Christopher Dickey, Newsweek Middle East editor and Paris bureau chief, and author of the Newsweek Online "Shadowland" column on the world of spies, soldiers and terrorism, gave a talk titled "Fact, Fiction and Foreign Policy" at Hamilton on Oct. 28. Dickey spoke about what he has learned from his 25 years as a foreign correspondent and spending much of that time in Baghdad, Cairo and Jerusalem.
According to Dickey, the main lesson he has learned from his experiences around the world is that "what the American people want from the rest of the world is to forget about it." This is particularly true, he said, when Americans are unable to understand other parts of the world due to the vast cultural differences between us and them.
Americans, Dickey said, live in a nation that was founded on the idea of the future, and were raised in a culture that is always looking forward. This is markedly different from the way the majority of the world lives, looking back at what they came from and the groups they belong to. It is telling, he said, that in America we think of ourselves as "having" friends and family, while the rest of the world think of themselves as "belonging" to a tribe or other family group. This cultural gap, part of the much talked about "clash of civilizations," means that Americans find it difficult to understand the Iraqi tribal system, and why Iraqis feel that their culture is disrespected by the Americans who are occupying their homeland and trying to influence their social structure.
America has been involved in a surprisingly high number of military operations in recent history, Dickey said, but the American people tend to quickly forget these conflicts once they stop being portrayed dramatically on TV. The rest of the world, however, and particularly the places who have been on the other end of American military action, do not forget what the United States has done overseas. Dickey spoke from his experiences in places the U.S. military was currently bombing or attacking, saying, "When you are on the recieving end of American fury, you wonder what they're thinking. Sometimes you realize that they're not thinking much at all."
After the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, Dickey wrote articles about terrorist groups in Afghanistan and the anger focused on the United States from around the world, but felt that his articles had no impact on the consciousness of the American people. He thought that maybe this was because American readers couldn't care about or understand people from other cultures. Dickey decided, therefore, to write a book about terrorism with an all-American character that his readers might better be able to relate to. Thus he wrote his first novel, Innocent Blood, the story of a blond-haired, blue-eyed man raised in America who is drawn into the world of Islamist terrorism and becomes involved in a plot to spread smallpox in the United States. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, many people asked Dickey how he knew that something like this was going to happen. In response, he said, Dickey asked them how they could not have known that something like this was bound to happen. In the months following September 11, Dickey began work on a sequel to Innocent Blood, the recently published novel The Sleeper. This book follows the protagonist of the first book, now a reformed terrorist, as he tries to hunt down the perpatrators of September 11.
After speaking about his books, Dickey answered questions from the audience. One audience member asked if Americans are any more naive or ignorant about the rest of the world than Europeans are. Dickey responded that the European experience and understanding of what is going on around the world today is different than ours for a couple of reasons. For one, they have been having small scale terrorist attacks in their nations for years, while attacks on our own soil are a new phenomenon for us. Also, the wars of modern European history have given the people of Europe an understanding of what it means to be both the occupied and the occupier. As Americans, Dickey said, we are not capable of understanding the full impact of what it means to be occupied, or even what it means to occupy others.
When asked by an audience member what American can do to change its situation in the world, Dickey responded that we have to raise the international consciousness of the American people. While the American people may think they know what's going on around the world if they watch the news, according to Dickey we miss a lot of what's going on precisely because of the media we are exposed to. The proliferation of media outlets has decreased the feeling of journalistic responsibility for any one media source, and there is a belief that the most profitable news is that which is entertaining and self-affirming. Dickey used FOX News as an example, saying that it is the "ESPN of the news media." In fact, he said, the American media today is in much the same place as it as during the "yellow journalism" at the turn of the last century. As Dickey pointed out, it was yellow journalism that got America into the Spanish-American war, "our first great colonial adventure." Later, he also said that liberal arts institutions such as Hamilton are important factors in creating international consciousness in that they create a "broader sense of the world" for their students. When asked about the outlook for democracy in Iraq, Dickey said that he believes there is almost no chance for a democratic Iraq with its current borders, despite the fact that Iraqis are an advanced people who do want to be free. He based his prediction both on the sectarian divisiveness of the nation, as well as the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure during the US invasion of the country. "There may be elections in January," Dickey said, "but they won't hold the country together. In fact, they might serve to tear it apart."
The lecture was followed by a book signing of The Sleeper. Christopher Dickey's lecture was sponsored by the Office of the President.
--by Caroline R. O'Shea '07
