By PLS
When “strategy” and “strategic” appear in the same title without so much as a colon (:) in between, some very fuzzy thinking is going on. Take the recently released U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication. Mindlessness (or worse: contempt) is sadly the case here. There is category confusion, functional conflation and a constant sprinkling of emotionally appealing words and phrases that don’t disguise the lack of a coherent (let alone inspiring) policy to rally the world around. This grab bag document presents us with little more than a pseudo-strategy aimed primarily (but not very intelligently) at curbing terrorism sourced to the Muslim world. The disconnect between grandiose title and pinched content is staggering.
Translate, Please!
Let’s get the evidence for brainlessness out of the way first. This “strategy” makes no distinction between the trivial and the immensely important. A generous half page (of 34, including addenda) is devoted to the minutia of managing photo ops, while a slapdash “vision of hope and opportunity...rooted in our most basic values” merits a poorly written single paragraph. There are “eight national security objectives.” One is “to encourage global economic growth.” Another is “to expand the circle of development.” What’s the difference? If an economy is growing, isn’t it developing—and vice versa? In any event, scarcely any attention is paid to either. Similarly, reaching out “to those who share our ideals” is evidently distinct from supporting “those who struggle for freedom and democracy.” Huh? Aren’t freedom and democracy supposed to be our ideals? This is a document produced by people who brainstormed a to-do list and called it a strategy. It’s a mind-numbing compendium of buzz words. “Mainstream” good. “Moderate” iffy. “Violent extremism” bad. All referring to Muslims.
Hey! Maybe I’ve got it! What’s meant here by “expanding the circle of development” could be what’s usually called targetting“foreign aid” or “foreign economic and emergency assistance” for maximum effect, the sort of thing that USAID used to do. Evidently poverty and disaster are to be handled henceforth by a cutely alliterative “diplomacy of deeds” that turns up a little later in this document.
Deeds Indeed!
Who on earth thought that one up? Didn’t it dawn on the authors of this document that war is the ultimate “diplomacy of deeds”? If efforts to provide tsunami relief and malaria eradication are exercises in the “diplomacy of deeds,” then surely the “noble” intention of conveying freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan by way of the US military action must also qualify as diplomacy by valiant deeds.
If I were a Muslim living anywhere, I’d have a pretty jaundiced view of America’s oddly skewed “diplomacy of deeds.” How many trillions are we spending to make war? How few millions for anything else? And I would go into a state of shocked disbelief on reading a litany of deed diplomacy examples that includes the reconstruction of Lebanon “post-Israeli/Hezbollah war.”
How stupid does the Bush administration think the Muslims of the world are? The U.S. actually contributed to the slaughter of innocent Lebanese and to the utterly disproportionate and vindictive destruction of Lebanon’s roads, bridges, villages and urban housing. Not only did the U.S. not promptly order the Israelis to stop the knee-jerk invasion of Lebanon, the Bush administration re-supplied the critical munitions that allowed the Israeli forces to keep the operation going.
So, how many Lebanese are going to celebrate if the U.S. should now pump in a few dollars to rebuild the bridges that should never have been destroyed by our Israeli client state? A recent Pew poll of attitudes toward the U.S. revealed that the post-tsunami upward blip in Indonesian approval of the U.S. is over. Our assistance was appreciated. But it has long since been overshadowed by our Middle East policy. Indonesians are not uninformed of events on the banks of the Tigris or in Lebanon.
Moderate Marionettes
This is very bad, Mr. Bush. Most Indonesians are of the “moderate” or “mainstream” sort your administration is supposedly courting via this “strategy,” one of whose major objectives is to “amplify mainstream Muslim voices.” What if these level-headed people are justly and massively critical of your policies?
Worse yet, if an unpopular U.S. co-opts violence-averse “mainstream” leaders to further an ill-conceived American strategy, to what extent will these paragons retain authority among their own people? The recommendation to convert sympathetic voices (or exchange program beneficiaries) into easily scorned puppets is a repeated, but profoundly self-defeating element of this “strategy” paper.
Global Schmobal
One expects a strategy to be coherent, consistent and comprehensive, and the official claims for this one are indeed global. In fact, a mission statement on page 2 declares that “across the world, America seeks to work with other governments in a spirit of partnership that supports human dignity and fosters peace and progress.”
Yet only one region of the world is ever mentioned in the main text of this 34 page document: the Middle East. Only one religion is named in non-laundry list fashion: Islam, Islam, Islam. Even more ludicrously, only Muslim society is represented as seriously oppressive or unfair to women and thus free game for change from the outside. (Would you want to be a woman in sub-Saharan Africa–or in Darfur, for that matter? Even the U.S. Supreme Court takes a dim view of women’s decision-making ability and the Religious Right in America also wants to keep women at home.) In short, either the issuers of this document are suffering from a highly blinkered paranoic monomania—or they are still hyping fear of Islamic terrorism for their own purposes. In an increasingly multipolar world where economies are globally interlinked effective diplomacy calls for serious networking and adroit multitasking, yet the Bush people have shrunk the globe into two cartoonish and hostile conceptual continents: America and Islamia. Everything else in the world—every country, every region, every constellation of history and aspirations—is mere backdrop or sideshow in this simplistic War on Terror document. Proof? The eight “general” Core Messages recommened as guides for public diplomacy in the largely ignored world outside Islamia occupy less than a page and are not preceded by anything like thorough discussion or analysis. The Core Messages that relate to the “War on Terror,” which is to say Jihadist (there! I said it!) Muslims, spill over onto a third page.
