by Steven R. Corman

Yesterday the Washington Times released video excerpts of an interview with  Hussain Haqqani, Pakistani ambassador to the United States.  While the Times featured statements about coming FATA operations in its print story, I was intrigued by a couple of comments he made about U.S. performance in the war of ideas.

On one count, Haqqani faulted U.S. officials for not spending enough quality time with the foreign media, allowing the Bad Guys to fill the gap:

U.S. officials are not always available to people for briefings.  Like it’s more important for them to talk to the American media than it is to talk to the Arab media or the Persian language media or to Urdu language media.  And so, supporters of Osama bin Laden in the meantime are very active.  So basically, in psychological warfare, bin Laden has made more gains than he should have been allowed to make, and that is the reason why there is confusion.

On another count, he said that what might seem like small incidents here can add up to big stories back home:

Every time a significant, respectable Pakistani is humiliated at an American airport despite having a valid visa, the story doesn’t even make it in your papers but it’s the big story in Pakistan.  They say, alright, these American’s won’t even respect our diplomat, they won’t respect some significant political leader.

Again, he says the extremists exploit such stories for their own propaganda purposes.

I don’t know if it’s true that U.S. officials are not available enough to the foreign press, or whether airport security incidents make big stories in Pakistan “every time.”  But it at least seems plausible that when we think of the “diplomacy of deeds” we think too big, overlooking the impact of small things like foreign press interviews and U.S. airport encounters.

by Steven R. Corman

I remember arriving in Karlsruhe, Germany on March 17, 2003.  It was two days before the Iraq invasion.  I didn’t know the date certain of the invasion, of course, but I knew for certain it was coming.  I was quite worried (needlessly, as it turns out) about how I would be received by the Germans.  They, like the rest of “Old Europe,” were vehemently against the war.

So was I.  It was not because I am a peace-nick who thinks there can never be a good reason for military conflict.  On the contrary, one of those reasons had surfaced just a couple of years earlier.  We needed to go to Afghanistan to close down the al Qaeda operation that had developed there over the years.

Like many others I objected to Iraq because of the flimsy rationale that was provided for it, which even at that time was showing signs of wear.  But even more than that, I knew that we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan.  By going to Iraq we’d be taking our eye off the ball.

I had heated arguments about this with one of my best friends, a neocon.   The mood among such people at the time was that you were either with the President or against him.  If you didn’t support him on Iraq you were against him.  And if you were against him then you were a candy-ass, Old-Europe-loving, peace-marching leftie that didn’t deserve to be looked at, much less listened to.  There was simply no room for principled opposition.  It was Groupthink on a massive, national scale.

The Wages of (Iraq) War

That form of social pathology led to profoundly bad decision making, as it inevitably does.  Today, even after five or ten revisions in the official reasons why we went to Iraq and stayed there, nobody argues that it was a good idea in hindsight.  Former military commanders and White House officials, and now even the Army’s Combat Studies Institute, are falling all over themselves to document the strategic error/blunder/disaster that was and is the Iraq War.

There are the direct negatives:  The length of the engagement, the military and civilian deaths, and the cost.  But even worse is the opportunity it has given the Bad Guys to recover in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Just today, the New York Times published an extensive article documenting this.  In a chilling statement it says

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

It concludes with this dismal assessment of six years of our efforts there:

“The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,” said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation. “The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia.”

So because of the Iraq adventure, we have allowed our real enemy–the one who has attacked us on our own soil–to retreat, regroup, and plan to attack us again.  It’s hard to imagine a more grave strategic error.

But We’re Stuck

At dinner the other night, a friend who I hadn’t seen for years asked me if I favored getting out of Iraq.  You might think that, given the tone of the preceding critique, I might favor that plan. But alas, as a radical centrist my role is to be an equal-opportunity antagonist.  I told my friend that I want to see us out of there as badly as the next person, but it would be a hugh mistake to leave precipitously, before the government has firmly establish itself.

