AMERICA

  
For every attitude that is supposed to be distinctively American one can find an opposite stance that is no less so … There is no such thing as an essentially American world view -- any more than there is an essentially American landscape. Anyone who thinks otherwise shows they have no grasped the most important fact about America, which is that it is unknowable.

-- British historian John Gray

In his last book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, [New York Times columnist Thomas] Friedman advanced what he called his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: no two countries would ever go to war with one another if they both had McDonald’s restaurants on their soil. It was bad luck that the British edition of this book appeared just as United States Air Force missiles rained down on Belgrade, a city whose many misfortunes unquestionably included the presence of American’s nastiest culinary export. Friedman honestly if ruefully admitted that Belgrade was the exception to his rule, but this was a warning against grandiose theories, golden or otherwise.

Now the good news. To begin with, Friedman is more often right than not. He was profoundly right in saying that Sept. 11 was an appalling crime that had no conceivable justification, or even any real origin in oppression and injustice. That might not sound like such an amazing insight, but it quite eluded the "American had it coming" left in Europe and on some campuses in the United States. As Friedman saw, Osama bin Laden was not the brave if misguided proponent of a worthy cause, and he didn’t care twopence for the Palestinians. He was -- let’s hope the paste tense is correct -- a bloodthirsty religious maniac, and his followers were deluded fanatics for whom murder was some obscure compensation for failure.

When he turns to the conflict in the Holy Land, Friedman is partly right. As he sees, the Palestinians have learned some things from Zionism, but they have still to learn the lesson that the best is the enemy of the good, and that all wise negotiations mean settling for what you can get now rather than what you want one day. And yet he fails to see the full pathos of the situation of the Palestinians, a people forgotten by history who found themselves involuntarily caught up in another people’s great drama.

Nor should he imply that the United States can be an even-handed broker in that conflict. A sharp-eyed Palestinian might spot a comical contrast here. While Friedman is dismayed when Arabs tell him "that the Jews control the U.S. government," he also admits that although Israeli settlement policy is "insane," President Bush can do nothing about it, because that "would inevitably force a clash with U.S. Jews, whose votes and donations he needs to protect his G.O.P. majority in the House."

With all those contradictions, few writers express better the sheer perplexity of America today: We are an open society and a beacon of freedom, so why do they hate us? Maybe an Englishman can help Friedman here. Like the Americans now, a hundred years ago the English combined political, cultural, economic and military hegemony with a very strong sense of their own virtue and high motives. And, just like the Americans now, they failed to see how insufferable others found this combination of might and righteousness.

-- Geoffrey Wheatcraft, reviewing Friedman’s Longitudes and Attitudes in the New York Times Book Review