World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  In Russia, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events, Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich was recently elected governor of the godforsaken, poverty-stricken region of Chukotka, where temperatures commonly drop to minus thirty degrees Celsius. For better or worse, Abramovich bought his popularity by spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money airlifting food, parkas, boots, and medicine, buying computers and textbooks for the schools, and even flying three thousand children to sunny vacation destinations so they could swim in warm water.38 A shrewd entrepreneur, Abramovich, who favors jeans and sneakers but models himself on American robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, wants to economically transform Chukotka and become “the first New Russian philanthropist.” So far, he is succeeding. “I love him,” said one local citizen, expressing a common sentiment. “Since he came in the new year, we have been receiving salaries on time. There have been no problems. All hope is on him.”39 While many wonder about his motives, the fact remains that Abramovich, over a period of just a few years (and while two of his fellow oligarchs were being exiled), turned himself into a revered figure, seen by the local people as genuinely committed to helping their community.

  Meanwhile, a growing number of Western multinationals have begun to view corporate philanthropy as part of a long-term profit-maximization strategy in developing countries. It is Coca-Cola’s official position, for example, that “In the nearly 200 countries where we do business, the Coca-Cola system gives back to the community.” (Perhaps nutrition and dental improvements could be areas for Coca-Cola to focus on.) In Mexico City, American multinationals played a crucial role in funding the building of El Papalote, one of the world’s outstanding children’s museums. Roughly five thousand poor and lower-middle-class children from all parts of the country visit the museum each day and, rightly or wrongly, associate the prominently displayed names of Hewlett-Packard and Procter & Gamble with the beneficial dispersion of science and education. Since its Pakistan soccer ball scandal, Nike has enacted a code of conduct and spent millions of dollars in philanthropy, specifically aimed at improving long-term opportunities for children and women in developing countries.40

  Ideally, voluntary contributions by market-dominant minorities would be highly visible and directed at large numbers of ordinary members of the disadvantaged majority. To be sure, any material redistribution effected by these contributions would itself be desirable, but as a practical matter the more important consideration may well lie in their symbolic implications. A principal focus of nationalist and ethnonationalist anti-market reactions in the non-Western world has been the humiliating domination by “outsiders” of a nation’s economic symbols: oil wells in Latin America, gold mines in South Africa, forests in Burma and Indonesia, Lomonosov porcelain in Russia, or other sectors that have come symbolically to be associated with national identity. Perhaps market-dominant minorities can turn symbolism around in their favor.

  A good question for market-dominant business communities to ask is whether there are, in a given developing country, important national sectors or symbols to which they could make visible, valuable contributions. Thus, such communities might learn from the recent example of a number of wealthy businesspeople in the United States, who, in several highly publicized gestures, have donated tens of millions of dollars toward scholarship funds for inner-city children. Along similar lines it might be an important demonstration of national solidarity for market-dominant “outsider” groups, which are often urban-centered, to fund rural development projects. In societies where child mortality is a constant source of sorrow, the contribution of new hospital facilities, water treatment plants, or even just antibiotics would certainly be appreciated. Major conspicuous contributions to infrastructure providing tangible benefits to ordinary citizens are another possibility.

  Given the extraordinary needs and deficits of developing societies, the opportunities for building interethnic goodwill are plentiful, and there is considerable room for creativity. For example, many have observed the tremendous unifying power of sports all over the world, across both class and ethnic lines. In the United States, nothing has improved race relations more over the last two decades than the idolization of such figures as Michael Jordan, Sammy Sosa, and Tiger Woods. In France the national soccer team is now invariably “a rainbow of colors from France’s imperial history.” Thus, out of the twenty-two glorified members of the team that won the world trophy in 1998, eight were black or brown-skinned, including a Ghanaian adopted by a French priest.41 In Indonesia, where anti-Chinese sentiment is about as fierce and entrenched as it can get, ordinary pribumi citizens openly adore Susi Susanti and Alan Kusuma, ethnic Chinese badminton stars (now husband and wife) who won gold medals for Indonesia at the Barcelona Olympics—the first golds ever taken by Indonesian athletes.42

  Odd or trivial as it may seem, contributions by “outsider” groups to a national sport or team—perhaps by funding the acquisition of a star soccer player or by donating athletic facilities—may be a way of deploying the power of national symbols constructively. (Indeed, the feeling of passionate, almost irrational identification with a favorite sports team bears a certain resemblance to nationalism and ethnonationalism.) I am certainly not suggesting here that a few strategic charitable contributions will cure ethnic conflict. Anti-Indian sentiment remains intense in East Africa despite the philanthropic efforts described above, and in a shocking and disappointing recent incident, Susi Susanti’s car was vandalized in Indonesia as part of an ethnic hate crime.43 There are no easy fixes for group hatred.