Doing so would play directly into the Bad Guys’ narrative.  This has been one of our biggest strategic communication shortcomings, and it started with going to Iraq in the first place.  At a recent conference I asked a Pakistani general why al Qaeda’s ideology is so persuasive to some people in his region.  He replied with a question:  “The extremists say that the United States is trying to conquer the Muslims and destroy the Umma. So what do you do?”  Answer:  Invade a Muslim country.  We have also played into the extremists’ narratives of humiliation with our treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

If we left Iraq prematurely, we’d be doing it yet again, and in a way that makes us look vulnerable to future attacks.  The Bad Guys think we simply don’t have the stomach for a sustained fight.  Their opinion is summed up nicely by al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri writing in 2005 in a treatise called The Emancipation of Mankind and Nations Under the Banner of the Koran:

I swear to God that we have exposed the secret of these American infidels.  Their soldiers are more cowardly than cowardice, and weaker than languor.  They depend on reconnaissance flights, remote shelling, and recruitment of mercenaries and thugs.  Other than that, there is no courage, perseverance, patience, or steadfastness.

The same matter is addressed by prominent extremist ideologue Abu Bakr Naji in his book The Management of Savagery:

Due to the nature of the psyche of the Taghuts and the psyche of their troops, they are not able to remain under pressure and intimidation for a long period of time. That is one of the reasons—but not all of the reasons – they do not successively and gradually exterminate the Islamic movement; rather, they resort to striking the movement (after) relatively long periods of time. Once that decision is made, a plan is put in place and the matter ends quickly because they know that they and their troops do not have the patience for a long battle, regardless of the extent of their numbers and size.

So, if we were to do anything to even imply that we are turing tail to run, we would validate this strong theme in extremist ideology.  They would be able to say to potential recruits:  “See?  We told you so.  If you will only join us and help increase the pressure, in good time they will completely collapse and we will be victorious.”

This is the real tragedy of the Iraq War.  Even though I regard it as the stupidest strategic move of my lifetime, maybe in U.S. history, there is no good way out.  We are stuck there, tying one hand behind our back.  Meanwhile, we are back to square one in Afghanistan because the roaches just scurried under a different cabinet while we were looking the other way.

by Steven R. Corman

As predicted in an earlier post,  Hoffman’s counter-tat to Sageman’s response to Hoffman’s panning of Sageman’s book has appeared at Foreign Affairs (below Sageman’s reply).  It contains little in the way of new information.

I’m a little surprised that Foreign Affairs published this.  Normally in the academic world the custom is that when a critique of an author’s work is published, s/he gets a rejoinder and that’s it.  It’s sort of an incentive for the critic to be careful.  By that standard Sageman’s reply should have been the end.  Now how are they going to conclude this?  Surely neither man will be content with the second-to-last word.  Pistols at 20 paces, perhaps?

by Steven R. Corman

On Monday, recently sworn-in Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Jim Glassman published an op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune.  Entitled “The Animosity Does Not Run Deep,” it interprets the latest Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Survey.

In a nutshell, he says that the survey is not all bad news.  Some metrics are not as bad as on the last survey, and the dislike is not uniform.  In general people like the U.S. even though they disagree with our policies.  Deep down, they understand that we’re a super-power that will set policy according to our own interests, as it should be.

John Brown of Georgetown University  likens Glassman to Vice President Cheney, who, when presented with numbers showing 2 out of 3 Americans said the Iraq War was not worth it, responded “So?”  Brown says Glassman “appears to be a representative of the Bush/Cheney ‘So?’ coterie as pertains to America’s place in the world.”  He acknowledges Glassman’s statements that we should listen to what foreigners have to say.

Glassman’s bottom line, however, is that no matter how negatively other countries view and react to US policy, the United States government should go about doing exactly what its leaders have set out to do. Moreover, he gives no hint that, as foreign policy is formulated, world public opinion should be taken into consideration. “Foreigners,” he proclaims, “recognize that the United States is the world’s most powerful nation and that ultimately we will do what is in our own national interest, as we should.” In other words, US might makes right, a view Mr. Glassman somehow believes is universally held by non-Americans.

