Source: Electronic Intifada
Cole steers the conversation away from what Mahmood Mamdani has called “Culture Talk” — i.e., the tendency to seek cultural causes for political effects, especially, the tendency of Western analysts to pathologize political violence and look for its causes in the teachings of Islam. He shows terrorism as a fringe phenomenon, analogous to white supremacist groups in the United States. He makes a distinction between reformist political Islamist organizations and Islamist revolutionaries and advocates engagement with the former as a means of marginalizing the latter. However, in a curious omission, no chapter is devoted to Palestine even though Cole admits that an equitable solution to the conflict “would resolve 90 percent of America’s problems with the Muslim world.”
While Cole rightly notes the absurdity of notions such as “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” (“the word ‘Islamic’ like ‘Judaic’ merely refers to the ideals of the religion”), his own first chapter is entitled “The struggle for Islamic oil.” US dependence on “Islamic” oil, according to Cole, is one of the major sources of what he calls “Islam Anxiety.” However, he does not explain why Venezuelan oil isn’t a source of Latino Anxiety. Also, as Cole himself notes, of the top five energy suppliers to the US in 2008, only one (Saudi Arabia) is a Muslim country. Cole concedes that it is not the dependence on foreign imports that Americans resent. Oil, he argues, is “wrought up with gender and race” because “American men view [their] vehicles as symbols of freedom and masculinity,” and having Arabs and Iranians — “among the more disliked ethnicities” — determine its price is “galling and even perhaps felt as castrating” because they control American sources of “manhood and liberty.”
There is no disputing that oil remains the pre-eminent US interest in the Middle East; [and] each one of Big Oil’s setbacks has been the consequence of US support for Israel. This US-Israel special relationship was recognized as a handicap by former CIA director and energy expert John McCone as far back as 1967, Cole shows. But if Israel is such a liability, why does the United States continue to support it? This is the fundamental question that Cole unfortunately sidesteps. Domestic political imperatives in the form of pressure from the Israel lobby have ensured unconditional support for Israel, and this has served as the main barrier to US economic interests in the region. Like most analysts on the left, Cole fails to appreciate that commerce is the potential bridge between the US and the resource-rich Middle East.
[Cole] refutes the racist and bigoted assumptions that underlie American views of the Muslim world, and makes a persuasive case for engagement. In the end, however, relations between the US and the Middle East are not strained because of nebulous notions such as “Islam anxiety,” but power configurations such as the Israel lobby which have an interest in thwarting any such engagement lest it jeopardize the US’s special relationship with Israel. By failing to address these barriers Cole offers prescriptions that have at best ad hoc value. This is an important book — a must read — in so far as it addresses how Americans keep getting the Middle East wrong; it could have been an indispensable book had Cole also questioned why.
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