Does America care?

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told me of a gung-ho colleague who, embedded with a marine unit racing towards Baghdad, excitedly declared over the telephone: 'We're crossing the Ganges!' When he was told that he must mean the Tigris, he said. 'Yeah, one of those Biblical rivers or other.'

When I mentioned to a reporter of USA Today how difficult it seemed to cover the Middle East without much experience in the region, she was dismissive. 'You can read one book like God has Ninety Nine Names and figure out what's going on here' she said, referring to a book by Judith Miller. 'You can talk to any cab driver and he'll tell you everything you need to know.' As it happens, all the cab drivers in Doha are from India and Pakistan."

New York Review of Books, 'The Unseen War', May 29, 2003.

If senior correspondents of American national dailies are as well informed as this, it should be no surprise that most pupils of a Texan high school believe that Rome is the capital of France or that India is in Africa, "while official intelligence of pre-war Iraq, including expectations of the welcome suggest that kind of ignorance may not be confined to high schools," as Ian Jack says in his Introduction to Granta 84: Over There: How America Sees the World (East West Books, Rs 399).

Does this mean that the USA, the world's newest, and the only empire in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union is also the most insular, the most powerful, never troubling to correct its ignorance of the people and places beyond its borders? As things stand today, according to a clutch of specialists, novelists and poets, official America doesn't quite give a damn and quite honestly looks forward to a Pax Americana.

Look at Iraq. Anyone can see what has happened there. It was nothing more than a war of colonial conquest fought for oil, "dressed up as a crusade for western life and liberty," and its authors were "a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geo-political fanatics who hijacked the media and exploited America's post September 11 psychopathy." These words are spoken in John le Carre's new novel, Absolute Friends.

And although it is usually philistine and unfair to blame a novelist for what his fictional creations say, in this case, the same sentiments are paraphrased by a host of American writers, all pure-bred, but who still have a modicum of critical sense left or at least enough to call a spade a spade.

Most of the writers run through America's recent histories of 'crime and non-punishment'. What hurts most sensitive Americans is that the tag of 'imperialism' sticks. "America dispatches its armies to most of the world, but its other exports dominate as well: corporate logos, security guards, medical companies, accountants, bankers, contractors, computer wizards, advertising agencies, evangelical missionaries, television channels, Hollywood films, Cokes and hamburgers. The flag's shadow falls dark on foreign climes, and the nation's boot-step digs deep. America killed two million Vietnamese. How many Arabs will go? Ours is an empire without borders, without limits, without the restraining hand of a rival. It is military, cultural, economic, and psychological. It standardises "" man on the American model."

While American writers describe their encounters abroad and how they were affected by them, outsiders comment on the strangeness of the place itself.

Most of the outsiders are generous and so it is not all slander all the way. There is the Other America, the leader in every field "" science, technology, medicine, the arts and the humanities "" that rewards hard work and intelligence, irrespective of race or creed. It is "the marked indifference to rank and hierarchy" that probably accounts its successes and makes it attractive for the less privileged world.

Granta has always been a mixed bag ""one central theme, along with works in progress in fiction, reportage, usually travel writing, and a photo-essay. So, it is this theme which makes this issue definitely worth it.