COMMENTARY Promoting US values
in Muslim lands By Ioannis
Gatsiounis
WASHINGTON - It has become
virtually axiomatic to suggest that a "war on
terror" led by force is destined to fail. As the
retired US general, Wesley Clark, noted recently,
"This is not World War II: when we kill people we
make matters worse." And so the question in most
Washington policy circles has shifted from whether
America should change course to how.
Ambitious efforts to reach a new consensus
are surfacing, as evinced by a recent conference
here titled "Terrorism, Security and America's
Purpose: Towards a More Comprehensive Strategy".
Top policy analysts offered practical steps for
America to get back on track, such as seeing to it
that rule of law governs all of Washington's
foreign policy. The conference also tackled
important issues, such as the "Strengths and
Limitations of
Democracy Promotion as a
Strategy for Fighting Terrorism".
However,
it generally paid scant attention to Muslim
sensibilities, as has most dialogue and literature
emanating from policy circles urging revision to
the country's foreign policy strategy. What "they"
want is still assumed to be what we want. More
specifically, these stirrings of dissent have
preserved the same basic conviction that inspired
the country's current course: That the core of the
solution is (whatever disagreement there is over
the means) to promote American values in Muslim
lands.
Keeping on in this way runs a
serious risk of emasculating Washington's battle
for hearts and minds, as we saw the Tuesday before
last in Saudi Arabia. It was then that new Under
Secretary of State Karen Hughes, who's in charge
of spreading America's message abroad, told an
audience of the kingdom's educated elite that she
hoped to see the ban on women driving lifted.
When an audience member told Hughes that
Saudi women were happy as they were, she was
applauded. Indeed promoting American-style
democracy to enhance national security has figured
largely in American foreign policy as far back as
when Woodrow Wilson was president. And arguably
Washington's savvy and tenacity on this front have
not only made America but the world safer.
But in Islam, America confronts a
civilization that, however diverse, is
collectively sensitive to attempts by the West to
impose its will: the colonial period is largely
forgotten in the West but remains an open wound
throughout the Muslim world. Heightening this
acuity is President George W Bush's "war on
terror", which many Muslims view as a war against
Islam; in other words, as Muslim ears are still
ringing from the destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Palestine, America returns to say, "ps: here
are some values for you."
Foreign policy
experts justify this imposition by not seeing it
as an imposition at all; after all, the Muslim
world hungers for democracy. But this overlooks
the telling findings of a University of Michigan
study: that support for many of the values
commonly associated with democracy, such as gender
equality and freedom of speech, is weak in the
Muslim world.
This may be due less to any
deep-seated aversion than backlash to the
"impurities" of globalization. What's certain,
however, is that Muslims have become wary of
Washington's intentions. I've heard often during
my travels through the Muslim world in recent
years that America doesn't "get Islam". The
opposite is equally true, that many Muslims don't
grasp America (hence the $1.2 billion the US
allocated to public diplomacy last year, double
what it spent in 1980, with more on the way).
The difference is, America, not Islam, is
doing the peddling. It is fighting the Islamists
for no less than the soul of Islam, for the
allegiance of the ostensibly undecided moderate
middle. Why, then, does so much of the advisory
discourse and literature on America's national
security and public diplomacy, while acknowledging
Islamic lands as the battlefront, make only
passing reference to Islam?
The Koran, for
instance, the covenant by which Muslims are to
live, is seldom cited; concepts central to Muslim
existence, such as tawhid (oneness of
Allah) and ijmah (consensus), are rarely
mentioned, let alone considered. Part of the
problem can be traced to the precepts of American
politics. Christianity heavily influences
discourse and policy on the right. Many
left-leaning elites come from a secularist
tradition. There is virtually a built-in
resistance to getting to know Islam better.
September 11 fed the resistance, when it
became all but official policy not to listen. To
listen was to be a relativist or worse an
apologist.
The obduracy eventually proved
fatal to America's foreign-policy objectives, and
Washington has since stressed the need for more
dialogue. "If we don't have long-term
relationships with Muslim populations, we cannot
have trust. Without trust, public diplomacy is
ineffective," 9-11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean
said last year.
But only selective
listening and dialogue has materialized. The
tendency to talk to persists, and it's not
likely to change any time soon, for several
reasons.
Firstly and most basically,
"Institutional self-reform is rare; the conscience
is willing, but the culture is tough," in the
words of historian Jacques Barzun. Secondly,
America's foreign policy agenda is in essence a
campaign of conversion - not from Islam per se but
in how Islam defines itself. Conversion attempts,
by their nature, don't seek to understand - they
look beyond it. They start from the premise that
one's own values are superior to those to be
converted.
Thirdly, Washington is
convinced that the Muslim world is the source of a
most elusive and potent danger - a threat not only
to our borders, as with the Cold War, but to our
subways, classrooms, ballparks and suburbs.
Containment will no longer suffice; conversion is
necessary. And the sooner the better. Fear and a
sense of urgency are driving the dialogue on
foreign policy.
Unfortunately, this puts
Islam "at the center of a fault line dividing the
West and the Rest [which] leads us away from an
understanding of attitudes in the Muslim world,"
noted political scientist Mark Tessler.
This is not to suggest that US foreign
policy should cease to promote American values;
some do bind mankind. But to be effective the
strategy, and the dialogue seeking to improve on
it, must more substantively engage the Muslim
world, as opposed to doing so in so far as it
serves American interests.
Until then, a
sign seen at a recent anti-Iraq War protest in
Washington, DC, will echo the fears of many
Muslims. It read, "Be nice to America or we'll
bring democracy to you."
Ioannis
Gatsiounis, a New York native, has worked as a
freelance foreign correspondent and previously
co-hosted a weekly political/cultural radio
call-in show in the US.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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