And why do we need to be saved from the innocent and the good? Perhaps because "innocence" is too often a polite description of what could less charitably be called "stupidity." Take our current president, for example. Many people believe he and his buddies have a sincere desire to do good in the world; supporters argue that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was intended to make the world a better, more peaceful place. That may be true; innocents often have only the best of intentions (not that I would accept the notion that Bush, Cheney, et al, are the least bit innocent, but they do pretend to be "good.") However, good intentions are small consolation to the families of all the people—soldier and civilian—who have died in this war, and great intentions do little to repair our shattered relationships with many countries around the world. If we grant that Bush and Co. thought they were doing good by invading Iraq, it's easy to see why Greene's narrator invokes God's protection from people like them.

The "quiet American" of the book's title is Pyle, a young, "innocent" American sent to Vietnam on an "economic" mission. Describing Pyle in Vietnam, the narrator gives would could also be a fair description of G.W. Bush as President:

He looked more than ever out of place: he should have stayed at home. I saw him in a family snapshot album, riding on a dude ranch, bathing on Long Island, photographed with his colleagues in some apartment on the twenty-third floor. He belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.

Of course, Pyle the "innocent" doesn't care if he's out of place—he has big plans to do "good"! While in Vietnam, Pyle secretly works to prop up a local "gang" leader to be a "third force" to combat the Communists. Of course, Pyle's efforts have horrific effects right from the beginning, and although Greene wrote the book in 1955 and couldn't have known he was being so prophetic, the disaster that is Pyle's plan to involve American forces and ideas in Vietnam foreshadows the much larger disaster that American involvement in the region would become in the next 20 years. It also eerily foreshadows current events, with U.S. forces again meddling where they're not wanted.

That's the simple, superficial stuff that resonated with me as I read, but there's much more to this novel. It's so prescient because it's so smart about colonialism. Academics probably call it a postcolonial novel because it's already cynically critical of the "new" colonialism we see today (e.g. in Afghanistan and now Iraq and countless other countries where the U.S. and other wealthy (mostly Western) nations have propped up warlords in the hope of making them puppets). It's somewhat in the tradition of Heart of Darkness, but as L said it doesn't dehumanize the colonized people like Conrad does. Instead, it problematizes that kind of colonist tendency-to-dehumanize by having its narrator struggle over his own relationship with the Vietnamese people with whom he lives, as well as the Vietnamese woman with whom he falls in love. In fact, one of the subplots is a contest between the narrator and Pyle over Phuong, a Vietnamese woman whom both the men "love." L could provide a fascinating account of how this relationship struggle symbolizes the colonial/post-colonial relationship with the colonized, but I'll let her explain that for you, if she so desires.

(I've been trying to get L to start her own blog so she can at least share her brilliant readings of books and movies with the world, but so far, no dice. Unless she has a blog and she's just not telling me, which is always possible....)

UPDATE: In a short article entitled "History's Fools," Jack Beatty echoes the gist of what I've said above, comparing our current crop of neo-conservatives (esp. Paul Wolfowitz) with the type of "innocent" we see in Pyle, the so-called "quiet American":

Paradoxically, the very scale of the debacle in Iraq may yield one long-term good: the repudiation of neo-conservative "democratic imperialism." The Americans killed in Iraq will not have died in vain if their sacrifice keeps other Americans from dying in neo-con wars to "remediate" Syria, Iran, or North Korea. After Iraq, "neo-conservative" may achieve the resonance of "isolationist" after World War II—a term of opprobrium for a discredited approach to foreign policy, shorthand for dangerous innocence about world realities. Like the isolationists, the neo-cons are history's fools. The strategy they championed was the wrongest possible strategy for the wrongest possible moment in the wrongest possible region of the world.

It's possible the so-called "innocence" of people like Wolfowitz could more accurately be described as willful ignorance verging on sociopathy, but the result is the same when people like this get a bit of power: danger for the rest of the world.