HOW TO
LOSE THE WAR ON TERROR PART 3: An exchange
of narratives By Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
There was a time in the
immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when
Western intellectuals debated the meaning of the
attacks that occurred on that day and the most
appropriate way to counter them. There was a
welter of voices, a cacophony of opinions.
Struggling to understand the event's
magnitude, German philosopher Jurgen Habermas
reflected that September 11 carried with it a
"foreboding atmosphere" that exposed "a long-known
vulnerability of our complex civilization". French intellectual
Jacques Derrida went further,
suggesting that the event's complexity forced us
to question our most "deep-seated conceptual
presuppositions". Opinion makers, intellectuals,
politicians, foreign-policy analysts, and the
great mass of the public wrestled with September
11's meaning, as if suddenly caught off balance by
the sheer audacity of the event. And so it was
that for the merest moment - a shimmering and
hopeful period so brief that it now seems that it
might never have occurred at all - Americans, and
others in the West, rejected "the received
concepts" of "war" and "terrorism" and shook
themselves from certainty's slumber.
The
hopeful moment passed. Driven by the shattering
visions of the assault - the specter of living
beings falling through the clear air of lower
Manhattan - the United States and its allies
attacked Afghanistan and drove the Taliban from
power, jailed al-Qaeda members and their
sympathizers, strangled Middle Eastern banks and
purged financial accounts, identified an "axis of
evil", passed new and more stringent security
measures, legislated new powers to domestic spying
agencies, and increased funding to their
intelligence services. They unseated Saddam
Hussein. Yet after five years and the expenditure
of thousands of lives and billions of dollars,
there remains what Habermas calls a "vague feeling
of angst": an indefinable yet precise sense that
somehow and in some way we in the West have gotten
this thing, this "war on terrorism", terribly
wrong.
But how?
In the first two
parts of this series on our dialogue with
political Islam (How to Lose the 'War on
Terror', Asia Times Online,
March-April), we provided a simple recounting of
our exchange with the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah,
Jamaat e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. Our
dialogue was a straightforward exploration of
political principles and tactics, a defense of our
central claim that, in failing to differentiate
among Muslim political groups, Western
policymakers are needlessly bloodying the Islamic
world's landscape and broadening the globe's
crisis.
But over the past two years, our
exchange with Islam's leaders - and now too with
policymakers in the United States and Europe - has
gone beyond the simple political formulas of
diplomacy. In a series of smaller and more private
meetings from Beirut to Istanbul and Brussels,
from London to Washington and Jerusalem, we have
begun to explore the intellectual foundations of
our confrontation so that we might, finally,
address the intangible "feeling of angst" that so
permeates our conflict.
What we mean
when we say ... The varying public
responses to our first two articles focused
primarily on two statements: the first, by a
leader of Hamas who acerbically warned us against
lecturing ("we don't want you to talk, we want you
to listen") and the second to our claim that the
West's image of al-Qaeda is reflected by a narrow
set of ideological misconceptions propounded by a
parochial political elite - policymakers whom we
described as Western takfiris. [1]
The first comment was greeted with broad
approbation, the second with widespread
skepticism, the responses dividing themselves
evenly along ethnic and religious lines: Arabs and
Muslims praised Hamas' warning that we must listen
as well as talk, while Westerners derided our
takfiri description as mere "political
sloganeering" and hinted that our exchange
typified that of "do-gooders" who naively believe
that the world can be ruled by the Sermon on the
Mount.
The responses themselves point up
significant and long-standing differences in how
the West and Islam fail to communicate. The
Western media's use of experts to decipher
meanings preceded the Oslo Accords by 20 years,
when news broadcasts regularly reported on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict by featuring Israeli
officials appearing alongside Middle East experts:
"So tell us, Professor, what do the Palestinians
think?" It was only after Oslo that Palestinians
were allowed to speak in their own voices - or
that we were allowed to listen.