Though I don’t read the essay as a big “so what?” as does Brown, I have a reservation about a seeming contradiction in Glassman’s analysis.   Regarding “where the animosity of foreigners comes from,”  he says they believe

that we don’t listen carefully to them, or act as a reliable partner, or take their views into account.  They want a more respectful hearning.

But, I would emphasize, they don’t just want a hearing.  The Bush administration has really been quite dutiful about giving respectful hearings.  Yet the impression is often that they are just “going through the motions,” checking off the listening box so they can carry on with their plans.  It’s not often clear that the hearings result in an impact on plans and actions, creating a perceived listen-do gap (an analogue of the well-known “say-do gap”).  I think this is what foreigners are really upset about.

This relates to another reason Glassman’s gives for foreign animosity, disagreement with our policies.  On this he says

Certainly, a knowledge of how foreigners will react plays a role in deciding how we pursue our national interest. But, in the end, global public opinion polls cannot determine the foreign policy of the United States.

Can we do a better job explaining and advancing our policies? Yes, indeed. Will those policies always and everywhere be embraced? Absolutely not.

The idea that we should consider “how foreigners will react” evokes an old linear model of communication that has long outlived its usefulness in the U.S. government.  The image is that policies are launched or broadcast into a population of foreigners, and it is our job to control how the policies are deployed to minimize the chances of negative effects.  If things go wrong it is because we did not manage the deployment of the policies skillfully enough.  The problem is not the policy per se, it’s the marketing of the policy to foreign audiences.

But this is neither acting as a reliable partner to the foreigners, nor taking their views (not their after the fact reactions) into account.  And by Glassman’s own account, this failure is where the animosity of foreigners comes from.  In other words, it appears that his framing of the policy-making process precludes the fixes that he says are needed for reducing the animosity.

Glassman’s overarching point, that the U.S. has to make policies in its own interests and not someone else’s, is absolutely true. In a recently published book, we have argued that that the U.S. should be more forthright about which interests it is willing to defend unilaterally, abandoning the unrealistic “partnership” language in the current U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication.  That he has taken a step in this direction is positive.

On the other hand, near absolute unilateralism is the current perception of U.S. policy among foreigners, if not the reality.  Glassman’s challenge is to find some middle ground between that and near absolute surrender of U.S. policy to foreign interests.  That will require some path by which the concerns of foreigners can be channeled into the policy formulation process, so the things we listen to will begin to have some visible impact on the things we do.

by Steven R. Corman

At a conference two and a half years ago I met Sami Hajjar. He was born in Lebanon, and has served in a number of diplomatic posts in the Middle East. Later he was on the faculty at the U.S. Army War College and a member of its Strategic Studies Institute. At the conference he told me his theory that a key to peace between Israel and its neighbors was a disputed region called Sheba’a Farms.

The area was captured by Israel in 1967 during the Three Day War. Israel has considered the territory to be part of Syria, though Lebanon claims it is part of their country. Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 did not include this area. For this reason Hezbollah believes Israel is still occupying Lebanon, and says it is engaging in guerrilla resistance against an invader, not terrorism, when it attacks Isreal.

According to Sami, this is the string which, if pulled, can unravel the entire knot of conflict between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. In a 2002 monograph, he says:

The Sheba’a issue is more than a legal question involving the right of sovereignty over the disputed area; it is the hook used by Lebanon and Syria to link the Lebanon-Israel track to the Syrian-Israel track in the Middle East peace process. It involves the larger question of a peace settlement to end the Israeli occupation of Lebanese and Syrian lands leading to a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Hizballah is the tactical instrument contributing to that end. Understanding the complexities of these relationships is critical to finding a resolution of what the United Statesand Israel regard as Hizballah’s terrorism.

Ambiguity about the borders between the three countries has given Syria leverage in peace negotiations with Israel, and it has resisted settlement of the border issues in the area for that reason. The border issue is quite complicated and is explained in detail in the monograph.

