If there is a more simple-minded commentator on the planet than Ian Buruma, it would be interesting to know who it is. Buruma let's remember, is the critic who decided after reading Ayaan Hrisi Ali's description of her genital mutilation by her grandmother that it wasn't the tradition of female circumcision, practiced ubiquitously in Somalia, that needed to be criticized, it was Hirsi-Ali herself. What was her crime? According to Buruma, she was an "enlightenment fundamentalist."

When Hirsi-Ali described her escape to the West, which entailed an escape from the assassination that surely would have been her fate had she stayed in the Islamic world, Buruma accused her penning "descriptions of life in the West" that have "an idealized, almost comic-book quality that sounds as naïve as those romantic novels she consumed as a young girl."

Buruma obviously doesn't like black women who are self-confident, willing to stand up for themselves and courageous enough to stare down Islamic extremists who believe the only punishment for apostates is death. He objects to her "style" and her "attitude." Poor Buruma even found Hirsi-Ali's body language offended his delicate sensibilities; he actually criticized the way she "waved her hand" in a television clip. Perhaps like his sexist colleague, Timothy Garton Ash, he thinks that had Hirisi-Ali "been short, squat and squinting, her story and her views might not have been so closely attended to."

Although he would deny it, no serious reader of his book, "Murder in Amsterdam:" Liberal Europe, Islam and the Limits of Tolerance" can come away with any other conclusion other than that Buruma is unable to tell the difference between a cold blooded murdering fanatic (the killer of Theo Van Gogh) and a passionate advocate for the rights of Muslim women.

The appropriate question is why institutions like Bard, the New York Public Library or journals like "Foreign Policy" would sully their reputations by having the likes of Ian Buruma associated with their organizations.

It is in this light that Buruma's ridiculous essay should be analyzed. His critique of American exceptionalism is about as intellectually rigorous as his critique of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is sympathetic.

Buruma sees similarities between American exceptionalism and French exceptionalism and criticizes the body politic in the United States for suffering from a great big Napoleon complex. He says,

"...the Napoleonic urge is rooted in the Christian tradition. French and American democracies may be secular, but the missionary zeal and the claims of universality surely owe something to the countries' religious past."

Fascinating, isn't it, that Buruma is so put off by the missionary zeal of Americans that he finds rooted in Christianity yet he is such a great apologist for the missionary zeal of Muslims? Sing the praises of the enlightenment and Buruma thinks you're uppity; advocate honor killing, consanguineous marriage of young girls, and female genital mutilation and Buruma thinks you're entitled to forbearance and understanding. Perhaps Buruma doesn't think that what the Muslim world is doing in Sudan has anything to do with "missionary zeal" and perhaps he thinks the attacks against Christians in Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and even Indonesia and Malaysia has nothing to do with an Islamic conception of "exceptionalism." One thing is clear, the idea of American exceptionalism irritates him while he believes Islamic exceptionalism represents multiculturalism at its best.

Buruma turns himself into the caricature of a thoughtful commentator when he suggests that the fact that Americans respect military leaders somehow makes the country akin to a tin-pot dictatorship. I haven't noticed anyone "genuflecting" to American men and women in uniform. The only genuflecting by a prominent American that I've seen recently is when President Obama literally genuflected to the King of Saudi Arabia.

No take-down of the United States would be complete without a perfunctory repetition of the cliché about the state of the American infrastructure; naturally Buruma obliges. But one wonders what makes Buruma think that the state of the American infrastructure is as bleak as he makes it out to be. Surely living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in a cozy little home in Dutchess County, Buruma hasn't seen any evidence of a decaying infrastructure himself. After all, for celebrity journalists like him, only the most luxurious accommodations are satisfactory. Perhaps Buruma learned about how horrible American infrastructure is from reading that learned journal and great purveyor of truth, the "New York Review of Books." But then, like him, the NYRB struggles to find anything about the United States that is laudatory, so exagerating how bad American infrastructure is seems like just the ticket.

As a European, one would think that at the very least Buruma’s comments about Europe would be informed; but his comments about France and Great Britain couldn’t be less accurate. He says,

“The latest venture in Libya, however, showed a more independent European spirit, led, unsurprisingly, by the French. It was as if President Nicolas Sarkozy, cheered on by some prominent French chauvinists, wanted to hitch the tricolor once more to its own mission civilisatrice. This time, the United States, exhausted by too many recent failures, took a back seat. Nonetheless, even this Franco-British mission could never have had any success without the wherewithal of U.S. power.”

