A civics lesson from Mohsin Hamid, who has lived in both the U.S. and Pakistan:
[T]here is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
When my family moved back to Pakistan, I was given a front-row seat from which to observe one such obscure episode. ...
When I mentioned the final campaign of the Cold War to my fellow freshmen at Princeton, few seemed to know much about it. Eighteen years later, most people I meet in the United States are astounded to learn that the period ever occurred. But in Pakistan, it is vividly seared into the national memory. Indeed, it has torn the very fabric of what, when I was born, was a relatively liberal country with nightclubs, casinos and legal alcohol.
The residue of U.S. foreign policy coats much of the world. It is the other part of the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" Simply because America has -- often for what seemed good reasons at the time -- intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, forgotten those interventions. ...
Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.
Because at their core, those values are sound. That is why, even in places where you'll find virulent anti-Americanism, you'll also find enormous affection for things American. ...
All of which leads us to another, perhaps more fruitful question that Americans ought to consider: "Why do they love us?" ...
The challenge that the United States faces today boils down to a choice. It can insist on its primacy as a superpower, or it can accept the universality of its values. If it chooses the former, it will heighten the resentment of foreigners and increase the likelihood of visiting disaster upon distant populations -- and vice versa. If it chooses the latter, it will discover something it appears to have forgotten: that the world is full of potential allies.
The real crime of the Bush administration has been to conflate the values of democracy and equality with the United States's power to impose its will on others.
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