Defining “Anti-Americanism”

While concerns over the “worldwide appeal of tasteless American culture,”Footnote ⁵ which apparently threatened to impose this system on other societies, can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century, perceived “anti-Americanism” in its current manifestation gathered momentum in the Cold War era, being further fuelled by the Vietnam War and the recent War on Terror. However, “anti-Americanism” is a problematic concept to define. Commentators such as Paul Hollander and Russell A. Berman categorize “anti-Americanism” as “a kind of neurosis rooted in ‘envy’ of America's great wealth and power,”Footnote ⁶ while Richard Parker suggests that “whoever is great is envied, and whatever he wants some will oppose simply because he wants it.” However, his claim that “such resentment is obviously a factor in Arab attitudes from time to time” should be treated with caution.Footnote ⁷ Berman extends this notion, suggesting that “the United States sets a higher moral standard … anti-Americanism is the expression of a desire to avoid the moral order.”Footnote ⁸ These readings of “anti-Americanism” build on the concept of US exceptionalism: the notion that America is not only unique, but in some way exemplary. As Richard Crockatt observes, it is evident that recent historical events have shaped such perspectives: “the international conditions of the post-Cold War world in general and the post-9/11 world in particular have inclined many Americans to accentuate their ‘American-ness,’ to enhance and even exaggerate their sense of the nation as unique and exceptional.”Footnote ⁹ Crockatt emphasizes that the post-9/11 era has prompted a “reassertion of America's core values and a heightened sense of the nation's distinctive destiny and global role.”Footnote ¹⁰ Robert G. Patman explores this further, suggesting that the events of 9/11 have actually caused US exceptionalism to evolve: “President Bush merged a Christian world-view with political language to create a new exclusive strain of US exceptionalism imbued with a fundamentalist moral purpose.”Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, Bush claimed that the US had a responsibility to “answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”Footnote ¹² According to Crockatt, this positing of the US as a force for good and its apparent mission of democracy promotion is the element of American culture that provokes alienation from other nations.Footnote ¹³

This article explores Iraqi responses to the American occupation, but not through the rather limiting definitions adopted by Hollander, Berman and Parker; rather it draws on the ideas of Max Friedman, who offers a seemingly more balanced analysis of “anti-Americanism.” Crucially, it examines how Iraqi bloggers anticipated Friedman's challenge to an oversimplified definition of “anti-Americanism” through his construction of a clear distinction between demonstrating objection to American foreign policy and taking an “anti-American” stance. Friedman defines “anti-Americanism” as “a prejudice with negative implications for the United States when there is a combination of blanket rejection of American society, hostility to American values (as understood by the speaker), and dislike of Americans.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, he suggests that such attitudes are actually very rare. The kind of behaviour that is frequently referred to as “anti-Americanism” is, on many occasions, an expression of opposition to US foreign policy. Friedman explains that this reading of opposition to US policy as “anti-Americanism” was “reified and spread throughout government, academia, and the media during the Cold War, when it was understood as an explanation for the source of opposition to US policies abroad and to be caused by irrational thinking by foreigners.”Footnote ¹⁵ As such, it was easy to dismiss the concerns of foreign nationals as irrational and therefore illegitimate. Whilst Hollander and Berman argue that to “speak out against America is to be against first principles such as democracy, or freedom, or Western values,” other commentators like Alan McPherson claim that any hostility toward the US has “almost always been, and often primarily was, not an a priori ideology but a response to US foreign policy.” He asserts that “the more US policy offended, the more widespread, deep, and visceral anti-US sentiment became.”Footnote ¹⁶ Although McPherson's study focusses on Latin America and the Caribbean, Iraqi writers such as Pax and Riverbend illustrate that this apparent causality can also explain the shift in attitudes in Iraq following the American occupation, and certainly challenge a simple definition of objections to US foreign policy as “anti-Americanism.”