In the
wake of September 11, Western news outlets
reverted to these pre-Oslo traditions, featuring
expert commentators filtering Islamist views for
an audience whose opinions on Islam have been
shaped by ... expert commentators. The global
communications revolution has proved singularly
unable to reverse this practice, in part because
broadcast corporations have proved vulnerable to
political and economic pressures - Hezbollah's
Al-Manar television is barred from broadcasting in
the United States and Europe because it is "a
terrorist entity", and no satellite company is
willing to take on Al-Jazeera's English-language
service.
The media's seeming inability to
present unfiltered commentary is, however, neither
universal nor causative, but particular and
derivative, and the result of deep-seated and
historically rooted mistrust of Western
policymakers toward Islam's leaders. This mistrust
was more recently mirrored by an angry exchange
that we engaged in with an employee of a US
foreign-policy organization, who hypothesized that
the reason the West does not listen to political
Islam is that political Islam has nothing to say:
"You spoke to the leaders of Hezbollah?"
"Yes."
"And to Hamas?"
"Yes."
"And they said that they
wanted democracy?"
"Yes."
"And you
believed them?"
The skepticism in these
words is pernicious, but by no means unusual: they
are intended to empty our dialogue with Islam of
its content and so translate the message of Islam
into a form that reflects US policies: "Hamas says
they believe in democracy, but what they really
mean to say is ..." Nor was the claim
unintentional; the critic's acerbity was a
purposeful negation of our belief that language
not only plays a central role in political
experience as well as our belief that the leaders
of Hamas and Hezbollah might be capable of telling
the truth - and of defining themselves.
Our response, we believed, was pertinent:
"Do you oppose Hamas and Hezbollah because you
believe they are incapable of telling the truth,
or do you claim they are incapable of telling the
truth because you oppose them?"
Particularly since September 11, the US
and its allies have approached Islam not to
understand it, or speak with it, or listen to it,
but to interpret it. Such interpretation is not
"liberating" but, as the Western thinker Susan
Sontag would have it, "reactionary, impertinent,
cowardly, stifling". It is meant to poison our
sensibilities.
Even so, such
interpretation is essential, many in the West
believe, because the language of the Islamists is
shadowy, unreachable and coded, while ours is
transparent, accessible and honest. When we say we
support democracy, we mean it; when they say it,
they're lying.
Speech acts Thus
our imprecation to "listen" is more than a
political conceit (or an attempt to replace the
real world of politics with the Sermon on the
Mount), it is the central message of many of the
most important and influential of Islam's
political leaders, for whom talking and listening
are a core strategy for de-escalating the
confrontation with the West.
This message
was at the center of a recent exchange in Beirut
with Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah.
Educated in Najaf, where his scholarship gained
respectful attention, Fadlallah is one of a
handful of grand ayatollahs in the world, a
community that represents the depth of Islamic
thinking inside Shi'ism. Fadlallah carefully
parses out his beliefs in powerful but phlegmatic
phrases. As a part of the Shi'ite elite, he has
followers who subscribe to his teachings, and he
takes great care in his use of language. Fadlallah
and his handful of colleagues are unique: there is
nothing comparable in the West - it would be as if
each Catholic cardinal had a different view of
Christianity, and attracted students to his views.
Aging now, Fadlallah does not sweep into a
room as he once did, and his guests can see the
wear on his face. But he is a man who cares about
words. There is, in his most recent
pronouncements, a careful worry about the dilution
of language, and the violence such dilution
portends. More pointedly, he argues that the
West's current political discourse is designed
precisely to close off an exchange and erode
understanding.
"We can talk about the
differences between freedom fighters and
terrorists, about legitimate resistance and
illegitimate resistance, and we can participate in
dialogues and in debates - but every religion
condemns the killing of civilians," he said. "The
West knows this. Yet the West does not take care
in what it says or in how it uses and applies its
categories, or whether it follows its own
principles. Its greatest mistake is in using these
terms too readily. It needs to be more thoughtful,
more attentive, more discerning in its use of
language.
