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COMMENTARY
November 1, 2001
Arab street
As its defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepares to embark on a second trip to Russia and Central Asia it is clear that the United States is laying the groundwork for a major escalation of the battle for Afghanistan. On his last trip he found support and arranged forward bases for the present level of military activity -- which involves ground special forces but no infantry engagement (though a growing if still small advance force of infantry is already waiting on the ground in Uzbekistan). By now it must be assumed the U.S. has settled at least in outline upon it's follow-up plan to take the battle from the air down into the landscape of Afghanistan. Journalists speak loosely about "phases" in the war effort and have assigned any number of phases to what they have seen so far. There has indeed been a regular weekly escalation in the form of fairly modest new missions added to the U.S. campaign. But only now do we begin to have a prospect of what might really be called phase two . This is likely to involve a large infantry commitment that will begin by securing territory and opening airstrips for resupply within Afghanistan itself. Where it goes from there we must just wait and see. As President Bush reminded yesterday in a well-timed message to a group of businessmen at the White House the war is on many fronts. He was directly anticipating a Commerce Department report which showed that the U.S. economy had slightly contracted in the third fiscal quarter its first quarterly loss in eight years. His remarks appeared to succeed in heading off a responsive plunge in the stock market as he turned attention to the "stimulus package" he was accelerating through Congress. In particular he was seizing the opportunity to press for the reduction of corporate taxes -- a move that would not usually be politically feasible but which will be more effective in encouraging an economic rebound than any short-term hand-out programme. As he has spelled out before there is the military dimension the diplomatic and political dimension the general economic dimension the oil or energy dimension the intelligence and security dimension the dimension of propaganda and morale. Captain Bush must seek progress in all these dimensions and simultaneously both at home and abroad. It is a dazzlingly complex picture one in which each dimension intrudes upon each other like a chess match on six planes. Disaster is possible on any of the planes. My impression is that a workable fairly long-term strategy has fallen into place on the military economic and energy fronts; that the diplomatic strategy is subordinated to these three; that the undercover battle against terrorists and terrorism is beginning to take a shape; but that the Bush administration has not yet had time to think through its strategy for propaganda and morale. In the first few weeks this was the least urgent large item of business. Mr. Bush put all his cards into a major public address before Congress; it was brilliant and carried the day. But as we are beginning to see now from the proliferation of doubts and second-guessing in the media the longer-term propaganda strategy can't wait any longer. I described his speech of Sept. 20 as "brilliant" because it succeeded in conveying crucial messages over the heads of politicians and media both to Americans and to people watching abroad. To the home audience Mr. Bush conveyed determination and defiance; he asked and he received from the American people a commitment to fight a very long and monstrously risky world war because there was no choice. But to foreign audiences especially those in Europe he managed to communicate how much was on the line that there could be no "middle way" between confronting Islamist terrorism and not confronting it. The speech was extremely well-received in Europe. It was received with near-indifference throughout the Muslim world. From what I could glean of the general response Arabian and other Muslims felt that they had heard all this before that there was nothing radically new in the U.S. outlook. The response in the six weeks since the speech has been along the same line. I am of course generalizing very broadly but I would characterize the present attitude of both the so-called "Arab street" and of the "moderate" Islamic dictatorships as: "Very well then you can have Afghanistan if you insist but you can't have anything else." Now the response to this response has been conducted so far only through state-to-state diplomacy. The secretary of state Colin Powell was initially given room to distribute all the old assurances and do what he could to straiten the immediate military path to Afghanistan. He did an extraordinary job of keel-hauling the Pakistan government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf who changed its outlook and direction overnight. He neutralized various challenges throughout the Middle East to the Americans' immediate course of action. He did what could be done in an emergency. But as we look farther down the road we see the possibilities for diplomacy are nearly exhausted. The U.S. is now getting as much co-operation as it is going to get -- which is to say very little -- from its erstwhile major allies in the region such countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There is still some "elbow room" among the several small Gulf states -- Kuwait Bahrain Qatar the United Arab Emirates and Oman -- where thanks largely to the concentration of oil wealth but also to the presence of more forward-looking Sheikhs -- we find the more Western-oriented of the region's societies. In each of these countries the small ruling cabal has more to fear from the loss of American support than from Islamist infiltration and violence. Iran presents a remarkable special case with its two contrasting governments -- the deeply unpopular rule of the Ayatollahs over the quite outward-looking ministries in the hands of the freely-elected president Mohammad Khatami. It is the one country in the world's most dangerous region that has actually passed through a period of "Islamism" through the eclipse of fanaticism and is beginning to emerge on the other side. The vicious anti-Americanism the other murderous hatreds that propelled the Ayatollah Khomeini to power a generation ago have now been largely spent. The people of Iran have had their opportunity to