The “Rise of Anti-Americanism” in Iraq

In the aftermath of 9/11, the journal New Republic announced, “we are living in a new era of anti-Americanism.”Footnote ¹⁷ However, far from 9/11 signalling the launch of a global shift towards “anti-Americanism,” a reading of the Iraqi responses to emerge since the 2003 Iraq War suggests that the change in attitudes towards America, and the West more broadly, can be traced back to the manner in which the American government responded to the terrorist attacks. In the earlier sections of Riverbend's blog, Baghdad Burning, the writer introduces herself as a young Iraqi woman who has been educated abroad and embraces many aspects of Western culture. Riverbend is eager to silence the critics who have made contact through her blog and have accused her of “anti-Americanism”: “I don't hate Americans, contrary to what many people seem to believe. Not because I love Americans, but simply because I don't hate Americans, like I don't hate the French, Canadians, Brits, Saudis, Jordanians, Micronesians.”Footnote ¹⁸ Although her blog entries indicate that she is deeply troubled by the American invasion, they also reveal her attempts to empathize with those on both sides. In the years that follow, however, Riverbend's blog portrays a marked change in her own opinions and in those of the Iraqi people more broadly. By December 2006, Riverbend describes how the experiences of the way in which her family and friends have been treated by the soldiers, and the hardships that they have endured as a consequence of the occupation, have changed her outlook dramatically:

This passage of Riverbend's blog provides the reader in the West with a vivid explanation for the rapid change in Iraqi attitudes towards the occupying forces, and challenges Hollander's definition of “anti-Americanism” as “an unfocused and largely irrational, often visceral aversion toward the United States, its government, domestic institutions, foreign policies, prevailing values, culture, and people.”Footnote ²⁰ It also reinforces the observation made by US soldier Kayla Williams in her Iraq War memoir that the increased levels of security and suspicion by US troops towards the Iraqis had a direct impact on the attitudes and behaviour of the Iraqi people.Footnote ²¹

Ivan Krastev claims that anti-Americanism is becoming “a defining feature of our time,”Footnote ²² and suggests that we are currently entering what may come to be known as “the anti-American century.”Footnote ²³ Crucially, many Iraq War narratives raise similar questions to the one which Ivan Krastev poses in his introduction to The Anti-American Century: “are the sources of the global revolt against America to be found in the US's policies, in the US's values or in America's hegemonic role in the world order?”Footnote ²⁴ Throughout the narratives, the authors' descriptions of the transition of attitudes towards America begin, to some extent, to address Krastev's question. Krastev identifies two distinct strands of anti-Americanism: “murderous anti-Americanism” and anti-Americanism “lite.” He outlines what he perceives as the difference between the two:

Krastev suggests, “The first kind can be dealt with only by ‘hard power’,” but the second “must be better understood in order to devise effective strategies to counter it.”Footnote ²⁶ Although Krastev does not depict “anti-Americanism” simply as an irrational reaction in the same way as does Hollander, he is apparently dismissive of the “anti-American” opinions of the “fanatical terrorists,” as he refers to them. For Krastev, it seems that only the second group are worthy of attention, although such categorization also raises questions regarding the perceived relationship between disagreeing with US government policy and “anti-Americanism.” What the Iraqi narratives can offer readers, then, is a challenge to the simplicity of such a definition. Riverbend chronicles how, in the early days of the occupation, many Iraqis were against the presence of coalition forces, but they did not display hostility towards the soldiers. However, as the occupation continued and increasing numbers of Iraqis became aware of family or friends who had been killed, injured or mistreated by US soldiers, attitudes changed dramatically. These blogs offer accounts of the immediate reactions of Iraqis to the events that unfolded in their country and provide a valuable insight into the complexity of the situation in Iraq. Crucially, they emphasize the importance of differentiating between “anti-Americanism” and opposition to American foreign policy, and explore the dangers of blurring that distinction.

Riverbend's blog entry, “Media and Falloojeh, April 14, 2004,” describes the changing attitudes of many Iraqis towards US foreign policy and government discourse. It depicts Riverbend's frustration at the condemnation of the way that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia reported the riots and fighting in Falloojeh, suggesting that the US objection to these reports might stem from the fact that the sheer volume of Iraqi dead shown in them is somewhat incongruent with the US line that the dead are “military targets” being killed with “intelligent weaponry.”Footnote ²⁷ The government discourse that Riverbend refers to is reminiscent of US, and to some extent British, news coverage of the Gulf War. Here, Riverbend highlights the fact that in the rapidly evolving digital age, it has become increasingly problematic for the US media to present the West with a “bodyless war,”Footnote ²⁸ as was apparently the case in the Gulf War. In the Iraq War, the wealth of information available, and the immediacy of its delivery though outlets such as Al-Jazeera and blogs such as Riverbend's, made it increasingly difficult to construct a version of the war in which there were no visible casualties. Despite the use of advanced military technology in the recent Iraq conflict, the guerrilla style of warfare and advances in communication technology render any claim of the Iraq War as a cyberwar deeply problematic. Few cyborg soldiers remained in the combat zone, and for most soldiers in this conflict the Iraqi people were not pixelated targets on a videoscreen, but real people who could communicate with those in the West via the Internet before images of events had even made it as far as the television screen. Although it is important to acknowledge that the use of technology in the Iraq War problematized its status as a guerrilla conflict, it cannot be classified as a technowar. The nature of the guerrilla-style combat in Iraq resulted in US soldiers encountering Iraqis face-to-face; in combat Iraqis were no longer represented as pixel images. However, developments in communication technologies, and the subsequent proliferation of Iraq War bloggers, resulted in the birth of a new virtual Iraqi. In this conflict, technology did not render Iraqis invisible, but rather provided them with a framework in which to communicate their stories and reclaim their visibility.