Sami argues that the fixing of the borders and the withdrawal of the Israelis would have a number of beneficial effects. First it would deny Hezbollah its main justification for continued attacks on Israel, and put pressure on the Lebanese government to reign them in as a regularized, unarmed political party. Second it would remove the last remaining territorial dispute between Israel and Lebanon. Third, because of this it would simplify negotiations between Syria and Israel by removing the “Lebanon card,” and allow those talks to focus on return of the Golan Heights.

When I first met Sami and heard this theory, he was very frustrated that nobody in the Bush administration would listen to his argument, which to me (an interested onlooker but non-expert in the Israel-Arab conflict) seemed pretty plausible. Now it appears that something has changed, probably owing to the Bush Administration’s 11th hour effort to make progress on Middle East peace.

Today ynet Israel News reports that the U.S. is backing an Israeli withdrawal from Sheba’a Farms:

Sources in Lebanon were quoted by Al-Hayat as saying that Israel’s possible withdrawal from the Shebaa Farms area, which was captured by Israel from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, was one of the focal points during the recent meetings US President George W. Bush held with German, Italian, British and French leaders while touring Europe.

The sources said Washington was more understanding of Lebanon’s position on the issue, which is supported by the Arab League, the European Union and UN chief Ban Ki-moon, and did not rule out the possibility that the US would press Israel to withdraw from the Shebaa Farms.

Also today, MEMRI quotes Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Al-Miqdad as saying the Sheba’a Farms is “completely Lebanese,” and indicating a willingness to work with Lebanon to fix the borders.

If Sami’s theory is right, this “significant turnaround in the United States’ position” (as Lebanese officials described it in the ynet article) could be a Hail Mary pass from the Bush administration with an actual chance of a last-second touchdown.

UPDATE:  Today (17 June 08) MEMRI reports that Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu Al-Gheit is behind the Sheba’a Farms initiative.

by Steven R. Corman

During my usual media grazing I ran across an article published yesterday in Aljazeera Magazine by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, in the “reviews” section. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be reviewing, but on the surface it has something to do with language and the word “islamofascism,” and I am on record as having serious concerns about use of that word.

At the same time I have heard complaints in the past about shoddy reporting and half-truths in al Jazeera. I roll on the floor laughing whenever I hear one of its hosts, Faysal al-Qassem, insisting on Syrian TV that the U.S. controls the Internet from one of its aircraft carriers and can disconnect any country instantly with the push of a button. So all and all, this article seemed like a good candidate for some fact checking.

Sepahpour-Ulrich begins by claiming that the neocons are engaged in a war-against-Islam:

Dominance and ownership of language enabled the neoconservatives to coin the term ‘Islamofascism’ in order to wage war against Iraq. Iran is their next target, while shamelessly and brutally the people of Palestine and Lebanon are being eradicated in the name of ‘democracy’.

There’s no denying that bad things are happening to people in Palestine and Lebanon, but eradication is not one of them. The Palestinian population of Israel is growing at such a rate that some are questioning whether the country will see it’s 100th birthday. And while the Israelis have killed plenty of Lebanese, the toll doesn’t come anywhere near the number killed by other Lebanese in that country’s civil war. Despite all this death it had a population growth rate of 1.19%, According to the CIA . This is eradication?

Next she says neoconservatism is “a Jewish phenomenon,” quoting Jacob Heilbrunn as a source. While there are undoubtedly Jewish neocons, that is hardly the whole story. A review of his book in Publisher’s Weekly says he lacks a grasp of the neoconservatives’ right-wing Christian elements and concludes that

Heilbrunn’s analysis lacks rigor concerning foreign policy assumptions and ideological and economic motives, thus unintentionally leaving his subjects more historically isolated than they really are.

Sepahpour-Ulrich goes on to detail how the Jewish think tanks have infiltrated virtually every aspect of the Free World, committing a multitude of sins. They have been responsible for the Bush war policy, for example.

