THEY DO NOT HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOMS

From The Financial Times (UK), December 31, 2004

In the three years since 9/11 the Bush administration has successfully sold the idea that the Islamist perpetrators "hate us for our freedoms" and loathe us for our values: for what we are and think, rather than what we do. In what is ultimately a war of ideas within the Muslim and Arab world, there is no idea more damaging - or more wrong. Unless attitudes are radically rethought, radical Islam will win the struggle for Muslim minds.

The self-serving fallacies of the they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms industry have been criticised in recent books from, for example, the former CIA official in charge of pursuing Osama bin Laden, Michael Scheuer (Imperial Hubris), and the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire). Both argue it is the policies of the US and its allies that have ignited such rage in the Arab and Muslim world.

Validation of this analysis came in September from an unusual quarter: the Defense Science Board (DSB), a federal committee of academics and strategists that gives independent advice to the US defence secretary. The DSB report's brief was to study US "strategic communication" policy. It found that "America's power to persuade is in a state of crisis" - not least, it suggests between the lines, because of this administration's unappealing mix of
high-handedness, incompetence and attraction to the use of force.

Good presentation will not build support for reviled policies. Credibility matters, the report says, and "simply, there is none - the US today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and Islam".

The polls the DSB looks at are chilling: single digit support for the US and its policies (for example, a 98 and 94 per cent "unfavourable" rating in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Washington's main Arab allies). The DSB finds
nonetheless that majorities or pluralities do support values such as freedom and democracy, embrace western science and education, and like US products and movies. "In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies," the DSB says, before noting that the surveys showed hatred of the policies had begun to tarnish the attraction of the values. So what is to be done?

George W. Bush appeared on the right track in a speech just over a year ago to the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. Rightly condemning the "cultural condescension" that suggests Arabs and Muslims are suited to despotism rather than democracy, he proclaimed a "forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East". The experience of the past 60 years, he said, had taught us "stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty". Quite so, but what has happened since then?

US support for Israel has solidified while the Israelis continue to expand their hold over the immeasurably weaker Palestinians. The Iraqi state and society have broken under a US occupation that continues to use disproportionate force with high civilian casualties.

Diplomatically, Washington endorses the transparent attempts of Moscow, Delhi and Beijing to reclassify regional disputes involving Muslims in Chechnya, Kashmir and western China as part of the "Global War on Terror".

Above all, in Muslim eyes the US is taking sides against freedom and Islam by continuing to support tyrannies throughout the region, as a trade-off for cheap oil and forward bases. In that light, the US-inspired Greater Middle East Initiative looks long on rhetoric and short on action - suspiciously like France and Britain's behaviourduring their post-first world war carve-up of the Middle East. It does not help that the programme's small secretariat is based in Tunisia, a police state.

It is the policies that have to change. In Iraq, the US needs to spell out credibly that it has no long-term designs on the country (unlike its British colonial predecessors). In Palestine it needs to arbitrate even-handedly and honestly. The US must engage with non-violent Islamist movements which the DSB correctly identifies as the emerging centre of political gravity in the region. It must above all cease propping up Arab despots.

No change in policy means the short-term survival of tyranny and the onward march of the jihadis. It also means the shared values of Islam and the west will wither.

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