"There is a dilution of language
at work here. What we need to realize is that
words have meanings, they can lead to violence."
Fadlallah is known for his courtesy and is
puzzled by its absence in others. He is accused of
masterminding the 1983 bombing of the US Marine
Corps barracks in Beirut, regularly described
(most recently by CNN) as the work of Hezbollah -
which did not exist at the time. The US responded
to the barracks bombing by attempting to
assassinate Fadlallah with a car bomb in 1985,
killing 73 Lebanese. Fadlallah's later years have
been spent in an attempt to engage the West in the
importance of speaking clearly. It has been a
frustrating experience, a conclusion implied in a
story purposely told to us by one of his
assistants prior to our meeting.
"There
was once an interviewer who interrupted His
Eminence to give his own opinion," this assistant
said. "And Sheikh Fadlallah allowed the
interruption to pass into silence. But when he
responded, he said: 'Young man, when you talk I
will listen carefully to everything that you say.
After you are finished I will respond, and you
will remain silent and listen very carefully to me
until I am finished. This is the discipline I
employ.'"
Fadlallah's concern with the
effects of Western discourse about Islam was most
apparent in the wake of the publication of
caricatures of Mohammed in a Danish magazine last
year. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was
most outspoken in condemning the demonstrations
that followed several months later, claiming that
Iran and Syria "have gone out of their way to
inflame sentiments and to use this to their own
purposes. And the world ought to call them on it."
Jack Straw, who was then the British foreign
secretary, parroted this imprecation, jarringly
repeating Rice's "call them on it" homey
Americanism.
US President George W Bush,
meanwhile, lectured Muslim governments that they
needed to "be respectful" of the Western value of
freedom of speech and telephoned the Danish to
express his "support and solidarity". In the pages
of the Washington Post, commentators Alan
Dershowitz and William Bennett supported Bush's
call by condemning US newspapers for failing to
follow the Danish example of printing the
cartoons, saying the failure undermined the
doctrine of freedom of speech. "When we were
attacked on September 11, we knew the main reason
for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of
life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never
imagined was that the free press - an institution
at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would
be among the first to surrender," they wrote.
The loud condemnations of Islam's reaction
reached deafening proportions when the views of
American conservative commentator Fred Barnes were
aired throughout the region: "It tells us a lot,"
he said. "It tells us that our enemy is not just
al-Qaeda. That there [are] Muslims all over Europe
and all over the world who are certainly enemies
of Western civilization ... Now, I think we've
learned a lot from this. We see the Muslims'
contempt for democracy, for freedom of speech, for
freedom of the press, and particularly for freedom
of religion."
Muslim protests over the
publication of the Danish cartoons was deeply
rooted and emotional, but were fed and exacerbated
by the West's insistence that its defense of the
cartoons was simply a reflection of its commitment
to freedom of speech - to its "values". That such
a defense might be viewed as hypocritical did not
occur to Western commentators, who failed to
perceive any symmetry between the West's
condemnation of Hezbollah's Al-Manar television
(to cite one example) and Islam's condemnation of
the Danish cartoons. Why is it that freedom of
speech can be extended to those who insult the
Prophet but not to those who then strongly protest
the insults? What kind of presuppositions are made
by those who view public demonstrations as an
attack on democratic values?
That the
banning of Al-Manar and the cartoon controversy
were somehow related in the Arab political context
would have come as a surprise to Americans, who
remain ignorant of the comparison. Al-Manar was
first barred from broadcasting by the French, in
December 2004. Then-prime minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin stated that the ban was being implemented
because "Al-Manar's programs are incompatible with
our values". The French ban was followed by the
decision of Al-Manar's US satellite carrier to
pull the plug on the station and, one year later,
the inclusion of Al-Manar on the US State
Department's Terrorist Exclusion List.
"It's not a question of freedom of
speech," said State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher. "It's a question of incitement to
violence, and we don't see why, here or anywhere
else, a terrorist organization should be allowed
to spread its hatred and incitement through the
television airwaves."
