A politics of gratitude has assumed a place of prominence in the conduct of U.S. foreign relations. After the original pretext for the invasion of Iraq lost its credibility, the rationale for war and occupation was transformed into a claim of U.S. sacrifice in behalf of Iraqi well-being and lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, and liberty. Iraqi gratitude became central to the moral logic by which the U.S. occupation is sustained.
After all, abandoning the defense of democracy, freedom, and liberty for the sake of an appreciative, struggling people would be tantamount to betraying national ideals. And Iraqis’ failure to acknowledge their appreciation would undermine the very premise of the occupation. Simply put: Why would the United States continue to fight for a nation of ingrates?
“We liberated that country from a tyrant,” President George W. Bush explained in a January 2007 60 Minutes interview, and added, “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”
In his memoir, L. Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, recalls meeting with Bush in 2003. The president’s overriding concern, he writes, was that the new Iraqi government officials publicly thank the United States. “I want someone who will be grateful,” Bremer recalls the president saying.
Bush was not disappointed. In his first press conference as interim prime minister in June 2004, Ayad Allawi, speaking through a translator, momentarily departed from the Arabic to emphasize his principal point: “I would like to say this in English. I would like to thank the coalition led by the United States for the sacrifices they have provided in the process of the liberation of Iraq.”
Three months later, Allawi addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “We Iraqis are grateful to you Americans,” he pronounced, whereupon senators and representatives rose to their feet in prolonged applause, perhaps sensing, if only intuitively, that they were also applauding themselves.
Gratitude often seems to dominate the president’s foreign policy utterances. Upon his arrival to Brazil during his March 2007 South America tour, he promptly affirmed, “I don’t think that America gets enough credit for trying to help improve peoples’ lives.” And in Argentina, he reiterated, “We don’t get much credit for [foreign aid]. And I want the taxpayers, I want the American people, to get credit for their generosity in Central and South America.”
This strategy of demanding “credit” aims to generate a complex web of binding reciprocities in which a system of domination appears to be a moral relationship, not one of power. Insofar as gratitude functions as a means of moral suasion, it reduces the obtrusiveness of U.S. power: The United States secures its objectives not through coercion, real or implied, but through voluntary acquiescence in the form of ethical reciprocities—hegemony as a moral system.
Yet the strategy does not always go unchallenged. “We are friends and we made you free from Iraq,” The Washington Post reported a U.S. Embassy official as saying to Kuwaiti Islamic leader Hakem Mutairi. “We thank you for everything you have done for my country,” Mutairi replied, “but you can’t make this a reason for colonialism.”
None of this, we should note, is entirely new. At the end of the 19th century, the United States, claiming to have liberated Cuba from Spanish colonial rule, demanded in return expressions of Cuban gratitude, which included accepting a privileged tariff schedule for U.S. imports, conceding the Guantánamo naval base, and acquiescing to the Platt Amendment, which stipulated that the United States could intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it saw fit.
In 1901, after the Platt Amendment was imposed, an editorial in the nationalist Cuban newspaper Patria asked indignantly: “If there is no independence and sovereignty, why should Cubans have to show themselves to be grateful to the United States?”
Louis A. Pérez Jr. teaches history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His forthcoming book, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos, will be published in 2008.
