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Battling for Hearts and Minds
Very EFL. Link to the blog and read the whole thing.
Insofar as we allow the enemy to define the battleground, the advantage is his. Our enemy is the Qutb/Salafi/Wahhabi Muslims who believe us a Satanic threat to Islam (this is exact and not hyperbole: Satan is the deceiver/seducer). Their philosophy has 2 main thrusts as far as we are concerned:- a critique of the West as secular/atheist (or Christian; it doesnât matter much to Qutb) and therefore intrinsically deranged; and
- a claim that only through adherence to Godâs law as codified in sharia is there true happiness and nobility.
We cannot persuade our committed foes, and shouldnât bother trying. We may be able reduce their recruiting rate, though. If we take their challenges as our battlefield, and attempt to deny them directly, weâre apt to lose. For example, consider Qutbâs first front. Our culture very plainly has deranged aspects, and atheism has a very prominent place in it. You may try to say that every society has problems--but Johnny Abdul will be more scandalized by alien faults than familiar ones. The local problems (government corruption, etc) may hurt him more, but they donât shock him as much as the unfamiliar ones. You may try to point out that a secular government doesnât require secularism--but that subtle point is apt to elude him: It has escaped attention here in the West as well. In short, Johnny Abdul is likely to agree with Qutb that weâre a lot of deranged atheists.
| Us agnostics and atheists are up for the high jump when the caliph takes over... |
Johnny Abdul is not an atheist; he despises them. He does like the goodies we offer, and for a lot of people, in peacetime, thatâs enough to reconcile them to us. But even in peacetime, and more certainly in war, sophisticated Muslims will warn that the goodies are a trap to snare good Muslims into materialism and vice. Which of course they certainly can be.
| The goodies don't care about your religion, if any... |
To make matters worse, Johnny Abdul may want the goodies, but he canât have them. He doesnât make enough money. He canât, not without fairly dramatic political and economic restructuring--which wonât happen. The political poles in these societies are the entrenched interests (and factions thereof) and the revolutionaries--who have coalesced around radical Islam. Not much hope for useful change there... If it were possible to improve Johnny Abdulâs economic life, heâd be more likely to go along with the great Satan in order to get medicine, etc. But he is simultaneously more likely to become more sophisticated and realize the trap of materialism.
| His economic life is never going to improve if he grows to adultery having read only one book. He's never going to improve his economic lot when he invests all his surplus capital (and some that's not surplus) in holy men and building new mosques. |
One school of thought holds that if we can make the Muslims middle class, theyâll exclude religion from their calculations--like Sunday-only Christians. But Marx was wrong, and not all motives are economic. How many of the suicide bombers are poor? How many of the 911 killers were poor? In any event, we canât change the economic conditions of Mideast countries without taking control of them--the reforms required are too radical. They need new political systems, changed economic structures, different educational priorities, different social attitudes towards corruption and nepotism--not just better roads.
| Hmmm... That's a flat statement that they're all incompetent to handle their own affairs. I don't think I agree. The Gulf States are actually doing a pretty good job of administering their own affairs. Tunisia seems to be a functioning secular state, though I'm not intimately familiar with it. Morocco's working hard to modernize. Libya, like them or not, has broken the Islamic-Arabist mold. We're actually only talking about a few countries that are showing themselves incompetent, and that primarily through the vagaries of dictatorial regimes. And of course the princes of Arabia, who have, in fact, proven themselves incompetent. The real problem doesn't seem to be the governments, which can be changed, but the substratum of society that's got the stranglehold on education, linked as it is with the guys who give the Friday rants. |
The other front--that sharia is the way of joy--is hard to counter directly, since Johnnyâs imam will point out that we (being infidels) have no standing to judge such things. We can publicize the horrors of the Iranian mullahs or the Saudi custodians of virtue or the Taliban soccer field mayhem. It wonât get very far coming from us. I see that weâve finally gotten a satellite station up, but I donât know much about it yet. Iraq is a great place to plant radio/TV stations for the whole Middle East--and we havenât moved on that yet. Even so, we canât expect that anyone will accept our critiques of Islam.
| I don't think we can look for a quick turnaround, but I do think we've got the opportunity for progress. We don't run the Baghdad press, but they seem to have gotten the free press idea pretty quickly and enthusiastically, and it's read outside of Baghdad. Given a few years, it'll be read throughout the Middle East, and has the potential to replace rags like Asharq al-Asswipe. What we absolutely, positively have to do in Iraq is foster the idea of individual liberty: go to the mosque (or church or temple) you want, or stay home; say pretty much what you want; do pretty much what you want. To paraphrase Huey Long, make every man a king, no man a despot. That sort of idea can't help but catch on, of only because Iraqis travel and other people travel to Iraq. |
Posted by: Korora 2004-02-23 |
