Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
War of Ideas by Thomas Friedman New York Times, January 8, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 1 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Airline flights into the U.S. are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of 5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National Guardsmen are posted at key bridges and tunnels. Happy New Year. What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III - the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam. O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here's how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization. With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life - an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe - you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust. Trust is built into every aspect, every building and every interaction in our increasingly hyperconnected world. We trust that when we board a plane, the person next to us isn't going to blow up his shoes. Without trust, there's no open society because there aren't enough police to guard every opening in an open society. Which is why suicidal Islamist militants have the potential to erode our lifestyle. Because the only way to deter a suicidal enemy ready to use the instruments of daily life to kill us is by gradually taking away trust. We start by stripping airline passengers, then we go to fingerprinting all visitors, and we will end up removing cherished civil liberties. So what to do? There are only three things we can do: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their own, and only they can really restrain their extremists. As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The cold war ended the way it did because at some bedrock level we and the Soviets "agreed on what is shameful." And shame, more than any laws or police, is how a village, a society or a culture expresses approval and disapproval and applies restraints. But today, alas, there is no bedrock agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized world. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamist terrorists are neither a state subject to conventional deterrence or international rules, nor individuals deterred by the fear of death. And their home societies, in too many cases, have not stigmatized their acts as "shameful." In too many cases, their spiritual leaders have provided them with religious cover, and their local charities have provided them with money. That is why suicide bombing is spreading. We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can't just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II. This column is the first in a five-part series on how we can do that. January 11, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 2 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN hile visiting Istanbul the other day, I took a long walk along the Bosporus near Topkapi Palace. There is nothing like standing at this stunning intersection of Europe and Asia to think about the clash of civilizations - and how we might avoid it. Make no mistake: we are living at a remarkable hinge of history and it's not clear how it's going to swing. What is clear is that Osama bin Laden achieved his aim: 9/11 sparked real tensions between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East. Preachers on both sides now openly denounce each other's faith. Whether these tensions explode into a real clash of civilizations will depend a great deal on whether we build bridges or dig ditches between the West and Islam in three key places - Turkey, Iraq and Israel-Palestine. Let's start with Turkey - the only Muslim, free-market democracy in Europe. I happened to be in Istanbul when the street outside one of the two synagogues that were suicide-bombed on Nov. 15 was reopened. Three things struck me: First, the chief rabbi of Turkey appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds in the street threw red carnations on them. Second, the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamist party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi - the first time a Turkish prime minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Third, and most revealing, was the statement made by the father of one of the Turkish suicide bombers who hit the synagogues. "We are a respectful family who love our nation, flag and the Koran," the grieving father, Sefik Elaltuntas, told the Zaman newspaper. "But we cannot understand why this child had done the thing he had done . . . First, let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish brothers. Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me apologize in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the deaths. . . . We will be damned if we do not reconcile with them." The same newspaper also carried a quote from Cemil Cicek, the Turkish government spokesman, who said: "The Islamic world should take stringent measures against terrorism without any `buts' or `howevers.' " There is a message here: Context matters. Turkish politicians are not intimidated by religious fundamentalists, because - unlike too many Arab politicians - they have their own legitimacy that comes from being democratically elected. At the same time, the Turkish parents of suicide bombers don't all celebrate their children's suicide. They are not afraid to denounce this barbarism, because they live in a free society where such things are considered shameful and alien to the moderate Turkish brand of Islam - which has always embraced religious pluralism and which most Turks feel is the "real" Islam. For all these reasons, if we want to help moderates win the war of ideas within the Muslim world, we must help strengthen Turkey as a model of democracy, modernism, moderation and Islam all working together. Nothing would do that more than having Turkey be made a member of the European Union - which the E.U. will basically decide this year. Turkey has undertaken a huge number of reforms to get itself ready for E.U. membership. If, after all it has done, the E.U. shuts the door on Turkey, extremists all over the Muslim world will say to the moderates: "See, we told you so - it's a Christian club and we're never going to be let in. So why bother adapting to their rules?" I think Turkey's membership in the E.U. is so important that the U.S. should consider subsidizing the E.U. to make it easier for Turkey to be admitted. If that fails, we should offer to bring Turkey into Nafta, even though it would be very complicated. "If the E.U. creates some pretext and says `no' to Turkey, after we have done all this, I am sure the E.U. will lose and the world will lose," Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, told me in Ankara. "If Turkey is admitted, the E.U. is going to win and world peace is going to win. This would be a gift to the Muslim world. . . . When I travel to other Muslim countries - Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia - they are proud of what we are doing. They are proud of our process [of political and economic reform to join the E.U.]