Peace Kills (11 page)

So we see at what level debate about a just war and the natural right of self-defense was being conducted. The next morning, in a further sign of the times, Boston's WBZ Radio played a recorded segment by Martha Stewart detailing the intricacies of flag etiquette. The
New York Times
Sunday Styles section could not resist a bow to the New Seriousness—or an Afghanistan hook—even when reviewing the stupidest possible television show:

First, network news programs broadcast images of Afghan women removing their burkas. … A few hours later … models had peeled away their clothing and were showing off thong panties as ABC broadcast the Victoria's Secret fashion show. …

And the November 20, 2001, issue of
The National Enquirer
had a feature headed “EVEN PETS ARE STRESSED
OUT FROM TERRORIST ATTACKS.” Here are some of the signs that your dog, cat, or hamster was suffering from the aftereffects of 9/11:

• Sadness or glumness.

• Constant fighting with other pets.

• Lapses in toilet training.

• Pet is more needy and constantly seeks attention.

Speaking of constantly seeking attention, Bill Clinton showed up to give a talk at Harvard on November 19, perhaps to share anecdotes about his being a star quarterback on the undefeated Crimson gridiron squad of warrior linage ancient.
The Boston Globe
didn't mention his football heroics but did give Bill two fulsome stories and a teaser: “Fans flock to Clinton in Hub visit.” According to the
Globe
, Bill “blamed himself for not building stronger ties with the Muslim world during the 1990's. … He said he should have worked harder … to support overseas ‘nation building.' “ In those days of flux and transformation there was comfort in knowing that some things stayed the same. It was still all about Bill. “America can exert influence, he said, by admitting its own faults.” Interesting source for that advice. “We cannot engage in this debate,” Bill was quoted as saying, “without admitting that there are excesses in our contemporary culture.” Whether the ex-president was referring to himself or to the Victoria's Secret fashion show was not made clear.

During a question-and-answer period Clinton said that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. It's a good idea. Islamic fundamentalists will need someplace to go.
Having them all in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would allow the War on Terror to be conducted in a compact area with well-mapped terrain and an excellent road system. As long as the Israelis don't get involved. We wouldn't want anybody on our side who was guilty of premature antiterrorism.

Hatred between Palestinians and Israelis abides. Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines. The threat of terrorist attacks by al Qaeda continues. Also, our cars need gas. It is important to understand Arab culture.

Egypt seemed a good place to start. Egypt is by far the most populous Arab state. And although Egypt is a poor country in per-capita-income terms, its economy is larger than Saudi Arabia's. Historically Egypt has been the most westward-looking of Arab countries. A Napoleonic invasion, an Albanian pasha named Muhammad Ali, and a British takeover gave Egyptians plenty to look at. The modern Islamist movement can be dated from the founding of the
Muslim Brotherhood by an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna, in 1928. Two of Osama bin Laden's closest aides, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the late Muhammad Atef, came from Egypt, as did Mohammed Atta, who led the September 11 hijackings. And there is this thing called the “Arab street,” which various serious people take seriously. In the November 11, 2001,
New York Times
John Kifner wrote, “It is on just this Arab … street that President Bush must fight in his war against Osama bin Laden.” On January 24, 2002, Chris Matthews said on the television program
Hardball
, “America's been fighting another kind of war to win the hearts and minds of the Arab street.” And on November 16, 2001, NBC
Nightly News
reporter Martin Fletcher, broadcasting from Cairo, declared, “The battleground isn't only in Afghanistan; it's here in the Arab street.” Well, Cairo has thousands of miles of street.

But there's a problem with Egypt. It's been around for five millennia. America is only three human life spans in age. I'm an American born and bred, so were my folks, and … How could the same small part of America vote for both Rudolph Giuliani
and
Hillary Clinton? How could any parts of America elect action-figure toys as governors? Why haven't they been noticeably worse than other governors? Why is the fastest-growing spectator sport in America watching cars turn left? How come I've never heard of anyone—Linkin Park, Ludacris, OutKast—on the
Billboard
Top 50? Why can't they spell? By what means did the Amazon.com list of best-sellers in 2001 come to contain
The Widsom of Menopause, Self Matters, Look Great Naked
, and
Body Change—
the last by someone called Montel Williams, who is on daytime TV? Have you ever
watched
daytime TV? Who are
these people taking DNA tests to see which one molested the Rottweiler?