Under Occupation: Changing Lives

Riverbend suggests that if some of the people who emailed from the safety of their computers in non-occupied countries experienced the war in Baghdad, those who accused her of being “anti-American” or unreasonable in her assertions might reconsider their positions. Certainly, the impression that readers glean from Riverbend's blog is not that of an irrational fanatic, but of a woman who has endured emotional and cultural upheaval. What she attempts to communicate to the readers of her blog from the early entries right through to the last entry in October 2007 is the sense that war and occupation alters a person's perception and sense of normality in ways that are unimaginable to one who has not experienced it for themselves. The detailed description that Riverbend provides of how everyday life has changed completely is particularly effective at communicating how the mind-set of ordinary people in Iraq has altered dramatically. Prior to the occupation, most Iraqi men and women worked. However, following the arrival of coalition forces, many people lost their jobs as part of the complex de-Ba'athification process,Footnote ²⁹ and women in particular were intimidated into staying at home by the threat of violence from street gangs. Far from the demonized image of the fanatical Ba'athist which is often perpetuated in the Western media, many members of the Ba'ath Party had originally joined to further their careers or to secure their family's safety. Pax and Riverbend map the complexity of the situation in a way that was distinctly lacking in the Western media and in literary responses to the war and the occupation. These Iraqi narratives help to disperse the Western perception of Sunnis, and specifically Ba'athists, as evil, and of the Shia and Kurds as victims. Instead, Pax and Riverbend provide the reader with alternative perspectives which emphasize the fact that they would choose to categorize themselves by their nationality rather than by their religious or political views.

By providing a political and historical context, a reading of Iraqi narratives helps the Western reader to gain an understanding of the complexity of Iraqi identities and of their affiliations within Iraqi society. Some Iraqis, like Riverbend, had worked in computer- and IT-related jobs and maintained Western lifestyles prior to the occupation. Riverbend highlights the fact that before the 2003 war, around fifty per cent of the workforce in Iraq consisted of women, and these women were paid exactly the same as the men doing equivalent jobs. As Riverbend points out, “females in Iraq were a lot better off than females in other parts of the Arab world (and some parts of the Western world – we had equal salaries!).”Footnote ³⁰ Following the occupation, however, her existence revolved around ensuring that the family collected enough water during the brief reinstatement of the supply to ensure that they would not run out during the next break. In a very short space of time, Iraqis had been forced to adjust to the removal of all of the modern amenities to which they had been accustomed for decades. This is one of the most striking things about Riverbend's narrative: it reinforces for the reader just how similar the pre-occupation lives of many Iraqis were to those of readers in the West. This sense of identification with Iraqi citizens intensifies the reader's experience of reading Iraqi narratives about the impact of the war on their lives. Riverbend observes how quickly a person's – and, perhaps more importantly, a nation's – outlook can be transformed by such experiences:

The “Borrowed Kettle”: Justifying the Occupation

Riverbend uses her blog to communicate her opinions on the political situation surrounding the Iraq War, and her exasperation at the “collective punishment,” as she refers to it, being suffered by ordinary Iraqis: “Is he [the US spokesman] implying that the 600 civilians who died during the bombing and the thousands injured and maimed were all ‘insurgents?’ Are houses, shops and mosques now military targets?”Footnote ³² She points out that the increasing Iraqi hostility towards US forces is not a result of “anti-American” news coverage, but rather a consequence of the US action in Iraq. It is the experiences of Iraqis at the hands of American troops which shape attitudes towards the occupying forces. In British journalist Rory McCarthy's collection of Iraqi narratives, an Iraqi woman, Um Sour, represents the views of many Iraqis who were sceptical about the American presence in Iraq from the beginning. She observes,