Why is it - Muslims
were asking during the February cartoon
demonstrations - why is it that Al-Manar's
condemnation of Israel is "incitement to
violence", while Fred Barnes could blithely
condemn Muslims as "enemies of Western
civilization"?
This said, Al-Manar's
programming content is not only a concern for the
West. Hezbollah foreign minister Nawaf Mousawi (as
we noted in Part 2 of this series, Handing victory to the
extremists, April 1) acknowledged his
embarrassment that the channel aired a documentary
on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and its
bald celebration of martyrdom, with the Dome of
the Rock as a backdrop, seems not so much a
dilution of speech as its escalation.
Our
claim is not that Al-Manar should get a "pass" on
hate speech simply because Fred Barnes is guilty
of the same offense - or that Grand Ayatollah
Fadlallah is some kind of sandal-clad prophet with
a copy of Emmanuel Kant prominently displayed on
his bed table - but that deeply rooted hate speech
cannot be ended by refusing to talk or listen.
Indeed, Mousawi's embarrassment about Al-Manar's
programming was news to policymakers in the United
States, when it need not have been. An exchange
with Hezbollah over the West's (and Fadlallah's)
view that hate speech leads to hate crimes ("that
words have meanings") might have resulted in a
de-escalation of the war of words that is fueling
the current conflict. Or perhaps not. But banning
Al-Manar in the West had precisely the opposite
effect to what was intended, for it gave it
increased legitimacy in the region by proving
that, in the words of an Al-Manar official, "The
West wants to hear only one voice, and that's its
own."
Fatefully, the cartoon controversy
reached its peak just prior to Ashura, the Shi'ite
holy day commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn
Ali, the grandson of Mohammed, at the Battle of
Karbala, in 680 CE. Ashura is traditionally a day
of mourning, and Lebanon's Shi'ites commemorated
it this past February 9 by attending a mass rally
capped by an address by Hezbollah general
secretary Sayyad Hassan Nasrallah (described in an
Associated Press report of that day as "a
black-turbaned, bearded cleric").
Born in
Lebanon but, like Fadlallah, educated in Najaf,
Nasrallah is perhaps the most magnetic,
sophisticated and respected political leader in
the Middle East. He is a mercurial public speaker,
and the tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters
who came to hear him believed he would issue a
rallying cry of protest, a scorching condemnation
of the West, and a defense of Muslim anger.
Surprisingly, he did not. Instead, Nasrallah
echoed Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah's continuing
concern about the potential violence of language.
His message was angry, but his audience sensed in
his words a deeper frustration - that through the
previous week the Muslim world had suffered
through a torrent of words, a lecture about
values, without any chance to respond. Now, he
would give a response.
"Defending the
Prophet should continue all over the world. Let
Condoleezza Rice and Bush and all the tyrants ..."
- and here, unaccountably, Nasrallah seemed to
search for the appropriate words, and then finally
found them - "... let Condoleezza Rice and Bush
and all the tyrants - shut up."
Nasrallah's frustration galvanized his
listeners, whose celebratory response to his
imprecation mirrored the views of the leaders of
political Islam in our initial series of exchanges
with them in Beirut last year. In the lead-up to
those meetings, our future interlocutors were
adamant, and recounted a meeting they had had with
American and European academics the previous year.
The meeting had featured presentations by American
and European scholars that emphasized that the
West would enter a dialogue with political Islam
only if three prior conditions were met - that
Islamist groups renounce violence, recognize
Israel, and disarm.
"We wondered, if we
met those conditions, just exactly what there
would be to talk about," a Hamas official said.
The meeting became a lecture, but rather than tell
their American and European counterparts to "shut
up" - as Nasrallah had done - the Islamist
delegates walked from the room.