No one who actually watched what happened in Libya could make the argument that an America exhausted by recent failures took a back seat. The French and the British lacked the military capability to begin the campaign because neither nation had the ability to take out Gadaffi’s antiaircraft systems. Once those systems were degraded by the United States to make it safe enough for French and British pilots to fly bombing sorties without the threat of being shot down, the United States handed over the assignment to the British and the French. Amazingly, even then they couldn’t handle it; in short order both the British and the French literally ran out of bombs to drop. Where did they have to turn? To the United States of course. Buruma can delude himself into thinking this was an exhausted America taking a back seat, but it’s pretty obvious that an America driving from the back seat is far more capable than the French or the British in the actual driver’s seat.

This essay by Buruma is little more than a trite anti-American diatribe that spouts all of the clichés long cherished by an increasingly unhinged and irrelevant left. Add to the fact that Buruma criticizes the United States for exactly the same things he gives the Muslim world a pass for and we’ve learned everything about Ian Buruma that we need to know.

I very muich agree with the author that foolish US foreign and "defence" policy over past twenty years owes a good deal to the collapse of the USSR.
But America's rise to become greatest military power on earth was not impeded by Britain in any significant way.

The author gives insufficient weight to the fact G W Bush initially opposed the foolish invasion of Iraq, on grounds Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The core of the conspiracy to set up the illegal invasion of Iraq rested on the falsification of intelligence by neocons within the Pentagon, and the use of that false intelligence to deceive Bush, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and key elements of the US Congress.

The Chancellor of Germany, Bismarck, decades before the outbreak of the First World War, saw that the rise of American power augmented substantially the power of the British Empire. And Bismarch could see it was imperative for Germany to maintain good relations with Britain. The very foolish and vainglorious German Emperor, after he sacked Bismarck, took Germany to catastrophe, in part because he was a stooge of armaments manufacturers.

"As recently as 2003, it was considered absurd to talk of the decline of the United States. Now, however, such a belief has become common currency among theorists, policymakers, and the media. What significantly raised the awareness of this concept was, of course, the fiasco of the United States’ preemptive invasion of Iraq. What is not yet sufficiently appreciated is the precise nature of this decline and when it specifically began.

Most analysts contend that the United States was at its hegemonic apex in the post-1991 era when the world was marked by unipolarity, as contrasted with the bipolar structure that existed during the Cold War.

But this notion has reality absolutely backwards. The United States was the sole hegemonic power from 1945 to approximately 1970. Its hegemony has been in decline ever since. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major blow to US power in the world. And the invasion of Iraq in 2003 transformed the situation from one of slow decline into one of precipitous collapse. By 2007, the United States had lost its credibility not only as the economic and political leader of the world-system, but also as the dominant military power.
Since I am aware that this is not the standard picture either in the media or in scholarly literature, let me spell this out in some detail. I shall divide this accountinto three periods: 1945-1970, 1970-2001, and 2001 to the present. They correspond to the period of US hegemony, that of slow US decline giving rise to a creeping multipolarity, and that of the precipitate decline and effective multipolarityof the era inaugurated by US President George W. Bush."

from Immanuel Wallerstein's "Precipitate Decline: The Advent of Multipolarity"

http://www.iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/HARVIR7!.PDF

see also

http://www.iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/NLRCURVE.PDF

"Since the end of the Second World War, the geopolitics of the
world-system has traversed three different phases. From 1945
till ca. 1970 the us hegemony exercised unquestioned hegemony
in the world-system. The period from 1970 to 2001 was a
time in which American hegemony began to decline, but the extent of
its decline was limited by the strategy that the US evolved to delay and
minimize the effects of its loss of ascendancy. In the period since 2001,
the us has sought to recuperate its standing by more unilateralist policies,
which have, however, boomeranged—indeed actually accelerating
the speed and depth of its decline."

both above from

http://www.iwallerstein.com/articles/

Interesting article. Somehow, I have never associated boots on the
ground with the word "exceptionism". To me it meant exceptionism in
science, literature, excellent universities, landing on the moon and more bets.
Everything worthy of what the word "exceptional" implies.