If this document really contained a comprehensive strategy to communicate the values of democracy, freedom, human dignity and economic well being on a global basis, surely it would have something to say about the need to foist (whoops! Bush think! I meant encourage or support) change on Zimbabwe and Myanmar. It would deal with klepto-autocracy in Russia and environmental disasters in China. It would mention Sudan’s genocidal policies, first toward its Southern Regions, now in Darfur. And so on. But this so-called “national security strategy” is so narrowly focused it doesn’t even deal explicitly with promoting nuclear non-proliferation, let alone corralling allies to cope with the nuclear nemesis of North Korea.
Enemy Number One and Only
Want to know who the Enemy Incarnate is? Read on.
The extremists have stated on numerous occasions that their goal is to create and impose a unified, dictatorial state on the proud and currently sovereign nations of the diverse Islamic world. The majority of civilized people do not want to live in the type of society the violent extremists seek. The best example is the society that was imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Books were burned, music was banned; cultural icons were destroyed; girls were not allowed to go to school or learn to read; women were not allowed to work—even if their husbands had been killed and they had no means of support. Freedom of expression and worship were not allowed; in fact, faith practices were so strictly proscribed that men could be punished if their beards were not the exact, appropriate length.
And here’s the boiled down version that becomes one of those “core messages specific to the war on terrorism” for public diplomats to deliver:
We saw the type of society the extremists seek in the Taliban rule of Afghanistan. Book were burned, music` was banned, cultural icons were destroyed. Little girls were not allowed to go to school or learn to read and women were not allowed to work to support themselves even if they were widowed and had no other means of support.
Now I wouldn’t want to live in a Talibanized society, but I wouldn’t want to live in the country whose rulers are great buddies of the Bush family either. That’s Saudi Arabia. Even though Saudi women are educated and can even go into business, they exist under lifelong subjugation to a male guardian, who may or may not be enlightened. What’s more Saudi Arabian oil money has been funding for decades the missionaries that have inspired terrorism against the West. So, if demonization is necessary, who’s the real enemy?
Human societies change and evolve. That includes Muslim societies, where change will continue to creep in from the outside and where change will also come through gradual reinterpretation of Muslim texts and traditions, a process already under way in many places. Arguments for female equality drawn from Muslim history are already being promulgated and they are having an impact, however slowly. Need I remind the Bush 2 administration that women did not receive the vote in America until the 1920s! Organic change cannot come from Big Foot interference by the U.S., though less arrogant, more sophisticated interactions may indeed do a little nudging here and there. For that matter, we might look around and learn a little from others.
The Taliban-ish among Us
Meanwhile, for examples of resistance to change via fairly coercive maintenance of religion-based tradition, let’s look closer to home. Little more than a century ago even northern Baptists in the U.S. forbade dancing, playing card games and, with the help of Blue Laws that endured well into the 20th century, doing much of anything at all on Sundays, except going to church. Even today there are Protestants who won’t defile Christmas with pagan tree trimming. And who isn’t familiar with the Amish of Pennsylvania who reject modern society—clothes, cars, immunizations, the works! In certain Jewish communities, women wear wigs to cover their hair as completely as Muslim women may with scarves, and Hassidic men are easily identified by dress and a “strictly prescribed” hair style. Dress, then, is severely regimented in many clannish conservative groups, most of them rigorously patriarchal, and the pressure to conform in every way is extreme. Nor are such religious sects generally tolerant of the looseness, as they see it, of non-members. When they dominate in a population, they put strong pressure on mores, library holdings, science curricula, etc. Think Intelligent Design. Think abstinence only contraception education. In modern day America! Are the Taliban so alien? Or do they exist on a continuum?
Finally, if the Taliban and other “extremists” and their myriads of supporters and sympathizers are so radically different, how can the writers of this document so glibly speak of the “universality of values” which are supposedly shared by all peoples everywhere? There’s a word for this. Ethnocentricity.
The Actionable Difference
Make no mistake, the Taliban set themselves apart, on the wrong side of an important line, in one truly critical area. They not only sheltered a criminal gang, they signed on to its agenda. The whole world (including many Muslims) agreed that the U.S. had every right to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan after 9/11/2001. Oddly enough, by 2003, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda were revealed to have been of minor importance to the Bush administration. Before the job of bringing Bin Laden and Mullah Omar to justice was accomplished, before Afghan women had been guaranteed the education, medical care and equal rights this “strategy” document lays so much stress on, the Bush administration had pulled out most American troops. Why? In order to topple Saddam Hussein, whose regime gave women freedom, education and equality. Women are far worse off in U.S.-liberated Iraq!
Ah, Iraq! so far as this “national security” document is concerned, it's an unmentionable as well as an ungovernable mess. Indeed, now that the entire Middle East is in more precarious shape than it was before the Bush 2 era began, the administration has evidently decided to return the spotlight to the Taliban and Afghanistan. That’s pretty cynical.
How Cynical Can You Get?
The felt need to cover up a policy failure is surely one explanation for the incoherence and internal contradictions of this document. But I suspect that the underlying reason for its pathetically evident shallowness is even more cynical, even more deplorable. What we’ve got here is robo-writing by people who probably know better but aren’t even trying to communicate. The problem then is contempt, not brainlessness or cluelessness. This hopeless document has been produced by a notoriously secretive administration, an administration that considers itself above the law and beyond accountability. Since Bush, Cheney and Company have interpreted the Constitution to justify doing whatever they want with national security policy, however sweepingly or nebulously defined, they assume they can write any old nonsense and foist it off as a strategy.
If, on the other hand (to give the devil his due), this document actually was designed to help the U.S. achieve security, not only by enlisting allies to help us counter terrorism, but by making friends in the Muslim world, the prospect is dire indeed. We haven’t a hope of achieving either goal with this coterie in power. They speak of human values and democracy while condoning torture and duplicitous governance. What's more, they seem to have borrowed much of their burnt earth approach to militant Islam from Israel which, as this week's New York Times Magazine indicates, is stronger than ever but also less secure than ever.