Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror
illustrates the progression of the world from the age of Post-Colonialism to its current state from the perspective of an outside critic of American foreign policy. Well-versed and knowledgeable, Mamdani brings to light key instances where America's government fell into corruption, and the unintended consequences of those actions. His book reveals that when a nation abandons reason it abandons morality, and that such a nation is bound to repeat its mistakes and commit whole new ones in the future.
The Cold War saw the end of the American Constitutional Republic. This becomes clear when one looks at how the United States acted with respect to the Communist specter. Vietnam began with a falsified claim of attack in the Gulf of Tonkin (Mamdani 2004), which led to the eleven-year war against Ho Chi Minh, the Viet-Cong, and the Soviets by proxy. Because certain tactics in the war were repugnant, the CIA performed secret operations away from the media and the public eye, such as their bombing raids of Laos (Mamdani 2004). Because secret operations must still be funded, and since the public will eventually question where all that "off the books" money is going, the CIA came up with a new strategy: lend support to the illegal drug industry, and profit off its rampant growth (Mamdani 2004). Thus immorality bred further immorality in an endless cycle.
The United States strayed further from its moral base as it began to befriend right-wing dictatorships while seeking the destruction of left-wing dictatorships. Mamdani cites an article by Jeanne Kirkpatrick that explains to a large degree why the United States applied this "double standard." She believed that left-wing dictatorships could not be reformed, whereas right-wing ones could be reformed. Therefore the United States supported right-wing dictatorships, no matter how brutal they were, and undermined left-wing ones, no matter how benevolent they were. All this was done without the knowledge or consent of the people or of the Congress as a whole (Mamdani 2004).
That was the point. A free people would never support fighting wars of aggression against nationalist governments, wars that were financed by drug trafficking and fought in support of a monolithic and unrealistic worldview. The people had to be lied to and distracted. America's fight against militant nationalism abroad turned her own patriotism into nationalism at home. One need only listen to talk-radio for five minutes to know this is true. Mamdani is correct when he says that contemporary terror was forged "in an environment of impunity created by state terror during the late Cold War." (Mamdani 2004). Whether it was El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua, the United States fostered state-sponsored terror, and when the means to victory are constrained to terrorism, both sides will use it as a means of attack.
When one realizes further that the United States helped create and train Al-Qaida, our mortal enemy, one can really grasp the depths that America's moral decay has led her into. To say that the Constitutional Republic is dead truly means that the rule of law is dead. The government has exceeded its bounds; it has waged war and murdered millions in the name of peace, justice, and freedom. This has succeeded in isolating America from an ever more hostile world.
As Mamdani says:
"If to live by the rule of law is to belong to a common political community, then does not the selective application of the rule of law confirm a determination to relegate entire sections of humanity as conscripts of a civilization fit for collective punishment?" (Mamdani 2004)
America must wake up to the fact that no nation is meant to rule the world, dispensing justice on whom it sees fit, but that sovereign nations must solve their own problems. America must turn inward and heal its own wounds, repair its legitimate government, restore freedom to its people, and once more be a city on a hill, illuminating the torch of liberty as an example for the rest of the world.
Works Cited
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of
Terror. New York: Three Leaves Press.