An Arab writes about the US election
November 2nd, 2004 - Beirut Times

This presidential election in America has all but taken over my life. For the past six months or so I have been spending more and more of my time obsessively following the election. With every passing day it took more and more of my time and energy; the first thing I do when I wake up is check the news for the latest poll numbers and election developments, at work I spend a considerable amount of time on the internet reading about it.

I am writing this to urge you to vote for John Kerry on November 2nd. I went to college in the US for eight years, within-which period I fell in love with the country. It was a tough time for me, culture shock and everything, but it was definitely some of the best years of my life. The US in general (and Boston in particular) was the place where I learned a lot about who I was; to me it was a place ripe with possibility, a place where I felt truly free, and, for much of the time I was there, a place where I felt at home.

I moved back from Boston to Amman seven years ago. Since then a lot has changed, it seems, under the Bush administration. I watched as, to my deep distress, this administration seemed to slowly but surely transform the America that I knew into something else that was also, however, familiar to me; less of a bastion of freedom, individualism, and democracy and more like, well, an Arab country.

My first glimpse of how America changed was during the Iraq war, when I was in rural Ohio, where my wife is from. America was whipped into a war frenzy, and everybody, it seemed, was willing to switch off their critical faculty, their patriotic duty to stick "support our troops" signs in front lawns and switch to groupthink mode. The closest thing I had seen that resembled this was when I was growing up and Jordan supported Saddam in his needless war against Iran. Every night on Jordanian TV we were shown Saddam's artillery firing off into the distance, his murderous project sold to an acquiescent Arab public as a virtuous and successful project. If Mr. Bush likes the pseudo-biblical metaphor of himself as a "steward of the land", the American people, it seems, were just as eager to become a brainless herd of sheep.

As a student in America, I was told that one of the foremost advantages of democracy was a free media, and that it had a responsibility to criticize the government as part of the system of checks and balances that the US enjoys. When it came down to it, however, it seemed that most of the US media were all too happy to abdicate any such role. Worse, they even went so far as to echo and appropriate the administration's war rhetoric. Thus, for example, an MSNBC report would declare that such-and-such army division had left for Iraq "to defend our country", and so on, when there was no need for them to use this language.

In retrospect, many (if not most) Americans say that they do not really know why the US went into Iraq. Mr. Bush likes to say that this war is part of a grand vision, a project to install a democracy in the Middle East. However it is hard not to see the irony in that the opposite seems to have happened, with the US instead acting like a
typical oppressive Arab regime. The US is not teaching the Iraqis democracy when it conducts torture and physical and sexual abuse at Abu-Ghraib; it teaches them that perhaps there is little difference between Saddam and America, and that those who were responsible can get away with it and the blame shifted to underlings.

The US does not teach the Iraqis democracy when it grants reconstruction deals to US companies like Halliburton without having to bid and compete for them on a level playing field. What it demonstrates to Iraqis is that crony capitalism is not an aberration
perfected by Saddam and his inner coterie, but business as usual for the Bush administrations and the powerful corporations connected to them. Furthermore, the Bush administration set a dangerous precedent when it held hundreds of detainees in Guantánamo Bay and denied them recourse to both America's own legal system and their rights under the Geneva conventions. To the world watching, especially the Iraqis Bush wants to teach about democracy, this is par for the course; it is what they were used to under Saddam, and can only be seen as a telling sign of American hypocrisy.

One of the things which struck me about American society when I lived in the states was that Americans were middle class! I was so used to the large gap between rich and poor, between the elites and the rest of the population in Jordan that this simple observation came as somewhat of a revelation. To me, it was refreshing; a model for what our societies should strive for. Americans might not realize how lucky they are to live in such an egalitarian society, and how important it is to preserve the middle class. Every American should be as distressed as I am by this administration's policies which
redistribute the wealth in favor of the very rich and contribute towards the erosion of the middle class. How do those who believe that Mr. Bush is a christian in the white house reconcile this idea with his allegiance to the rich and powerful? I dare say that if Jesus were president of the United States today he would spend more time worrying about the 35.9 Million Americans living under the poverty line (about 12.5% of the population) than the wealthiest 1%. What do you call a tax cut that contributes to turn a record $5.6 tillion surplus into a record deficit of $4.4 trillion (bankrupting 50 states in the process)? A bribe for votes.

Then, of course, there's the patriot act, which gives the various law enforcement agencies the ability to share information, but also allows the US government to spy on its people in the name of fighting terrorism, without the need for justification and without
accountability. Somehow, the analogy to, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Assad's Syria is lost on most Americans.

I would agree with those who say that the Patriot act is a necessary evil in a post 9-11 world, except for the fact that not a single individual detained under this act was convicted for anything related to terrorism as of this writing. With their supposed traditional mistrust of 'big government', Republicans should be on the forefront of opposition to this law, because with no burden of accountability it simply invites government abuse.

The patriot act can only lead, and has lead, to the racial profiling of Arabs. I am moving with my family back to the US after this election and for the first time find myself wondering whether, in fact, I would have more freedom in Jordan than the US. My two year old son has an Arabic-sounding name, and I shudder to think that he would grow up in a place where our phones might be tapped, email monitored, or where we would be called in for so-called "voluntary interviews" for no reason other than being Arab. Mr. Kerry, in my view, has the right idea when he says that the Patriot Act has to be changed, and that Americans should not allow the terrorists to re-write the constitution of the United States. The bottom line is that Mr. Bush's policies are fraying the very democratic fabric of the America that I know and love. Those who say that with Mr. Bush "what you see is what you get" can hardly be aware of the damage that he is inflicting on their democracy.

I urge all Americans but especially Arab Americans to vote for John Kerry November 2nd, not least because for those of us who left the Arab world to find a home in America, Mr. Bush is effectively taking that home away from us. Mr. Kerry, as someone wrote in a New Yorker article, "offers a clear corrective alternative to Bush's curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery". I believe that Kerry has substance to George Bush's empty rhetoric, and is more the tempered diplomat to George Bush's reckless cowboy. Mr. Kerry has been criticized for being "overeager to acknowledge every angle of every issue", but as far as I am concerned this is not a drawback but a virtue, and, right now, is exactly what America needs in a president.

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