained about how the liberal media tried to dissuade
America from the war and convince everyone there weren’t any WMDs
there and that the American public was against the war in any case. He
seems to forget that some of the largest anti-war protests in American
history took place against this war, and they took place, for the first in
anyone’s history, before the war even started, sure proof of how morally
‘driven’ they were.

Again, Willis is an actor and doesn’t speak for America. Except, I suppose, on issues relating to acting…

Most college brats in America were opposed to the Vietnam War because they didn’t want to soil their hands in a war zone, though they weren’t really concerned with the dropping of napalm and Agent Orange on Vietnamese villages.

This is absolutely untrue. There was enormous and well-documented concern for the suffering of the Vietnamese.

As for the liberal media in America, what the hell is he talking about? What liberal media? And if they even exist, are they any match for the illiberal, Rupert Murdoch-dominated media empire?

As for the WMD issue, Mr Willis seems to have forgotten his own remarks on this, when he said that it didn’t matter whether WMDs were there or not because Saddam had gone too far and had to be removed.

Moreover, by scoffing at criticisms about whether there is enough proof of
the presence of WMDs, he seems to forget that it is the media’s job to
criticise, speculate, be skeptical, review the facts, come up with their own
points of view and express other views. Hence, their description as the
‘fourth estate’.

We have growing problems in America with our media. Accurate and fair reporting used to be its primary goal. Now its primary goal is hoarding advertising dollars. This means that accuracy and balance are irrelevant. They simply want to attract viewers and to do that they create easily digested stories that don’t upset their viewers.

I would argue, though, that the Arab media has a similar problem. People want to hear anti-American slant, so that is what they’re given.

I truly wish both our presses would adopt a more understanding and conciliatory tone. Whipping up anti-American or anti-Arab frenzy is incredibly dangerous. What happens, if, as we fear, some terrorist gets hold of a WMD and sets it off in a US city? These terrorists, it seems, would get what they so desire—a (briefly) destabilized America. But what would be the consequence of that? I would argue that it would result in a retaliation that would leave the entire Middle East in ruins. In light of this, it seems that a cooling off period on both sides would be a very good idea.