For Riverbend and Um Sour, the reasons for the US occupation have become blurred and lack a single definitive justification. The effect of this seems to be a mistrust of American foreign policy, the government that constructs it and the military that implements it. Um Sour's words echo Naomi Klein's assertions that the US administration was motivated by capitalist aspirations for the Middle East: “the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means.”Footnote ³⁴ Slavoj Žižek offers an explanation as to what is responsible for the mixed messages that both Iraqis and Americans have received regarding the intervention in Iraq. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, he refers to Sigmund Freud's strange logic of dreams whereby a series of explanations for an event or an action is offered, but some of the reasons contradict the others. In the case of interventions in Iraq, Žižek argues, there were inconsistencies between the different reasons provided by the US administration.Footnote ³⁵ First, the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). When no WMDs could be found, it was claimed that Hussein had been involved with al Qaeda in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and that he should be punished to prevent any further attacks. When no evidence could be found of a link between Saddam and 9/11, the justification for occupation was that “Saddam's regime is a ruthless dictatorial regime, a threat to its neighbours and a catastrophe to its own people, and this fact alone provides reason enough to topple it.”Footnote ³⁶ The narratives by Riverbend, Pax and the Iraqis that McCarthy meets demonstrate how the lack of a definitive justification for the occupation has damaged the relationship between the US and Iraqi citizens.Footnote ³⁷

It is not only the presence of US troops which damaged this relationship. The situation was exacerbated by the treatment of the war by the Western media as a glamorized Hollywood version of combat. Despite the emergence of new avenues of information in the form of blogs and television channels such as Al-Jazeera, the Western media still tended to present a sanitized version of the war. Riverbend questions where the images of the real destruction are:

Although it should be noted that bodies are, in most cases, absent from the footage broadcast of 9/11, Riverbend raises an intriguing point regarding the dissemination of images depicting harrowing acts of violence. If the reason for censoring bodies in the Iraq War was to maintain the illusion of a “clean” war in which the US forces were in control, then what is the rationale for the events of 9/11 featuring so highly in US media representations? The use of emotive images from 9/11 would certainly support the second justification that Žižek identifies. Although the link between Saddam and the terrorist attacks has not been substantiated, the US government's “war on terror” which encompasses military operations across the Middle East creates a convenient association between the Arab and terrorism. Sina Ali Muscati explores the representation of the Arab/Muslim, providing examples of the ways in which Western rhetoric “others” and dehumanizes Iraqi citizens. She argues that the figure of the Arab as the threatening “Other” was born out of a necessity for a focal enemy following the end of the Cold War. She quotes a New York Times headline which appears to encapsulate this: “The Red Menace is Gone. But Here's Islam.”Footnote ³⁹ Muscati observes that

Although Saddam was frequently depicted as synonymous with evil in the Western media during the Gulf War, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 saw the point at which many American citizens came to consider all Arabs and Muslims a potential threat to their personal security. This fear of Islam amongst the population of America was demonstrated by the rumours circulated about Barack Obama shortly after he came to office, claiming that he was Muslim as a means of tarnishing his popularity. More recently, the public condemnation of the proposal that a new mosque should be located within the vicinity of Ground Zero is indicative of a perceived synonymy between Muslims and the perpetrators of 9/11. Although it could be argued that the Obama administration has sought to address many of the policies initiated by the Bush administration, the “othering” of Middle Eastern nations and peoples continues to influence public opinion. Writers like Pax and Riverbend problematize such a concept, and offer the Western reader an alternative to the hegemonic discourse.

Democracy Promotion and the Failures of the Past

The readership of these blogs is not limited to civilians. Indeed, both Pax and Riverbend document dialogue with soldier bloggers stationed in Iraq. Whilst the soldier in the combat zone rarely perceived the pixelated image of an Iraqi enemy, communication technologies enabled a revealing online dialogue between US soldiers and Iraqi citizens in a manner unimaginable in previous conflicts. Pax's blog, Where is Raed?, reveals yet further complexities regarding what has been termed “anti-Americanism.” His online discussion with an American soldier, to whom he refers as [Mr.Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq],Footnote ⁴¹ exposes the deep-seated mistrust which has its roots not in the events of 9/11, or even in the American reaction to it, but rather in the abandonment that many Iraqis felt when American forces failed to help them overthrow Saddam in the aftermath of the Gulf War (which led to the massacre at Hilla and numerous others). As Pax explains, a large proportion of Iraqis were ready to rise up against Saddam at that time, but they were denied the help of the US military forces:

