Telling America's story
Nor do young Muslims remember that the United States sent 500,000 troops to the Persian Gulf a decade ago to protect Muslims in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the depredations of Saddam. Or that 18 American soldiers died in Somalia in 1993 trying to arrest Mohammed Farah Aidid because he had murdered 22 Pakistani Muslim peacekeepers. Or that America last used its military might to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Arabs protest our evenhandedness in the dispute between Israel and Palestinians, but they don't seem to understand that the long, steady efforts by the United States to bring about a settlement have only borne as much fruit as they have because the Israelis trust us as a friend. Or that we shell out $5 billion a year to keep peace between Egypt and Israel. Or that a long-term peace will be possible only if America provides more guarantees. Many Arabs also protest United Nations sanctions against Saddam, claiming they are causing the deaths of starving Iraqi children. We must prove to them, as Michael Rubin did in the New Republic, that northern Iraq is living under the sanctions but its leaders have behaved responsibly so that infant mortality there is actually lower than it was before the sanctions were imposed in 1990. "The United Nations isn't starving Saddam's people," Rubin writes; "Saddam is." Indeed, columnist Thomas Friedman calculates Saddam has killed a million Muslims over his bloody career.
America is big enough that we should admit that we have our failings. We must do far more than we have recently in helping poorer peoples gain freedom and justice. But we also have a good story, and we must tell it to the world with as much verve and imagination as we are now showing on the field of battle.
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