- Who wrote this - a pop sociologist, obscure blogger or
anti-war playwright? "Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic
- namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything
about the war is - for Americans - really no more than an extension of
American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is ... heightened
by election-year atmospherics, but none the less sustains their impression
that when Americans talk to Muslims, they are talking to themselves."
-
- Actually, this is the conclusion of the report of the
defence science board taskforce on strategic communication - the product
of a Pentagon advisory panel - delivered in September. Its 102 pages were
not made public in the presidential campaign, but, barely noticed by the
US press, silently slipped on to a Pentagon website on Thanksgiving eve.
-
- The taskforce of military, diplomatic, academic and business
experts, assigned to develop strategy for communications in the "global
war on terrorism", had unfettered access, denied to journalists, to
the inner workings of the national security apparatus. There was no intent
to contribute to public debate, much less political controversy; the report
was for internal consumption only.
-
- They discovered more than a government sector "in
crisis", though it found that: "Missing are strong leadership,
strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a
culture of measurement and evaluation." As it journeyed into the recesses
of the Bush foreign policy, the taskforce documented the failure of fundamental
premises. "America's negative image in world opinion and diminished
ability to persuade are consequences of factors other than the failure
to implement communications strategies," the report declares. What
emerges is an indictment of an expanding and unmitigated disaster based
on stubborn ignorance of the world and failed concepts that bear little
relation to empirical reality, except insofar as they confirm and incite
gathering hatred among Muslims.
-
- The Bush administration, according to the defence science
board, has misconceived a war on terrorism in the image of the cold war.
However, the struggle is not the west versus Islam; while we blindly call
this a "war on terrorism", Muslims "in contrast see a history-shaking
movement of Islamic restoration" against "apostate" Arab
regimes allied with the US and "western modernity - an agenda hidden
within the official rubric of a 'war on terrorism'".
-
- In this conflict, "wholly unlike the cold war",
the Bush administration's impulse has been to "imitate the routines
and bureaucratic ... mindset that so characterised that era". So the
US projects Iraqis and other Arabs as people to be liberated, like those
"oppressed by Soviet rule". And the US accepts authoritarian
Arab regimes as allies against the "radical fighters". All this
is nothing less than a gigantic "strategic mistake".
-
- "There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-US
groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from
what they see as apostate tyrannies that the US so determinedly promotes
and defends." Rhetoric about freedom is received as "no more
than self-serving hypocrisy", highlighted daily by the US occupation
in Iraq. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom', but rather they hate
our policies." The "dramatic narrative ... of the war on terrorism",
Bush's grand storyline connecting all the dots from the World Trade Centre
to Baghdad, has "borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars".
As a result, jihadists have been able to transform them selves from marginal
figures in the Muslim world into defenders against invasion, with a following
of millions.
-
- "Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy
directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information',
or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather, it
is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none - the United
States is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims
... Inevitably, therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the
party that has both the message and the 'loud and clear' channel: the enemy."
-
- Almost three months ago, the board delivered its report
to the White House. But, a source told me, it has received no word back.
The report has been ignored by those to whom its recommendations are directed.
-
- For the Bush administration, expert analysis is extraneous,
as it is making clear to national security professionals in its partisan
scapegoating of the CIA. Experts can only be expert in telling the White
House what it wants to hear. Expertise is valued not for the evidence it
offers for correction, but for propaganda and validation. But no one, not
in the White House, Congress or the dwindling coalition of the willing,
can claim the catastrophe has not been foretold by the best and most objective
minds commissioned by the Pentagon - perhaps for the last time.
-
- - Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President
Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of www.salon.com
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1364249,00.html
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