As Pax observes in an earlier entry, such historical events result in a situation in which “Fear is deep [in many Iraqi cities] and trust in the people-from-Foreign is not high.”Footnote ⁴³ The Gulf conflict was a defining moment in America's development as a global power, and in the way the nation presented itself as “the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its own national motives, but in the name of global right.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Crockatt points out that “democracy promotion” has become a central goal of post-Cold War foreign policy and that “the tendency of the right is to deny the significance of cultural factors on the grounds that democracy is a universal good which can and should be applied everywhere.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He suggests that the conviction of the US administration that “the American nation and its peculiar destiny”Footnote ⁴⁶ should enforce its values on the world is what causes many nations to perceive the US as a hostile entity. Crockatt's observations are confirmed by Riverbend's analysis of Iraqi perceptions regarding American interventions in Iraq:

Here, Riverbend clearly communicates the fact that many Iraqis objected not to America or its values, but to the idea of promoting those values on a universal level through the application of force. With this statement, Riverbend identifies one of the key arguments raised by Huntington, who asserts that the key to many nations' objections to Americanism is the idea of American exceptionalism. He suggests that the idea of the “American creed” which encapsulates US values

Historically, this sense of American exceptionalism has been embodied by concepts such as Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁹ In contemporary society, it is the idea of the universalism of American values and the US mission to “remake the world”Footnote ⁵⁰ which is so strongly objected to. As Riverbend concludes, Iraqis (and most other societies) object to having American principles imposed upon them. She draws the reader's attention to the way in which many Iraqis interpret US attitudes to other nations and cultures. This challenges the accounts of many Western writers, such as Kayla Williams, who frequently presume to project their own American ideals onto the Iraqis that they meet. Although Williams's narrative is quite sympathetic towards the Iraqi people, she perceives “freedom” to mean accessibility to material goods such as money and a car.Footnote ⁵¹ Williams's analysis is intriguing: she appreciates the simplicity of the lifestyle that many Iraqis lead, but when they say they want a better life she takes this to mean that they want a westernized lifestyle, when, in fact, many Iraqis would not necessarily equate this with a better life. For many Iraqis, a better life means freedom, safety, the right to work, and the right to be proud of their own identity. There is a sense in these narratives that Iraqis feel that the US endeavours to impose its values on the rest of the world, that it sees its version of democracy as superior to others, and that the rest of the world should be not only encouraged to follow its example, but forcibly compelled to do so. Huntington summarizes the logic of non-Western attitudes towards the West thus: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”Footnote ⁵² At the “World Tribunal on Iraq” held in Istanbul in 2005, the Jury of Conscience condemned the war in Iraq as an exercise in asserting imperial power:

The promotion of democracy that the US administration has frequently used as justification for the intervention in Iraq is apparently one of the factors at the centre of its failure. Pax cites a passage from The Economist which summarizes the consequences of the American pursuit of democracy promotion: “We'll happily watch the American bullets fly over our heads at first … But after a two-year honeymoon we'll be shooting at them. Iraqis will never, ever be ruled by foreigners.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These blogs confirm that this prediction from October 2002 was, in fact, disturbingly accurate.

Aspirations and Apprehension: The Shaping of Future Iraq

One of the most notable themes in both Riverbend's and Pax's blogs is their focus on the possible outcomes of the occupation for future Iraq. As Rosemary Hollis has observed, “what happens to Iraq now is of great import, not only for the Iraqi people and the surrounding region, but also for the post-Cold War, post-9/11 international order.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In addition to the religious segregation that is taking place in Iraq (which is a cause of concern for both bloggers), is the shaping of the “new Iraq” by the interim “Puppet Government,” as Riverbend refers to it. What Riverbend seems to find most unsettling about this is the American influence which manifests itself in the new policies, attitudes and rhetoric of the Iraqi governing council. Riverbend expresses concern about the fact that most of the members of this government had not even been living in Iraq prior to the occupation and many of them still live mainly abroad, despite their positions in the governing council. In an entry entitled “Of Chalabi, Flags and Anthems,” Riverbend suggests that the “new Iraq” is being shaped according to US ideals, rather than Iraqi ones. Crucially, her narrative demonstrates that it is the imposing of American ideals on the new Iraq which is one of the significant factors in the rise of Iraqi opposition to US foreign policy. This substantiates Huntington's theory that “in this new [post-Cold War] world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural identities.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He identifies the forcing of universal values onto rapidly developing nations as the single most significant threat to peace: “as their power and self-confidence increase, non-Western societies increasingly assert their own cultural values and reject those ‘imposed’ on them by the West.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Riverbend's opposition to the proposed division of the country into separate states and the new Iraqi flag are symbolic of Iraqi resistance to building their country on US ideals. Riverbend anticipates that the next new US contribution to building a new Iraq will come in the form of a pledge of allegiance written by an American, and then she wryly suggests that the new Iraqi national anthem might be a “gaudy, Iraqi version of ‘Lady Marmalade’” featuring Chalabi, Allawi, Hakeem and Talabani.Footnote ⁵⁸