  But there have been moments from which hope can be drawn. In a now-famous gesture in 1995, with all of newly democratic South Africa watching, Nelson Mandela embraced the country’s largely white rugby team by donning its green and gold jersey and attending its world championship game. Mandela’s gesture, coupled with the ensuing victory, produced a moment of rare ethnic reconciliation that has helped sustain South Africa’s fragile democracy to this day.44

  And what about the United States? What should the world’s market-dominant minority do about the growing anti-Americanism around the globe? Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jared Diamond recently offered one answer, much along the lines of what I have proposed for other market-dominant minorities. In an essay entitled, “Why We Must Feed the Hands That Could Bite Us,” Diamond urges Americans to combat the forces of poverty and hopelessness on which international terrorism feeds through three basic strategies: providing health care, supporting family planning, and addressing chronic environmental problems such as deforestation that infuriate local populations. Diamond recognizes that these measures will not eliminate the immediate threat of terrorism. But as he points out, the “few active terrorists [who carried out the September 11 attacks] depended on many more people, including desperate populations who have tolerated, harbored and even taken part in terrorist activities. When people can’t solve their own problems, they strike out irrationally, seeking foreign scapegoats, or collapsing in civil war over limited resources. By bettering conditions overseas, we can reduce chronic future threats to ourselves.”45

  Other influential figures have taken a similar position. Not long after September 11, 2001, World Bank president James Wolfensohn joined the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and British chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, in calling for a $50 billion increase in foreign aid to poor countries, calling it “an insurance policy against future terrorism.” Similarly, former U.S. treasury secretary Robert Rubin has called for an international campaign to raise public support for increased aid budgets, particularly in the United States.46

  Not surprisingly, the “more foreign aid” view has its acerbic critics, both from the left and the right. Gregory Clark, for example, a commentator for the Japan Times, mocks the liberal notion that addressing poverty will solve the problem of terrorism. “If people in the Third World want to use force against their governments or the West, that is because of perceived injustice. Large outpourings of aid will just add t
o the long history of aid waste and corruption.” In Clark’s view, terrorist attacks will continue as long as the United States continues its overseas “meddling” and its hypocritical support of oppressive regimes.47

  Similarly, but for vastly different reasons, Daniel Pipes argues that U.S. foreign aid is not the right response to the September 11 attacks. In an essay called “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?,” Pipes answers his own question with a vociferous no. “Indeed,” writes Pipes, “if one turns away from the commentators on militant Islam and instead listens to the Islamists themselves, it quickly becomes apparent that they rarely talk about prosperity. As Ayatollah Khomeini memorably put it, ‘We did not create a revolution to lower the price of melon.’” In Pipes’ view, militant Islam is ultimately about a struggle for power. Thus, “economic assets for Islamists represent not the good life but added strength to do battle against the West.”48

  Clark, Pipes, and many others are obviously right that anti-Americanism, including the particularly virulent Islamicist strain, stems from much more than just economic deprivation. Moreover, it is fantasy to think that U.S. monetary assistance might be able to do anything more than make a small dent in eliminating world poverty, at least in the near future. In my opinion, however, the wisdom of recent calls for American beneficence lies in their potentially far-reaching symbolism. Rightly or wrongly, for millions around the world, the World Trade Center symbolized greed, exploitation, indifference, and cultural humiliation. (John Cassidy recently observed that, relative to the size of our economy, the United States has the smallest aid budget of any advanced country: around 0.1 percent of GDP.)49 Like other market-dominant minorities around the world, perhaps America should try to turn symbolism around in our favor. There is no long-term promise in retreating into belligerent isolationism, or glorifying American parochialism—a recent number-one country song celebrates not knowing “the difference between Iraq and Iran.” It is difficult to see, in any event, how a little generosity and humility could possibly hurt.

  Afterword to the Anchor Edition

  In March 2003, three months after the publication of World on Fire, the United States went to war with Iraq, commencing our preemptive strike with the awesome bombing of Baghdad. We went to war without United Nations authorization and without the support of traditional NATO allies such as France, Germany, and Canada. Of the major European powers, Great Britain alone, led by Tony Blair, fought beside us.

  The U.S. government’s principal justification for war was national security—specifically Saddam Hussein’s sponsorship of terrorism and the “grave danger to global peace and security” posed by Iraq’s “massive stockpile” of biological and chemical weapons and its efforts to produce nuclear weapons. At the same time, an equally powerful sub-theme—formally laid out in “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” issued by the White House in September 2002—was the U.S. government’s commitment, including through military means, to replacing brutal, repressive dictators like Saddam Hussein with free market and democratic institutions. According to the Strategy, “We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” And in his March 31, 2003 Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, President George W. Bush explained that “disarming and liberating Iraq” was merely “a first step” toward “the development of a free market democracy in Iraq.”

  The U.S.-British victory in Iraq was swift and decisive. Despite Saddam Hussein’s bizarre claims that “The enemy . . . is in trouble now” and “Victory will soon be ours,” his reviled Ba’athist regime fell in just over forty days, prompting dancing and cheering—not to mention looting—throughout Iraqi streets. Since that initial jubilation, however, one thing has become painfully clear: The United States dramatically underestimated the difficulty of turning Iraq into a liberal, Western-style free market democracy.

