Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“a controlled disintegration”: Quoted in Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur (New York: Zed Books, 2013), 100.

“This smells like Indonesia”: Quoted in Neni Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens: The Story of the Greek Left (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 133.

“involvement in torture went beyond simply moral support”: Becket, Barbarism in Greece, xii.

“unpleasantness”: Lieven, “US/USSR.”

“between Turkish labor and anti-communist”: Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 56.

“economic rather than political”: Quoted in ibid., 56.

whom a CIA officer once tried: Marc Edward Hoffman, “As Big as Mount Ararat,” The Nation, June 24, 2010.

“from the disgust of other nations”: Quoted in Charlotte Wolf, Garrison Community: A Study of an Overseas American Military Colony (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 41.

“Fuck your parliament”: Quoted in Gary Younge, “Obama’s Dilemma Is America’s Appetite for Power but Aversion to Risk,” Guardian, September 7, 2014.

“It was widely believed that the military”: Maureen Freely, Enlightenment (New York: Overlook Press, 2008), 26.

5. MONEY AND MILITARY COUPS: THE ARAB WORLD AND TURKEY

“freedom”: Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 15.

In the fall of 2011, six months after the revolution: Suzy Hansen, “Egypt’s Mean Queen,” Newsweek, January 2012.

“It makes me turn your question round and round”: Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), 117.

“to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible”: Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), 19.

“openly blaspheme or insult”: Ibid., 29.

“I cannot tell you”: Ibid., 39.

“literate, scientific”: Ibid., 65.

“Sarruf and Nimr extolled”: Ibid., 70.

“Roosevelt should act”: Ibid., 84.

“Here was the man of the Fourteen Points”: Muhammad Haykal, quoted in Manela, The Wilson Moment, 149.

“To place the brunt of the burden”: Quoted in Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 178.

“The Americans were something completely new and strange”: Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (New York: Vintage, 1989), 44.

“Why did they have to live like this”: Ibid., 595.

“insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative”: John Updike, “Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns,” The New Yorker, 1988.

“ruthless and efficient”: Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (New York: Verso, 2014), 23.

“Nasser may have fallen”: Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 299.

“I almost died of disgrace”: Quoted in Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 152.

“a perpetually dependent market”: Kandil, ibid., 161.

“Phillips, Toshiba, Gillette”: Sonallah Ibrahim, The Committee (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 18.

“While the words used for God and love”: Ibid., 18.

“Merak etmeyin”: Quoted in Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals’ Coup: An Inside Story of 12 September 1980 (London: Brassey’s, 1987), 172.

“Should we not hang them?”: Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Kenan Evren, 97, Dies; After Coup, Led Turkey with Iron Hand,” New York Times, May 9, 2015.

“The policy was not necessarily to kill you in jail”: Ibid.

“Your boys have finally done it!”: Quoted in Birand, The Generals’ Coup, 185.

“We admire the way in which order”: Quoted in “From the Editors,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), Summer 2016.

“more subtle, more cunning and terrifyingly effective”: Quoted in “Mr. Allende Follows Outlines of Speech,” New York Times, December 5, 1972.

“We lived in a country totally isolated from the world”: Quoted in Claire Sadar, “I Only Remember Fear,” Muftah.org, September 11, 2015.

“the collective well-being of the nation”: Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 212, quoting Timothy Mitchell in “Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of Your Desires,” MERIP 279, Summer 2016.

“Simply because we are forced to say yes”: Galal Amin, Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubarak (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 169.

“Since the rejection of the West”: Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 9.

“Bin Laden rejected the secular”: Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, 340.

“The one thing that everybody in the prison”: Quoted in David Kirkpatrick, “U.S. Citizen, Once Held in Egypt’s Crackdown, Becomes Voice for Inmates,” New York Times, August 28, 2015.

“Baghdad University in the 1980s”: Tariq Ali, “The New World Disorder,” London Review of Books (April 9, 2015): 19–22.

“The Arabs were once a great civilization”: David Riesman, introduction to Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 13.

6. LITTLE AMERICAS: AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, AND TURKEY

“reverse the momentum and gain time”: Quoted in Helene Cooper, “U.S. Eyes New Target: Heartland of Taliban,” New York Times, February 26, 2010.

“do the things we thought the Americans”: Qais Akbar Omar, “Where Is My Ghost Money?” New York Times, May 4, 2013.

“Afghan people’s right to freedom”: Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire.”

“public floggings and hangings”: Ibid.

“By the mid-eighties”: Kamila Shamsie, “Pop Idols,” Granta 112, September 2010.

“Please explain”: Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire.”

In 2009, General McChrystal had promised: Suzy Hansen, “The Nowhere War,” Bookforum, June 2014.

“carried out raids against a phantom enemy”: Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 110.

“As the soldiers approached a home”: Ibid., 220.

“All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures”: Quoted in Vanessa Gezari, The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (Simon & Schuster, 2014), 24.

“What we need is cultural intelligence”: Ibid.

“If you could have found a way to project”: Ibid., 198.

“aimed at propagating a strict religious fundamentalism”: Banu Eligür, The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113.

“improvement of our relations”: Ibid., 116.

“an inextricable part”: Ibid., 116.

“Both ‘red imperialism’ and ‘capitalist imperialism’”: Julia Alexandra Oprea, “State-Led Islamization: The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis,” Studia Universitatis “Petru Maior,” issue 1, 2014, 131–39.

“useful tool for creating citizens”: Eligür, The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, 93.

“tactically opened up a social and political space”: Ibid., 24.

“His dream was to make Turkey another America”: Sedat La?iner, “Turgut Ozal Period in Turkish Foreign Policy,” USAK (Uluslararas? Stratejik Ara?t?rmalar Kurumu) 2 (2009): 153–205.

“Of course Uncle Sam isn’t sending you”: United States Department of Defense, A Pocket Guide to Turkey (June 11, 1953), 3.

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