. They mention this to me. They ask, `How is this going?' " Yes, everyone is watching, which is why the E.U. would be making a huge mistake - a hinge of history mistake - if it digs a ditch around Turkey instead of building a bridge. January 15, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 3 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN uring the next six months, the world is going to be treated to two remarkable trials in Baghdad. It is going to be the mother of all split screens. On one side, you're going to see the trial of Saddam Hussein. On the other side, you're going to see the trial of the Iraqi people. That's right, the Iraqi people will also be on trial - for whether they can really live together without the iron fist of the man on the other side of the screen. This may be apocryphal, but Saddam is supposed to have once remarked something like: Be careful, if you get rid of me, you will need seven presidents to rule Iraq. Which is why this split-screen trial is going to be so important. Either Saddam is going to be laughing at us and at Iraqis, saying "I told you so," as Iraqis are squabbling and murdering each other on the other side of the screen. Or, we and the Iraqi people will be laughing at him by proving that it is possible to produce something the Arab world has rarely seen: a self-governing, multiethnic, representative Arab government that accepts minority rights and peaceful transfers of power - without a military dictator, monarch or mullah standing overhead with a stick. You don't want to miss this show. This is pay-per-view history. If, somehow, Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Turkmen, Christians, Assyrians and Shiites find a way to embrace pluralism, it will be a huge boost to moderates in the war of ideas all across the Muslim world. Those who scoff at the idea of a democratic domino theory in the Arab world don't know what they're talking about. But those who think this is a done deal don't know Iraq. If Iraq is going to be made to work as a decent, pluralistic, self-governing entity, noted the Iraq expert Amatzia Baram of the United States Institute of Peace, all the key factions there will have to accept being "reasonably unhappy." All will have to settle for their second-best dream in order to avoid their first-class nightmare: chaos or a return to tyranny. Islamists will have to accept being unhappy that the system does not mandate Sharia law as the constitution, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because Islam will be the official religion of the state and respected as an important basis for legislation and governance. Secularists will have to accept being unhappy that Iraq's new basic law gives Islam an important symbolic place in governance, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because this secular law and judges will still provide the basis for a new rule of law. Kurds will have to accept being very unhappy not to achieve their dream of an independent Kurdistan, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because the special autonomous status of the Kurdish region will be concretized in Iraqi law. The Sunnis will have to accept being unhappy that they are no longer controlling Iraq and its oil wealth, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because they will discover that they still have a significant role in the parliament, and a share of the nation's oil wealth in their own provinces, thanks to the new Iraqi federalism. The Shiites will be unhappy that, now when their majority political status will finally be realized, power and resources are going to be diffused throughout a federal system and constraints are going to be placed on the power of the majority. But they will only have to be "reasonably" unhappy, because there will eventually be a Shiite head of government, and the very federalism that disperses power and resources will also enable Shiite provinces that wish to adopt a more Islamist form of government to do so. "Let us put aside the literary phrase `We are brothers but others are dividing us,' " wrote the thoughtful Arab columnist Hazem Saghieh in Al Hayat. "We in Iraq and elsewhere are not brothers - there are problems we inherited from our own history and social makeup, which were not helped by oppressive modern regimes. . . . Let's be frank: the Shiites today scare the Sunnis; the Sunnis and the Shiites together scare the Kurds; and the Kurds scare the other minorities. . . . All the ethnic groups of Iraq have the responsibility of putting nation-building above their selfish and conflicting calculations." In short, our most serious long-term enemy in Iraq may not be the Iraqi insurgents, but the Iraqi people. Can they live together reasonably unhappy at first, and then grow reasonably happy? If they can, we will be Iraq's temporary midwife, helping give birth to its democracy. If they can't, we will be Iraq's new, always unhappy, baby sitter, and the old one, Saddam Hussein, will be laughing at us all the way to the gallows. January 18, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 4 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Let's not mince words. American policy today toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insane. Can anyone look at what is happening - Palestinians, gripped by a collective madness, committing suicide, and Israelis, under a leadership completely adrift, building more settlements so fanatical Jews can live in the heart of Palestinian-populated areas - and not conclude the following: That these two