experience life in a theocratic asylum and have had enough of it. And yet the Ayatollahs continue to have their hands on implements of mass destruction to be sponsors of the focused anti-Semitic Hezbollah terrorism which reaches through Lebanon into Palestine and into the West. And like the Taliban of Afghanistan the Ayatollahs can hardly be expected to release their grip on power. For they fear their own people as much as they fear the U.S. From even this brief sketch it will be seen that the U.S. and its allies face different propaganda "hurdles" within each country in the region. In my view Iran requires the most delicate treatment as a potential long-term ally; it is to Iran rather than to Egypt or Saudi Arabia that we must address our most patient and sensitive "pitch" must use something approaching to subtlety. It has become less necessary elsewhere. But what pitch are we making? This is what the Bush administration is trying to decide at a time when it begins to see that none of the old formulae can work. The U.S. media as well as government is awakening to the fact that the so-called "moderate" governments have dressed themselves in an armour of routine anti-Americanism against their own societies. We are beginning to read if only in translation the frightful absurdities that appear daily in government-sponsored and controlled press and broadcasting; and which have been appearing there for decades. We are coming to terms for instance with a level of anti-Semitism in the politically-nurtured popular culture that is no less than what we faced in Nazi Germany; and with an anti-Americanism that is only slightly less virulent because more schizophrenic. (The masses hate America and the West but at the same time could not wish to emigrate anywhere else.) It follows that the United States with whatever help it can get from Canada and Europe must find a way to address the "Arab street" directly country by country. It must do this somehow over the heads of the various Muslim governments whose fear of their domestic Islamist opponents is greater than their fear of the West. The U.S. has the Bush administration now realizes been wasting its time and money trying to buy off the various regimes when it needed to present its case directly to Muslim people. In trying to decide what to do now President Bush's advisers are almost at a loss. They are themselves openly seeking advice from every imaginable quarter. Their phone lines are conspicuously open to sympathetic Muslim callers from across the U.S. (By "sympathetic" I mean those who do not propose to grind on about American complicity in the fate of Palestine.) What I think they will discover I hope sooner not later is that the best defence is a good offence. It is in fact a strategy that has never before been tried in U.S. posturing towards the Islamic world. Heretofore the best the Americans have ever come up with is some variation on the theme of I'm guilty, hit me. The enemy in the "Arab street" has no respect for guilt. He sees America as an immensely successful commercial society lacking a spiritual backbone or spine. He resents American success which he interprets as empty arrogance; he is deeply mired in envy. He has specific grievances that have been nurtured and cultivated for decades. He wants his share in the American wealth as a matter of right not of earning. He comes from a culture in which the idea of productive enterprise or more generally of individual initiative has been largely suppressed for more than six centuries. He lives in a world of private tyrannies a world of dusk rumour and nuance in which the most incredible notions -- such as international Jewish conspiracies -- may be taken for self-evident. It is wrong and worse counter-productive to make endless concessions to this point of view. What instead is required in opposition to all this dark "nuance" is the bright simplicity of direct confrontation. We in the West must find a way to present ourselves not for what we aren't but for what we are. We are the antithesis of what we find in the "Arab street" and we must present this antithesis in the boldest possible terms. For discussion purposes let me lay on the table the sort of "propaganda project" I would recommend to President Bush in the unlikely event he asked for my opinion. I would propose a huge civ to civ propaganda effort one which frankly started Hi, this is the Christian-Crusader-Zionist West and we have some things to say to you. The message would be all destructive hope and candour: we would tell them about the stinking corruption of their governments the backwardness and dysfunction of their societies and the mental imbalance of their religious leaders with interludes of intensely danceable Arab pop music. Then contrast Western values: Individualism. Liberty. Human rights. The rule of law. Equality before the law. Democracy. Constitutionalism. Free markets. The separation of Mosque and State. And as Salmon Rushdie would add: Bacon sandwiches. Short skirts. We would say openly This is what we want for you, and when you feel completely ready, you may choose it for yourself. It is because so much of the Muslim world is steeped in paranoical "nuance" that only a frontal cultural attack will serve. No rumours just facts; no secret agendas or conspiracies or plots just the whole goods in one incredibly painful and joyously exhilarating package like a mouth full of chillies. The platform should be satellite TV. In effect create an Al Jazeera for our side. The name should be something like "The Street" in English. Multiple channels but the main one in Cairo Arabic; backed up with AM radio and gorgeous picture magazines with lots of fashion ads. Promotional airdrops of face powder and lipstick. Very big budget. Indeed a part of this budget should be from advertising with President Bush when he has a moment calling big corporate bosses to say there's a huge young Muslim market out there just waiting to happen and this is the only possible way in. Part of the effort must be in effect to "co-opt" Muslims living in the West. Pay them the big bucks to work in this glitzy operation. Leave them no path to retreat into the shadowy "nuances" of the mosques and madrasas within the West itself. Now if this sounds radical of course it is. But as I believe the Bush administration is discovering half-measures will certainly not work. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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