I don't understand anything about America's culture. What could I hope to learn about Egypt's? In fact, quite a bit—before I'd been officially in the country for more than a minute. Coming through passport control, I was detained by a solemn fellow who showed me a badge. In his well-ironed dress-down Friday clothing, clean grooming, and chilly politeness, he was the exact counterpart of a Mossad agent who had detained me at Ben-Gurion Airport eight months before. “I would like to ask you a few questions about why you are visiting Egypt,” the solemn fellow said.

My tour operator, carrying a placard with my name completely misspelled, swooped in with a great bustle: “We are a prominent Egyptian tourism company! Government-licensed! This man is a valued client! Tourism is in a ruinous state! Do you even
see
another tourist?! What will become of Egypt's foreign-reserve situation?!”—although that was all body language. I believe the only thing my tour operator actually said to the intelligence officer was “He's with me.” Away we went. Have your travel agent try that with the Mossad or the FBI.

There was another lesson in just the drive through Cairo from the airport, on the far east side of town, to my hotel, by the pyramids in the west. It's the lesson of all swollen capitals in societies with uncompetitive economies. “In a competitive society,” the economist Friedrich Hayek once said, “most things can be had at a price—though it is often a cruelly high price we have to pay … The alternative is … the favor of the mighty.” The mighty have their seat in the capital. Better stick close to their chair legs and napkins to get a crumb from the mighty's table.

Cairo is the largest city in the Middle East and Africa, with more than 16 million people, most of whom were offering to carry my luggage at the airport. And they were more persistent than the secret police. Annex Damascus to Beirut, Baghdad, Kuwait City, Jerusalem, and Riyadh (what a war you'd have!) and you still wouldn't get Cairo. Almost a quarter of the people in Egypt live in the city, a long haul from the sea, on the site of an old fort of middling strategic importance, distant from natural resources or any traditional means of creating wealth except the Nile farmlands now under Cairo pavement. Think of a capital of the United States located in a Maryland swamp with 70 million Americans gathered there to be close to Medicare benefits, Fannie Mae, and Small Business Administration loan originations.

After ninety minutes in my tour van I realized: so vast is Cairo, there really is no way across it. At least no way with my eyes open. The traffic is too scary. We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world. (God, if He's a Darwinian, may be similarly aghast at life.) But most foreign driving has the advantage of either brevity, in its breakneck pace, or safe-if-sorry periods of complete rest, in jam-ups. Cairenes achieve the prolonged bravado of NASCAR drivers while also turning any direction they want in congestion worse than L.A.'s during an O.J. freeway chase.

When I could bear to peek, I saw traffic cops—not in ones or twos but in committees, set up at intersections and acting with the efficiency and decisiveness usual to committees. And I saw a driving school. What could the instruction be like? “No, no, Anwar,
faster
through the stop sign, and make your left from
the far right
lane.” Surely John Kifner,
Chris Matthews, and NBC News are kidding when they use “Arab street” as a metaphor for anything in the Middle East. Or, considering the history of the Middle East, maybe they aren't.

The bar at the Mena House Hotel, in Giza, has half a dozen floor-to-ceiling windows, and the view of the Great Pyramid of Khufu fills them all. A number of people were in the bar. Unfortunately for business, they all worked there. Several waiters craned their necks, trying to catch my eye. Across the roomful of empty tables a musical trio abandoned their classical repertoire and began cracking one another up with jazz noodlings of “Woman in Love.” Out in the lobby, by the front door, was an unattended metal detector. Every now and then it emitted a merry buzz, and everyone in the bar looked up hopefully, only to see another idle taxi driver on his way to the men's room.