  Before the war, optimists (including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) pointed to American successes in reconstructing post-Second-World-War Germany and Japan, both of which transitioned smoothly to free market democracy. But neither postwar Germany nor Japan is an apt comparison for Iraq, for one simple reason: Neither country was riven by ethnic, religious, or tribal schisms remotely comparable to those of Iraq. By 1945, Germany had exterminated most of its non-Aryans and Japan had for centuries been strikingly ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Unfortunately, a far better parallel for post-Saddam Iraq is post-Tito Yugoslavia.

  Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s ethnic and religious dynamics are extremely complicated. They involve cross-cutting conflicts across Kurds, Shias, Christians, and Sunnis; many horrendous massacres; wholesale confiscations; and deep feelings of hatred and need for revenge. In particular, Iraq’s Shias represent a 60 percent long oppressed majority in Iraq. It is impossible to know what kind of candidate—fundamentalist or moderate, conciliatory or vengeful—they would vote for in free elections. It is clear that the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s brutal (but secular) Ba’athist police state, while long overdue, has also fueled religious demagoguery among vying Islamic clerics and unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements throughout the country. Needless to say, these extremist movements are intensely anti-American, anti-foreign- investment, and illiberal. They have especially grievous implications for girls and women.

  Perhaps because of beliefs in the “melting pot” and the United States’s own relatively successful—though halting and incomplete— history of ethnic assimilation, Americans don’t always understand the significance of ethnicity, both in the United States and especially in other countries. Interestingly, British colonial governments were fastidiously conscious of ethnic divisions. Of course, their ethnic policies are a dangerous model. When it was the British Empire’s turn to deal with nation-building and ethnicity, the British engaged in divide-and-conquer policies, not only protecting but favoring ethnic minorities, and simultaneously aggravating ethnic resentments. As a result, when the British decamped, the time-bombs often exploded, from Africa to India to Southeast Asia. By contrast, at least before the war, the U.S. government’s ethnic policy for Iraq was essentially to have no ethnic policy. Instead, U.S. officials seemed strangely confident that Iraq’s ethnic, religious, and tribal divisions would dissipate in the face of democracy and market-generated wealth. In President George W. Bush’s words, “freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred.”

  But in countries as deeply divided as Iraq, everything—even freedom and wealth—has ethnic and sectarian ramifications. Who will comprise the police? Who has experience in engineering and oil or the skills to run a stock exchange? Given Saddam Hussein’s sadistically unfair and repressive regime, some groups—namely, the Sunni minority, particularly the Ba’athists—will almost certainly have a head start in terms of education, capital, and economic and managerial experience. Consequently, as is true in so many other non-Western countries, laissez-faire markets and overnight democracy in Iraq could well favor different ethnic or religious groups in the short run, creating enormous instability.

  At the same time, because the United States is the world’s most powerful and most resented market-dominant minority, every move we make with respect to Iraq is being closely—and perhaps even unfairly—scrutinized. Despite Saddam Hussein’s barbarous gulags, gross human rights violations, and repeated refusals to comply with U.N. requirements, international public opinion was overwhelmingly against the United States going to war with Iraq, even in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, not to mention China, Russia, France, and the Arab states. It is important to see that this opposition to U.S. policies was closely bound up with deep feelings of resentment and fear of American power and cynicism about American motives.

  Unfortunately, the latest developments in Iraq seem only to be fueling these suspicions. U.S. troops have not yet found weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, it has become clear
that at best the U.S. government was operating on an oversimplistic view of what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like.

  Instead of a gratitude-filled Iraqi people cooperating with the United States in a rapid transition to multiethnic free market democracy (which ideally would produce a domino effect across the Middle East), Iraq today teeters on the brink of lawlessness. In June 2003 in Najaf, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, unilaterally cancelled local elections, even though the Iraqis were eager and ready to vote. Mr. Bremer based his decision on the ground that conditions in Najaf were not yet appropriate for elections. A senior official in his office elaborated: “The most organized political groups in many areas are rejectionists, extremists, and remnants of the Ba’athists. . . . They have an advantage over the other groups.” Not surprisingly, the barring of elections in Najaf—and the U.S.’s decision more generally to postpone Iraqi self-government—has produced tremendous anger throughout Iraq. Attacks on coalition forces continue, and demonstrating crowds yelling “No Americans, No Saddam” and “Yes to Freedom and Islam” are increasingly common.

  Deep ethnic and religious divisions remain in Iraq, but ironically one theme unifying the Iraqi people at the moment is their intensifying opposition to American and British occupation. Meanwhile, in the words of one observer, the vast majority of Arabs in the Middle East are “perched at the edge of their seat waiting for the U.S. to fail. . . . Many Arabs feel that any work in Iraq now—be it humanitarian relief work, governance, or helping the economy—is feeding into the occupation of one of the strongest Arab nations.”