Washington think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) became home to many influential neoconservatives such as Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle who came to join the AEI from the Jerusalem-based think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS). A 2003 study by the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy (IRMEP) indicates a correlation between the Bush war policy and the funding of these think tanks.

I was unable to find any 2003 report on IRMEP’s web site that talked about a correlation between Bush war policy and think tank funding. I was also unable to find out anything on the site about who or what is behind IMREP. One blogger claims that this “institute” is one guy named Grant Smith with a web site, a cell phone, a P.O. box, an ax, and a grinder.

The Jewish think tanks have also conspired with Rupert Murdoch, according to Sepahpour-Ulrich, to dominate the media. While there are some media outlets with a well known conservative bias, there are also media outlets with a well known liberal bias. It’s not possible to straightforwardly tie the biggest media monopolies–such as AOL/Time-Warner, Viacomm, and Bertelsmann–to neocon ideologies. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2005, Brian Montopoli questions all claims about certan ideologies (left or right) dominating the media:

That’s an untenable idea on several counts, not least of which is the fallacy of treating what has been erroneously dubbed “the mainstream media” as a monolithic entity with a single agenda instead of a diverse collection of organizations with their own interests. Then there’s the fact that in any rational accounting of the shortcomings of our currently beleaguered media, ideological bias falls pretty far down on the list. As we’ve noted before, if there’s an overriding bias that controls and corrupts news outlets, it’s a bias toward sensationalism and conflict at the expense of actual newsgathering–a bias that’s driven by pressures for profits and ratings, and one that rides roughshod over any given reporter’s personal ideology.

What have the neocons done with their media dominance? Covered up the “truth” about 9/11:

In that a new UN Human Rights Council assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is indicative that this group’s role is believed to be influencing U.S. policies, if not determining it (New York Sun).

Well, not exactly. It’s not a UN Human rights council who is making this call, but one of its members, Richard Falk. He is seems to have beliefs similar to those of the 9/11 Truth Movement, which claims the U.S. government (no doubt at the behest of the Jewish neocon think tanks) brought down the WTC towers with explosives. The same Sun article quoted by Sepahpour-Ulrich notes that Mr. Falk wrote a February 16, 1979 op-ed in the New York Times praising the Ayatollah Khomeini. He said “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” just months before Khomeini’s followers invaded the American Embassy in Teheran.

She goes on

In line with the neoconservative’s agenda, the mainstream media in the U.S. framed September 11 within the context of “Islamic terrorists.” …As religious extremism was emphasized as the motive for the terrorist plot, all other inquiries were terminated.

Only the mainstream media did not emphasize religious extremism as the cause at all, at least in the early going. A study I co-authored (published in this book) looked at the top words framing coverage of 9/11 in the 66 days following the attacks. The words Islam, Islamic, and Muslim are not part of that list. It is bin Laden and al Qaeda who are portrayed as being responsible for that attacks. They emphasized religious extremism as the motive for the terrorist plot. If this theme has since appeared in the media, then they, not the Jewish neocon think tanks, deserve the blame for it.

My review of Sepahpour-Ulrich’s essay leads me to three observations. First, the things it says are half true. There are neocons who see a war against Islam, believe that it is an inherently violent and evil religion, and have the word “isloamofascism” as their language-marker. They tend to be either conservative Jews or right-wing Christians and are staunch backers of the interests of Israel. Neoconservativeism does drive some prominent media sources (Fox News, for example), and it has heavily influenced the Bush administration, particularly its decision to go to war against Iraq, a Muslim country.

But second, the facts presented in this article are only half true. And it takes someone with an agenda to take such half truths and convert them into a conspiracy theory that says Jewish think tanks have seized the levers of U.S. power in order to pursue their evil plan to destroy the Muslim community. This argument would be amusing it if were not reproducing a key narrative of al Qaeda and related extremist groups. Why would someone like Sepahpour-Ulrich, who is described as

an Iranian-American studying at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is a member of World Association of International Studies society, Stanford

distort facts the way she has done here in order to support an extremist narrative? It is also pathetic that an outlet that aspires to be a serious media source would publish such a shoddy piece of journalism, apparently without simple fact checking.