I wandered across the street to the pyramid complex, now closed for the evening. Behind a police station was a stable yard with horses and camels kept for foreign visitors who, in better times, when there
are
foreign visitors, want a Sheik of VisaCard moment on their home videos. There I met Mousa, who presented himself, in so many words, as the Night Mayor of Khufu. He promised a forbidden after-hours tour.

“Can we climb to the top?” I asked.

“It is forbidden.”

We walked through an alley, past a large hole in the wall that surrounds the pyramid complex. “Japanese tourists did this,” said Mousa, “to climb to the top.” Has anyone had any success understanding Japanese culture?

Mousa worked as an unlicensed guide from eight at night until two-thirty in the morning. He supported, he said, his father, his wife, three daughters, his sister whose husband had died, and his sister's child. “I must tell my father there is one tourist in Egypt,” said Mousa.

I asked him about the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Whoever does this ruins my life,” said Mousa. “I do not know who does this.”

Perhaps taking my silence as a rebuke, Mousa continued, “Maybe Osama bin Laden does this.” He warmed to his theme. “Osama bin Laden does the killing in Luxor.” Mousa was referring to the murder of fifty-eight tourists at the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, in November 1997. And Mousa may have had a point. According to Egyptian police, one of the killers, Midhat Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, had traveled to Afghanistan and Sudan for terrorist training. “Osama lives in Egypt before,” Mousa said. (Maybe not, but the family business, Binladen Brothers for Contracting and Industry, employs forty thousand Egyptians.) “And has no respect for Egypt. He tries to destroy our country.”

We walked across the outskirts of the village of Nazlet as-Samaan. The people who helped with the building of the pyramids once lived here. Now the people who help with the gawking do. We went behind the Sphinx into the quarry where pyramid makings were cut, forty-six hundred years ago, and climbed to the edge of the Giza Plateau. There was Khufu—immense, 449 feet high, almost exactly 745 feet on each side.

The stones aren't as big as those the Hebrews in
The Ten Commandments
hauled across the movie screen. The real blocks of granite and limestone are about the size of industrial
air-conditioning units on strip-mall roofs. They look depressingly unfake. You can imagine the awful labor of heaving and pulling these rocks—2.3 million of them, according to Mousa.

There is a question that less sophisticated Americans ask (and more sophisticated Americans would like to): Why are the people in the Middle East so crazy? Here, at the pyramids, was an answer from the earliest days of civilization: people have always been crazy.

A certain amount of craziness, if not possessed already, can be acquired trying to walk in Cairo. The city is well supplied with sidewalks, but they just take you around the block. You can't step off them because of the traffic. The locals manage to cross streets. I began thinking that Cairenes employ some chapter of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I missed when I was a hippie, that tells them how to keep going after they've been squashed between two trucks.

It took me forty-five minutes to cross the Shari El Corniche to get to the Nile embankment—and then, rather than try it again, I hiked almost a mile to what I thought was a walkway overpass. It wasn't an overpass. It was a stairway for pedestrian access to one of Cairo's few stretches of expressway. I guess this was installed for those bored with ordinary Cairo jaywalking: a sort of double-black-diamond run for the Cairo shoe slalom. Later, in a taxi on this same expressway, my driver missed an exit and backed up to it from somewhere beyond the next one.

Cairo's buildings are Cairo's traffic in concrete. Every structure seems halfway through construction or halfway through demolition, and some seem to be undergoing both.
This is modern Cairo. You can find old stones in the town if you let your tour guide drag you to them. My tour guide, Peter, did his best to show me a first-century Roman fort, the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun, and Saladin's twelfth-century citadel. But even the pyramids are as beside the point in Cairo as the Dutch wall is on Wall Street. Essentially all of Cairo is modern. The population was only 570,100 in 1897. The number of residents has more than tripled in the past twenty-five years. I saw a cement truck, barrel turning, load ready to pour, driving down a Cairo street at two o'clock in the morning.