Presenting a nation without sin—one that has always conducted its Middle
Eastern policies evenhandedly and with best intentions toward both
Palestinians and Israelis, for example—merely leaves students ignorant,
unable to understand why others are upset with us. Such presentations also fuel
students’ ethnocentrism—the belief that ours is the finest society in the world
and all other nations should be like us. Americans are already more
ethnocentric than any other people, partly because the immense economic,
military, and cultural strengths of the United States encourage us to believe that
our nation is not only the most powerful but also the best on the planet. Any
history course that further increases this already robust ethnocentrism only
decreases students’ ability to learn from other cultures.
Besides being crippled by their “international good guy” assumption,
textbook authors operate at a second disadvantage. Our wars with Iraq have a
history. Chapter 8 pointed out how textbooks have done a woeful job of
discussing the history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The United
States helped Saddam Hussein seize power in the first place. In 1963, Iraq’s
Shi’ite prime minister, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, “began to threaten U.S. and
British influence,” in the words of journalists Anthony Lappé and Stephen
Marshall. The CIA masterminded Qassem’s overthrow; in return, Hussein and
his Ba’ath Party welcomed Western oil companies at first. A few years later,
however, Hussein nationalized the Iraqi oil industry. Nevertheless, since an
old principle of war and diplomacy holds “the enemy of my enemy is my
friend,” the United States supported Hussein when he invaded Iran in 1980. In
1982, President Reagan removed Iraq from the list of known terrorist countries
so we could supply Hussein with military equipment and other aid for his war
with Iran. During the rest of the 1980s, the United States sold Iraq military
helicopters, computers, scientific instruments, chemicals, and other goods for
Iraq’s missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, according
to reporter John King. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency supplied
Iraq with information to help its forces use chemical weapons on Iranian
troops. Although such weapons have long been outlawed, the United States
then blocked UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s use of them.
Even after the war with Iran ended and we knew Hussein was using these
weapons on his own people, we continued to send weapons-grade anthrax,
cyanide, and other chemical and biological weapons to Iraq. No textbook
acknowledges our linkages with Hussein in the past.^20