Third, the half-true parts point to the strategic communication value of deeds and actions. While it takes someone with an extremist agenda to distort facts, some extreme facts are very helpful in giving the distortions the ring of truth. Those in the United States who support invading Muslim countries and who spout-off about “islamofascists” are also complicit in the production of distortions like the ones in this article.

by Steven R. Corman

Yesterday’s New York Times reported on a feud between Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman about whether al Qaeda represents a continuing threat as an organized force, or whether it has degenerated into a disorganized social movement. At the root of it is Hoffman’s scathing review of Sageman’s latest book entitled Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century. Sageman’s thesis is that al Qaeda’s days as an organized threat are largely behind it, and that today their main threat comes from scattered “bunches of guys” who become radicalized as part of a social movement.

In his review at Foreign Affairs, Hoffman says that while we should acknowledge threat posed by roll-your-own terrorist cells, it’s a mistake to assume al Qaeda’s operational days are over:

Al Qaeda is much like a shark, which must keep moving forward, no matter how slowly or incrementally, or die. Al Qaeda must constantly adapt and adjust to its enemies’ efforts to stymie its plans while simultaneously identifying new targets. The group’s capacity to survive is also a direct reflection of both its resilience and the continued resonance of its ideology.

In a tit to Hoffman’s tat, Sageman has just published his own Foreign Affairs essay in which he says “Hoffman portrays Leaderless Jihad as a simple-minded polemic and ignores the subtleties of its arguments.” He still sees the leadership as a threat that must be dealt with, but that the nature of the overall threat has evolved. He says that Hoffman’s position is

completely at odds with the evidence found in trial transcripts from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, not to mention what I have heard from law enforcement agencies around the world during my extensive consultations with them.

Rumor has it that Hoffman is preparing a counter-tat. But whilst we await that, a I offer a few observations.

First, I have been hearing Sageman’s argument from people involved in counter-terrorism since 2005, so there is no denying that there is less worry about organized leadership and more worry about the social movement than was the case right after the 9/11 attacks. It seems that both experts agree that both threats exist, but they differ about which is number one versus number two. At least one other expert I know of is betting on Hoffman’s formulation.

Second, this argument seems to be part of a trend. Just the other day I wrote about a similar disagreement between Peter Bergen and Michael Scheuer on a related issue, whether islamist ideologues are turning against al Qaeda. If there is this much disagreement among knowledgeable people about the “true” state of affairs, it probably mirrors similar uncertainty among those formulating and pursuing anti-terrorism policy and hints that our intelligence on the state and activity of the leadership leaves a lot to be desired.

Third, this makes me worry about some nagging contradictions in what the government has been saying recently about this issue. Just a year ago, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate said

Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.

As Hoffman pointed out in his review, DNI McConnell just echoed this conclusion February 2008. Yet just a couple of weeks ago CIA Director Michael Hayden claimed significant progress against al Qaeda. According to the Washington Post, he

now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In today’s Times , there is another story suggesting success against terrorist networks in Southeast Asia.

It’s pretty hard to reconcile the inconsistent pictures in these reports. I’m not sure what to make of them, but now that the Silly Season of Campaign 08 is fully upon us, I’ll be looking at any reports of sudden success in the war on terrorism with a very skeptical eye.

by Steven R. Corman

The latest entry in the war of language comes from Jim Guirard of the TrueSpeak Institute writing today at Small Wars Journal Blog. Guirard is one of the earliest and most persistent arguers against using the word “jihadi” to describe the Bad Guys, a position we here at COMOPS have also defended again, and again, and again, and again.

In today’s post, Guirard gives a nice catalog of proofs of al Qaeda apostasy, and re-iterates the importance of words in conflicts like this. But then, as if to ignore his own advice, Guirard pens a concluding section in which he defends (and chides the government for abandoning) two labels that are downright dysfunctional and one that I’ve come to seriously question in the last month.

