Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
Their Hearts and Minds? by David Rieff 
New York Times, September 4, 2005 Their Hearts and Minds? By DAVID RIEFF With its bitter echoes of Vietnam, the expression ''hearts and minds'' is one that many Americans understandably use ironically rather than seriously. But if the last three years have demonstrated anything, it is that hearts and minds are essential to defeating the insurgencies that United States forces face in Iraq and, increasingly, again in Afghanistan. Whatever you think about the Iraq war, or the fight against Islamic terrorism more broadly, the move among American policymakers away from military solutions and toward political ones can only be a good thing. President Bush's appointment of his longtime confidante Karen Hughes as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, and of Dina Powell, an Egyptian-American Washington highflier, as her deputy, is perhaps the clearest sign that the administration is finally getting serious about beliefs as well as bullets. Certainly, the agenda Hughes outlined during her Senate confirmation hearings in July was ambitious. ''We're involved,'' she told the Foreign Relations Committee, ''in a generational and global struggle of ideas.'' She added: ''I recognize the job ahead will be difficult. Perceptions do not change easily or quickly.'' Refreshing though it was for its candor, Hughes's statement neglected the larger question: Is hostility toward the United States based largely on misperceptions of America's actions and intentions or on a genuine dislike of the power America wields around the world? It would be wonderful, of course, if the bin Ladens and al-Zarqawis drew their support primarily from the miseducation of young people in radical madrasas and the misinformation that the administration believes to be dished out on Al Jazeera. But in their equation of hatred with ignorance, Hughes, and the rest of the Bush administration, including the president himself, may be falling into a determinist trap. Their profound belief that American ideals should prevail leads them to assume that these ideals must prevail if only they are communicated well enough. To believe this, however, you must believe that there is an inevitable progress to history -- a progress toward freedom. The president said as much in his second Inaugural Address, arguing that it was the United States' mission to spread such freedom throughout the world. His view is shared by many Americans. But non-Americans have become increasingly wary of this mission. Is it possible to persuade them that, as Hughes put it in her Senate testimony, the United States is ''a tremendous force for good''? Between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large number of people in Western Europe, the Soviet empire and elsewhere did believe this. (Latin America was, of course, the great exception.) The Bush administration has often expressed its confidence that the American mission in Iraq will eventually succeed, just as the occupations of Germany and Japan and the struggle with Soviet communism succeeded. The problem is that despite the old cliche about history repeating itself, history rarely repeats itself. Able officials like Karen Hughes do not seem to have come to grips with the difficulties of waging a war of ideas against the exponents of a radically unfamiliar worldview. The administration is doubtless right to insist that, like the communists before them, the Islamists are marked by their contempt for individual liberty and by their willingness to commit mass murder in the name of some radiant future. But there is an essential distinction -- one that may make the strategy that worked against the Soviet empire impotent with regard to the jihadists. Communism was a version of modernity. It valued education -- above all, scientific education -- and it insisted on gender equality. The United States was also committed to modernity. The conflict was thus a clash between two systems that shared certain fundamental presuppositions. And given the rank inferiority of the communist version, the belief that democracy and capitalism could and would prevail made sense. But the conflict with jihadism is a contest between modernity and antimodernity, and, as we are discovering to our cost, obscurantism has a far larger constituency and a far more powerful hold on the popular imagination, certainly in the Islamic world, than most people imagined a generation ago. Jihadists have the advantage of speaking to a Muslim population that already shares many of their beliefs, whereas communists had to indoctrinate many of their constituents from scratch. Add to this the fact that, in countries like Egypt, a version of modernity has largely failed to provide ordinary people with a decent life, and the appeal of the fundamentalists is neither so difficult to explain nor so irrational as it sometimes appears. Restating America's case more eloquently would certainly be a good thing. But the assumption that everyone in the world will gravitate toward a variation on American democracy if given half a chance is more likely based on wishful thinking (and, doubtless, good intentions) than on a sound and sober reading of history. In her Senate testimony, Karen Hughes said that ''people will choose freedom over tyranny and tolerance over extremism every time.'' Would that it were true. Of course people crave freedom, but Karen Hughes's idea of it and the Ayatollah al-Sistani's idea of it are very different. As for people unfailingly choosing tolerance, the historical perspective suggests that this has been the exception rather than the rule. An American public diplomacy that convinces itself otherwise has little chance of success, no matter how influential the person at its helm and how many resources she has at her disposal. David Rieff is a contributing writer and the author most recently of ''At the Point of a Gun.'' |