nations are locked in an utterly self-destructive vicious cycle that threatens Israel's long-term viability, poisons America's image in the Middle East, undermines any hope for a Palestinian state and weakens pro-American Arab moderates. No, you can't draw any other conclusion. Yet the Bush team, backed up by certain conservative Jewish and Christian activist groups, believes that the correct policy is to do nothing. Well, that is my definition of insane. Israel must get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as soon as possible and evacuate most of the settlements. I have long advocated this, but it is now an urgent necessity. Otherwise, the Jewish state is in peril. Ideally, this withdrawal should be negotiated along the Clinton plan. But if necessary, it should be done unilaterally. This can't happen too soon, and the U.S. should be forcing it. Why? First, because the Arab-Muslim world, which for so long has been on vacation from globalization, modernization and liberalization, is realizing that vacation is over. There is not enough oil wealth anymore to cushion or employ the huge population growth happening in the region. Every Arab country is going to have to make a wrenching adjustment. Israel needs to get out of the way and reduce its nodes of friction with the Muslim world as it goes through this unstable and at times humiliating catch-up. Second, three dangerous trends are converging around Israel. One is a massive population explosion across the Arab world. The second is the worst interpersonal violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians. And the third is an explosion of Arab multimedia - from Al Jazeera to the Internet. What's happening is that this Arab media explosion is feeding the images of this Israeli-Palestinian violence to this Arab population explosion - radicalizing it and melding in the heads of young Arabs and Muslims the notion that the biggest threat to their future is J.I.A. - "Jews, Israel and America." Israel's withdrawal is not a cure-all for this. Israel will still be despised. But if it withdraws to an internationally recognized border, it will have the moral high ground, the strategic high ground and the demographic high ground to protect itself. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon, the Hezbollah militia, on the other side, went on hating Israel and harassing the border - but it never tried to launch an invasion. Why? Hezbollah knew it would have no legitimacy - in the world or in Lebanon - for breaching that U.N.-approved border. And if it tried, Israel would be able to use its full military weight to retaliate. Demographically speaking, if Israel does not relinquish the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians will soon outnumber the Jews and Israel will become either an apartheid state or a non-Jewish state. Moreover, an Israeli withdrawal will strip the worst Arab leaders of an excuse not to reform, it will create more space for the best Arab leaders to move forward and it will give Palestinians something to protect. In sum, Israel should withdraw from the territories, not because it is weak, but because it must remain strong; not because Israel is wrong, but because Zionism is a just cause that the occupation is undermining; not because the Arabs would warmly embrace a smaller Israel, but because a smaller Israel, in internationally recognized boundaries, will be much more defensible; not because it will eliminate Islamic or European anti-Semitism, but because it will reduce it by reducing the daily friction; not because it would mean giving into an American whim, but because nothing would strengthen America's influence in the Muslim world, help win the war of ideas and therefore better protect Israel than this. The Bush team rightly speaks of bringing justice to Iraq. It rightly denounces Palestinian suicide madness. But it says nothing about the injustice of the Israeli land grab in the West Bank. The Bush team destroyed the Iraqi regime in three weeks and has not persuaded Israel to give up one settlement in three years. To think America can practice that sort of hypocrisy and win the war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world is a truly dangerous fantasy. January 22, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 5 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN od bless the Democratic Party's primary voters in Iowa. They may have rescued our chances of succeeding in Iraq and even winning the war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world. Go Hawkeyes! How so? Well, it seems to me that Iowa Democrats, in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies. "It was a good night for the [Tony] Blair Democrats in Iowa," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. By "Blair Democrats," Mr. Marshall was referring to those Democrats who voted for the Iraq war, and conveyed "a toughness and resolve to face down America's enemies," but who believe the Bush team has mismanaged the project. This is so important because there has been no credible opposition to the Bush foreign policy since the Iraq war. Democrats have been intimidated either by Mr. Bush or by Mr. Dean. Mr. Bush's lightning victory in Iraq intimidated those who favored the war but had reservations about the Bush approach. And then, when things started to go sour in Iraq, Mr. Dean's outspoken opposition to the war - and the eager reception it received from some Democratic activists - got those Democrats who did vote for the war tied into pretzels, trying to simultaneously justify their war vote and distance themselves from it. Without a serious Democratic critique of the war - and I define "serious" as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team's - Mr. Bush has gotten away with being sloppy and unprepared for postwar Iraq. My hope is that Iowa will embolden the Blair Democrats to shuck off their intimidation, by Mr. Bush and Mr. Dean, and press their case. It is the only way to build a national consensus for what's going to be a long cold-war-like struggle to strengthen the forces of moderation and weaken the forces of violent intolerance within the Arab-Muslim world - which is what the real war on terrorism is about. To be successful, Democrats will need a candidate who understands three things (which Messrs. Kerry, Lieberman, Clark and Edwards