By DOUGLAS FARAH
Posted: 4:23 am
September 14, 2008
Jim Sciutto, a veteran TV correspondent, poses a question that has puzzled many Americans since the 9/11 attacks: Why does so much of the Muslim world seem to hate the United States? As he sums it up: "The great paradox of America's position in the Muslim world: deep distrust of American intentions coupled with an unrealistic confidence in American power."
Sciutto's answer, "Against Us," succeeds best when he lets interviewees and their circumstances speak for themselves, as he does with the story of a girl named Homa in Afghanistan, who dreams of living in a country like America where "things work .ñ.ñ. The lights go on when you flip the switch. The roads are smooth. The cars start." Not only does a more nuanced and complex view of her relationship with the United States emerge, but Sciutto captures the essence of the small failures that have added up over time to deep disillusionment with the foreign presence there.
In this case, despite billions of dollars in foreign aid, a school for 4,000 children just a few blocks from the presidential palace has never been rebuilt despite multiple promises that it would be. The result of the inability of the weak central government and its foreign backers to carry out such a simple task makes the school an apt symbol for much of the deep failures in that country.
Dr. Jamal Taha, in Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, emerges an heroic figure, toiling for endless hours and without resources in a hospital with little functioning equipment, trying to save lives in the midst of his nation's unraveling. Jamal "is a medical workhorse probably without equal in all of Iraq," Sciutto says. "Over the four years I have known him I have watched the violence age Dr. Jamal. He is 34 years old but already looks well into his 40s." Once again, the simple failure to help solve the most pressing human problems while claiming to bring freedom is a theme that drives many to disillusionment with the United States and its foreign policy.
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