Jason Soon brought our attention to this excellent, insightful essay by Barry Rubin at Australia’s The Review: The September 11 Ledger, subtitled The truth about US Mid-East policy. Rubin defends US Middle Eastern and Arab policies, with numerous examples and lucid writing.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the new anti-Americanism–though even this point is not so new–is the contradiction between seeing the United States as an arrogant bully whose mistreatment of the Arabs and Muslims merits punishment and as a cowardly weakling.

While the radicals must portray America as a bully to provoke outrage against it, they must also portray America as weak to encourage Arabs and Muslims to fight it and believe they can win. So the revolutionaries must persuade the masses and leaders that America is simultaneously horrible and helpless.

Here, too, is a key problem with the US debate over the terrorism crisis: American opinion-makers, diplomats, and academics are defining America’s mistake in the Middle East as having been too tough. Instead, the belief that America could be defeated and the readiness to try such a strategy arises from the fact that the United States was too weak and meek in its behaviour. Far from attacking America because it is really a big bully, extremists past and present launched assaults to prove their belief that the United States was a paper tiger.

Thus, while US policy has made mistakes perhaps the biggest mistake of all is the precise opposite of what it is accused of doing by critics both at home and in the Middle East. Rather than having been guilty of bullying, the United States has been too soft to merit respect. Here is a country in which the most influential text on the Middle East, Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, charges that Americans — and especially American scholars — totally misunderstand and constantly insult the Middle East. In fact, the Middle East’s miscomprehension and hostile behaviour toward America far exceeds these same qualities on the part of the United States.