First, he defends the “war on terrorism” as “fundamentally correct and unnecessarily controversial,” referring to several essays he has written on the subject. In one of these he contradicts himself by saying we should call it a war because

all of this country’s “Death to America” enemies are delighted to call it “war” — beginning with al Qaeda’s preposterous claim that it is a Holy War “Jihad” and continuing apace with all the “Illegal War” and “Bush’s War” and “Immoral War” condemnations which have long been voiced by the President’s cut-and-run detractors in this country, in Europe and elsewhere.

But just a few paragraphs later he quotes Senator Moynihan warning us of the dangers of semantic infiltration, “the process whereby we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality.” If they are so eager to call it war, aren’t we obliged to resist infiltration by calling it something else?

As we have argued, there are very good reasons for calling it something besides war that have nothing to do with the Bad Guys’ propaganda. I won’t rehash all the arguments here, but the most important is that calling it war it creates certain expectations–like an engagement of limited duration, a definitive end involving surrender of the enemy–that can’t be met, causing erosion of political support for the effort. The alternative is to call it crime. While some people seem to think this isn’t a macho enough label, it is certainly a lot better aligned with the nature of the conflict.

Second, Guirard defends the labels “islamist” and “islamism” as alternatives to jihad-based labels. I have a great deal of sympathy with this argument, and have taken to using these terms in my own writing recently. Guirard correctly says that these words denote a political/ideological (rather than religious) movement, and he asserts that they are

already widely used and well understood by much of the Muslim Community itself to correctly differentiate the “Irhabi Murderdom” (Terroristic Genocide) types and their mandate-for-murder ideology from those many civilized and peaceful Muslims to whom the honorable terms “Islam” and “Islamic” correctly apply.

I don’t know about the evidence for this claim, but I recently attended a conference on countering ideological support for terrorism that was attended by a number of Muslim military officers that has caused me to question my own thinking in favor of this language. They seemed unimpressed with subtle linguistic distinctions introduced by adding the postfix “ism” to Islam, and viewed any such language as an effort to tar the whole of Islam with the Bad Guys’ brush. This still leaves the question of what we should call them, and I join Guirard in questioning whether words like “radical extremists” and “violent extremists” do the job.

Guirard’s third argument is the most wrong-headed, in my view. Here he defends the application of labels like “fascist” and “islamo-fascist” to the Bad Guys:

Since the word “fascist” has come to be the codeword for brutal and unpardonable EVIL, al Qaeda and its murderous ilk are clearly “fascist” and jackboot Left-illiberal to the marrow of their pseudo-religious bones — and should not be exempted from being labeled as such, as long as this invective does not apply routinely and automatically to their professed, and avowedly “peaceful, compassionate and just” versions of Islam.

He regards “islamo-fascist” as striking just the right balance while reclaiming the implications of the “fascist” label as extra incentive for getting rid of the “evildoers.”

I’m not buying it. First, if the word fascist “has come to be the codeword for brutal and unpardonable EVIL” then this merely describes its connotation. As a matter of definition, it is most commonly taken to be a form of government that puts the interests of the state above the interests of its component individuals and groups. To apply the label to the Bad Guys helps legitimize them (in the same way as calling them “jihadis”) by implying that they are some kind of government. They are wanna-be fascists, if anything.

Second, Guirard quotes Wittgenstein on the importance of language. It that spirit we should recognize that “islamo-fascist” is a language marker of a particular group of conservative thinkers who openly argue that Islam is an inherently violent and/or evil religion. Guirard apparently does not agree with this group about Islam, yet by using their language he invokes their ideology, one that (understandably) antagonizes peaceful Muslims.

Finally, do we really need any extra incentive for riddance of these bastards? I don’t think so. In any case it’s not a good rationale for adopting unrealistic, inaccurate, and antagonistic language.

by Steven R. Corman

Jim Snyder has an interesting post at The Hill on efforts to reinvigorate international travel to the U.S. It cites statistics from the Travel Industry Association (TIA) suggesting that travel to the U.S. has declined by one-third over the last 15 years, having an impact on travel-related businesses like hotel chains and conventions. It’s a slide that even the Hughes/Disney production Portraits of America was helpless to reverse.