The
sphere of violence Our experiences, both in
our dialogues last year and in our most recent
exchanges with European and US officials, have
focused on a reigniting of listening and talking
not simply because the leaders of political Islam
have emphasized this need. Rather, our dialogues
were established on the belief that the kind of
talking and listening in which we were engaged was
different from the ubiquitous reconciliation
conferences that dot the Middle East's political
landscape.
Our goal was not to end
violence, but to circumscribe it within
well-defined limits - an end-point we believed
essential to our goal of persuading Western
leaders to differentiate between those who
perpetrated September 11 and those who condemned
it, between those who depend for their legitimacy
on the support of their people and those who
don't. Our purpose was, then, recognizably
selfish: to the degree that the West held Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat e-Islami
and other moderate Islamists responsible for
September 11 (the Islamist "Gironde", in our
formula) was the degree to which Islamists would
conclude that the West held Islam collectively
responsible for September 11 - and the degree to
which violence would be visited on the innocent.
The evident interest of Western officials
in our exchange was a tacit, if partial,
recognition of these views - that important
officials had concluded that power is not solely
the monopoly of the US and its allies and that,
while to "turn the other cheek" in the face of
September 11 involved a lack of dignity, those
attacks do not absolve politicians from engaging
in diplomacy. We say partial recognition, because
the increasing interest in our exchanges was not
kindled from altruistic motives, but from looming
failure - the widening war in Iraq, the spreading
violence in the region, the feckless
implementation of the West's program of promoting
democracy, as well as the increasingly strident
voices in Islam demanding an airing of their
grievances.
It was not happenstance that
these fears were repeated, sometimes word for
word, by the leaders of political Islam, whose
desire for dialogue was fueled by "the widening
war in Iraq, the spreading violence in the region,
the indifferent implementation of the West's
program of democracy, and the increasingly loud
voice of our people that they be allowed to air
their grievances".
Never mind: while our
dialogue has not resulted in a political
breakthrough, simply confirming that an exchange
of narratives might be possible holds out hope for
the reversal of Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that
"war is diplomacy by other means" - an attempt to
remove the current conflict from the sphere of
violence to the sphere of talking.
Our
colleague John Alderdice - one of the first of
Northern Ireland's "Unionists" to express a
willingness to talk with Sinn Fein, and a key
official in the negotiations of the Good Friday
Agreements - recounted his own experience of
moving a conflict from the sphere of violence to
the sphere of talking. One of the first conditions
for doing so, he noted, is that both sides must
have confidence that they will not be weakened by
a dialogue. Usually, a participant who refuses to
participate does so because he fears his own
weakness. Alderdice was puzzled, therefore, by
Western intransigence in recognizing the need for
an exchange with the leaders of political Islam:
"We in the West have tens of thousands of troops
in the Middle East, dozens of ships on the high
seas, and control of the world's financial
markets," he said. "So what exactly are we afraid
of?"
Talking and listening, then, are more
than a metaphorical construct, a repetition of the
Sermon on the Mount, or a faith-based
reconciliation program by another name; it is,
rather, an attempt to palliate fears, put the
individual back at the center of history, and
negate the intellectual apartheid that robs words
of their content. It is also an attempt to deny
the efficacy of those in the West who would refuse
Islam the richness of its diversity at the same
time that it rejects Islam's rhetoric of the
West's collective guilt.
"We know that in
war innocent people will die, because this is the
nature of war," Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah told us.
"But this does not excuse responsibility or negate
the requirement that we do everything that we can
to save the innocent. This is an ideal that the
United States and the West has and this is the
ideal that we also have. It is a basis for the
beginning of an understanding, because it is this
belief that separates us from our enemies in the
world and inside of our own societies."
Note 1. Takfiris
are Muslims who view all Westerners as
kafirs
(infidels).
Coming
on Monday, Part 4: Acts of faith
Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a
London-based group dedicated to providing an
opening to political Islam. Crooke is the former
Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff
member of the Mitchell Commission investigating
the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant, author
of six books on US history, and a former personal
adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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