Pax and Riverbend discuss the idea of dividing Iraq into states according to ethnic lines, an idea which has been proposed by various parties including the US government and Iraq's new governing council.Footnote ⁵⁹ The problems with this notion are explained in detail by the Iraqi citizens in both the blogs. The suggestion of segregation and the subsequent discussions on Iraqi national identity are one of the points at which the reader witnesses intertextual exchanges of opinion between the blogs. This potential for intertextuality lends blogs the capacity for developing political debate and establishing a collective of Iraqi citizens opposed to US foreign policy. Crucially, online media enable the dissemination of this counterdiscourse to audiences around the world. Riverbend draws the reader's attention to Pax's entry on the subject in order to set up her own discussion. She then responds to his entry in order to provide her own perspective on the issue. Riverbend exposes the complexities of Iraqi identity, making it clear that it is problematic to define a unified Iraqi identity, and, moreover, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so in light of the resurgence of extreme Islamic groups imposing their ideals on Iraqi civilians. Pax immediately draws readers' attention to the fact that such divisions in Iraq not only are a bad idea, but would be impossible to achieve due to the way that Iraqi society has evolved since Britain and France created Iraq following the First World War. He points out that segregation in today's Iraq would divide neighbourhoods and even families: Pax's own father is Sunni, his mother is Shia, and their neighbours are Kurds. Riverbend repeatedly expresses her frustration at the way that the occupation has transformed Iraqi life and is eager to emphasize how she and her generation led westernized lives before the war. She expresses her wish that the distinctions that have been accentuated between different ethnic groups in Iraq could be removed and return to the way they were before the war:

Pax does indeed summarize the situation well, and candidly discusses his reactions to it. Although he is adamant that there should be no divisions in Iraq, he accepts that the situation is more complex than that. If federalization should come to Iraq, then, Pax points out, the best outcome would not be the three-state model which the government seems to favour, comprising “Kurdistan in the north, Sunni-stan in the middle and Sh'ia-stan in the south.”Footnote ⁶¹ If federalism were absolutely unavoidable, then a better approach, Pax suggests, would be to also create independent states around Baghdad, Samaweh and Basra. Pax summarizes his own feelings on the subject rather poignantly: “it is all one Iraq for me.”Footnote ⁶²

Given the experiences of the Iraqis that McCarthy's narrative documents, it would be reasonable to question whether the views that Riverbend and Pax express in their blogs, particularly regarding pre-occupation Iraq and their hopes for a peaceful future, are perhaps slightly idealistic. Several of the Iraqis that McCarthy interviewed recount a pre-occupation Iraq under Saddam's rule in which they were subject to persecution and genocide. It is worth considering that Pax and Riverbend living in Baghdad in the pre-occupation era may have enjoyed a more comfortable – and, crucially, more metropolitan – existence than many people living in different areas, such as the victims of the atrocities that were committed at Hilla (where mass graves from the 1991 massacre were uncovered in 2003). It could be inferred that those Iraqis who have access to computers and the Internet, and who are proficient in their use of English, are likely to be middle-class and therefore wealthier than some of the people that McCarthy spoke to. One might even speculate as to the possibility of such authors having been linked, as many middle-class Iraqi families were, to the Ba'athists in the past. If this were the case, then their impressions of pre-occupation Iraq, and consequently their hopes for the future, may differ from those of other Iraqis. Even with the advent of the Internet, Western readers' only exposure to the stories of poorer and working-class Iraqis is through accounts like McCarthy's. In this sense, blogs can be seen as exclusionary for certain groups, thus exacerbating the invisibility of particular sectors of Iraqi society in the global sphere. Although the documenting of narratives via a British journalist does not avoid the disadvantages associated with translation, it does enable another group of Iraqis, who otherwise would be silenced, to develop a voice on the international stage. In this sense, McCarthy's text provides a sense of diversity which is lacking in the Iraqi-authored blogs, simply because it draws on the stories of Iraqis from a range of ethnic and economic backgrounds. Some of these accounts provide a stark contrast to the liberal attitudes that Riverbend and Pax suggest is typical of the majority of Iraqis, highlighting that the situation may vary considerably across all of the regions and within each of the ethnic groups in Iraq.