Now the travel industry is using the concept of “public diplomacy” to push for big congressional funding in the form of Travel Promotion Act. Says TIA President and CEO Roger Dow:

It’s no secret that people around the world don’t like us as much as they used to. All of our research shows when people come here, 74 percent are more likely to feel good about America and Americans. This is public diplomacy.

Snyder’s article puts the cost at $200 million. Curious how the money would be spent, I had a closer look at the Senate version of the bill. How silly of me to think that looking at a piece of legislation would make things clearer.

As near as I can tell, most of the money is destined to set up a nonprofit Corporation for Travel Promotion that would mainly administer something called the “travel promotion fund. ” It can borrow up to $10 million for this fund from the Treasury in 2008, to be paid back in 2009 with interest. Are you still with me? Then in years 2009 through 2012, the fund can obtain up to $100 million a year from fees collected from an electronic travel authorization system that DHS is supposed to set up, provided that the Corporation gives a 100% match (presumably collected from the travel industry). The bill also directs the DHS to set up said travel authorization system, but as far as I can tell it does not fund creation of that system.

So where does that leave us? I have no idea. It looks like this bill could actually cost $400 million, not including the cost of developing the travel authorization system that’s supposed to generate the fees to fund it. But being a neophyte bill-reader I’m willing to admit I could have gotten the figures wrong.

Whether the total is $200 million or $400 million, it’s instructive to compare it to the 2009 State Department Budget for Public Diplomacy. It’s asking for $395 million to, among other things, create 20 new public diplomacy positions and fund efforts designed to help counter terrorist ideology. Let us also remember that the State Department already performs some of the functions called for in the bill through the Bureau of Consular Affairs and an official web site called discoveramerica.com.

Amid budget cuts in U.S. international broadcasting and widespread agreement that American diplomacy is “chronically starved for money,”$200-$400 million to promote travel to the U.S. seems kind of over-the-top, even if it does come with an industry match. This is especially true when, to read TIA’s statistics a little diferently, 26% of those who come will not be “more likely feel good about America and Americans” after they’ve gone.

by Steven R. Corman

There has been a lot of buzz recently about dissent in the ranks of al Qaeda. Much of it has focused on a rejection of violence against civilians by Sayyid Imam al Sharif, a.k.a Dr. Fadl, issued from by fax from an Egyptian prison. Lawrence Wright has an article about it in the current issue of the New Yorker. Another analysis comes from Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank in the current issue of the New Republic. Both authors see this as part of a rising chorus of dissent in the Islamist community against the violent methods of al Qaeda, causing worried reactions from al Qaeda leaders.

Today the Diane Rehm Show on NPR hosted a panel discussion including Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Michael Scheuer, and Jarret Brachman discussing these developments, which I commend to COMOPS Journal readers. Highlights include Scheuer going against the grain, saying that no Muslims would be fooled by pronouncements issued from an Egyptian prison and that al Qaeda’s strategy against the West is proceeding according to plan. Bergen disagreed, giving examples of how cracks in The Base extend well beyond Egyptian jails.

Brachman made perhaps the most important point of the discussion (with which Gerges seemed to agree). Notwithstanding their own image problems, the extremists’ propaganda punch relies on damning the West with its own actions, showing how it fails to live up to its own values. I would add that we are also playing into the extremist narrative. At a recent conference I spoke to a Pakistani general, whose comments were telling. He said nobody in his part of the world cares about bin Laden anymore. So, I asked, what sustains the extremists? “The extremists say that the United States is trying to conquer the Muslims and destroy the Umma. So what do you do,” he asked. “Invade a Muslim country,” I said. And he smiled.

UPDATE:

Here is a post at Danger Room about Scheuer’s nay-saying, including a link to some comments he posted Thursday on a thread there.