do): First, this notion, put forward by Mr. Dean and Al Gore, that the war in Iraq has diverted us from the real war on "terrorists" is just wrong. There is no war on "terrorism" that does not address the misgovernance and pervasive sense of humiliation in the Muslim world. Sure, Al Qaeda and Saddam pose different threats, Mr. Marshall notes, "but they emerge from the same pathology of widespread repression, economic stagnation and fear of cultural decline." Building a decent Iraq is very much part of the war on terrorism. Second, sometimes smashing someone in the face is necessary to signal others that they will be held accountable for the intolerance they incubate. Removing the Taliban and Saddam sent that message to every government in the area. Third, the Iraq war may have created more hatred of the U.S., but it has also triggered a hugely important dialogue among Arabs and Muslims about the necessity of reform. A serious Democratic candidate, I hope, will force the Bush team to accept the fact that it has failed to create a stable political transition in Iraq and must urgently change course in two ways: (1) It can't succeed in Iraq without forging a rapprochement with Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, they will ensure that we fail. If Iraq works, that will create its own reform pressures around the region. (2) The Bush team has to scrap the complicated caucus system it has devised for choosing an interim Iraqi government. It won't work. The Shiites' demand, though, for immediate elections also won't work. The U.S. should beg the U.N. to find an Afghan-style solution for Iraq: expand the Governing Council from 25 to 75 people, bring in all strands and make it the interim government - in return for the U.S. dropping its approach and the Shiites dropping theirs. It is the only way out of this impasse - the only way to create a decent Iraq that can help us win the war of ideas in the region. Democrats haven't been able to hold the Bush team accountable because their party couldn't offer a credible alternative. Well, here's hoping that the credible Democratic opposition was just reborn, re-energized and "de-intimidated" by the people of Iowa. Lord knows we need it. January 25, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST War of Ideas, Part 6 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN DAVOS, Switzerland For the past few weeks I've tried to lay out the tactics we in the West can adopt to strengthen the moderates in the Arab-Muslim world to fight the war of ideas against the forces of intolerance within their civilization - which is where the real war on terrorism will either be won or lost. But if there is one thing I've learned in examining this issue it's this: ideas don't just spread on their own. Ideas spread in a context. So often, since 9/11, people have remarked to me: "Wow, Islam, that's a really angry religion." I disagree. I do agree, though, that there are a lot of young Muslims who are angry, because they live in some of the most repressive societies, with the fewest opportunities for women and youth, and with some of the highest unemployment. Bad contexts create an environment where humiliation - and the anger, bad ideas and violence that flow from it - are rife. In short, it is impossible for us to talk about winning the war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world without talking about the most basic thing that gives people dignity and hope: A job. "For a long time now, I've felt that what we're really facing is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash of generations," argued David Rothkopf, a former acting U.S. under secretary of commerce. "You have an aging developed world, particularly Europe, that is trying to protect its jobs, and you have a young, job-seeking, job-needing emerging world, particularly the Muslim world, that will go anywhere and do anything to either seize the job opportunities or express their frustration with not having opportunities." Just read the numbers and weep: of the 90 million Arab youth today (between the ages of 15 and 24), 14 million are unemployed, many of them among the 15 to 20 million Muslims now living in Europe. "There's not enough jobs and not enough hope," Jordan's King Abdullah told the Davos economic forum. According to the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, between 1980 and 1999 the nine leading Arab economies registered 370 patents (in the U.S.) for new inventions. Patents are a good measure of a society's education quality, entrepreneurship, rule of law and innovation. During that same 20-year period, South Korea alone registered 16,328 patents for inventions. You don't run into a lot of South Koreans who want to be martyrs. I was at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the U.S. and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The context - infrastructure, productivity, education - just isn't there yet. So what to do? A lot of help can and should come from Europe. Although America is often the target, Europe has been the real factory of Arab-Muslim rage. Europe has done an extremely poor job of integrating and employing its growing Muslim minorities, many of which have a deep feeling of alienation. And Europe has done a very poor job of investing in North Africa and the Middle East - its natural backyard. America is far from perfect in this regard, but by forging the Nafta free trade agreement with Mexico, the U.S. helped create a political and economic context there that not only spurred jobs and the modernization of Mexico, but created the environment for its democratization. Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: "I don't think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent." It was in that optimistic environment that Mexico had its first democratic transition from the ruling party to the opposition. So if you take anything away from this series, I hope it's this: The war of ideas among Arabs and Muslims can only be fought and won by their own forces of moderation, and those forces can only emerge from a growing middle class with a sense of dignity and hope for the future. Young people who grow up in a context of real economic opportunity, basic rule of law and the right to speak and write what they please don't usually want to blow up the world. They want to be part of it. |