Challenging Western Perceptions of “Anti-Americanism”

In her commentary, Riverbend also identifies another crucial distinction which anticipates many later cultural commentaries. She asks, “Why does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti-American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as ‘Pepsi’.”Footnote ⁶³ Here, Riverbend highlights an issue which has been raised in other texts from the Iraq War and previous wars, as well as by cultural commentators such as Huntington and Crockatt. She points to the perceived relationship in America between positioning oneself as anti-war and lacking a sense of patriotism. Riverbend's claims, which form the epigraph to this article, argue that it is essential to differentiate between “anti-Americanism” and positioning oneself against American foreign policy. This is something which both Riverbend and Pax make clear in their accounts. The producers of cultural representations often interpret American nationalism as intrinsically connected to the American government and the US military.Footnote ⁶⁴ Since much of the world perceives America via this increasingly militarized image, the distinction between “America” and American foreign policy begins to blur, making it problematic for other nations to separate their distrust of the American government and its foreign policy from their feelings towards America and the American people:

Riverbend's conclusion, “If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi are ‘America’ then yes – I hate America,”Footnote ⁶⁶ reinforces Huntington's assertion that “how Americans define themselves determines their role in the world, but how the world views that role also shapes American identity.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Crockatt extends this idea, explaining that although Americans are responsible for defining their identity, there is a significant gulf between the perception that they have of their own identity and the way that identity is perceived by other nations. He suggests that “Americans too need to understand how others see their country and in particular the huge gap which often exists between their own sense of themselves and the images which others have of them.”Footnote ⁶⁸ It is possible that Riverbend questions the representation of the US as militarized because she has grown up with the results of a militarized government in Iraq. Indeed, many Iraqis consider Saddam's most significant mistake to be his militarization of his own identity and that of his government. It is also worth noting that although Riverbend never discloses the identity of the country in which she spent her youth, her discourse carries a “slight American inflection,”Footnote ⁶⁹ leading her readers to conclude that her time abroad as a child was possibly spent in America (or in a westernized country which is influenced by American culture). Consequently, the idea that she is perceived by some American readers to be “anti-American” would perhaps be all the more insulting to her. In addition to challenging Hollander's and Berman's definitions of “anti-Americanism,” Riverbend's commentary reinforces Muscati's assertions regarding the “othering” of the Arab/Muslim:

Here, Riverbend's observations seem rather prophetic in terms of the souring of relations between America and Iraq. Indeed, after six years of war and subsequent conflict in Iraq, and its repercussions around the world, there are many angry families in both America and Iraq who seek revenge for the death of their loved ones. The evidence of increasing opposition to US foreign policy over the course of Riverbend's blog, and in other Iraq War narratives (both Iraqi and American), is remarkably reminiscent of the observations of a Vietnamese Buddhist leader, Thich Nhat Hanh, on the effects of American action in Vietnam (quoted by Rev. Martin Luther King in 1967):

This militarized image of America is indeed the one which has emerged above all others as America embarks on the twenty-first century. Like in the Vietnam War, it can be argued that it is government policy and military action that alienate the citizens of the “enemy” nation. Indeed, Morris Berman suggests that the US policy of military containment in the late twentieth century “proved to be especially destructive in its application to countries such as Iran and Iraq.”Footnote ⁷² He concludes that, given such history, “the events of September 11 were the tragic but inevitable outcome of [American] foreign policy in that part of the world.”Footnote ⁷³ As Parker anticipated as far back as 1988, “we can expect further acts of violence against Americans, but it does not mean they are a result of an inevitable Muslim or Arab animosity. They are a reaction to the invasion of American culture, not an inherent and unavoidable phenomenon of race and religion.”Footnote ⁷⁴