Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star
November 14, 2005

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, is facing charges in connection with the leak of a CIA officer’s identity and has become a popular target of Americans scared by the human, moral and economic toll of the Iraq war. Valerie Plame’s identity was leaked to the press after her husband, Joseph Wilson, had accused the Bush administration of distorting intelligence about the alleged purchase by Iraq of uranium yellowcake from Niger to rally public support for the Iraq war. Many Americans have developed an interest in the Libby case, hoping it will expose other administration officials who may have misused intelligence to bluff them into supporting the Iraq war.

It may. But I’m not too hot about this show. Obsession with the use of intelligence may continue to divert Americans’ attention from the roots of the war in Iraq and against the terrorists.

The Iraq tragedy and America’s so-called “global war on terror” is rooted in a broader confrontation between an American and an Islamist ideological school, which has been brewing since the end of the cold war. The American ideologues – whose views are shared widely across the political and intellectual spectrum – believed the United States “defeated” the Soviet Union. In contrast, many Islamists thought that Islam had precipitated the unraveling of the Soviet state.

The contention has degenerated into warfare and terrorism mainly because each side drew further conclusions from its reasoning. The Americans persuaded themselves that their victory over U.S.S.R. had proved that their political and economic models were mankind’s ultimate destiny. The neoconservatives, the most forceful advocates of this thesis, went a step further. They declared that it should be America’s mission to spread its version of democracy to non-democratic societies, especially those in the Muslim Middle East.

The Islamists reached an opposite conclusion. They said that because Islam had rolled back communism in Afghanistan, it could now throw out America’s bases, troops and “client” governments from Muslim lands.

I had a preview of the Iraq war during a 1995 research stint in Jordan. An American diplomat there explained to me how the U.S. could help a “democratic Iraq [become] an Arab Germany.” He hinted that some Americans were working on it. Later I would learn that neocon Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David and Meyrav Wurmser, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Lewis Libby and non-neocons such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Zalmay Khalilzad wanted regime change in Baghdad. They maintained that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would trigger the democratization of Arab Muslim societies. That would, they said, take care of anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism, because democracy defuses grievances by offering the aggrieved the freedom to express them in public. The neocons, the most zealous champions of this argument, usually talked about democratizing resourceful Muslim countries and those hostile to the U.S. and Israel. They pushed, specifically, for the democratization of Iraq, which fit both descriptions.

Among the Islamist ideologues who dismissed the America-has-defeated-the Soviets claim is Khurshid Ahmed, vice president of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami party. The former economics professor maintained that the Soviet system “collapsed of its own weight; it didn’t work” as an economic or political model. The catalyst for its unraveling, he told me at his Islamabad home in August 1989, was the Soviets’ defeat in the battlefields of Afghanistan at the hands of Muslim mujahideen. The Americans never challenged the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe or elsewhere and “never fired a shot at the Communists.”

Other Islamists I interviewed in the Middle East said the American arms buildup against communism was “a waste” as the U.S. was defeated by an impoverished communist North Vietnam.

Democratic governance is one of the West’s abiding lessons for mankind, although America’s contribution to the demise of communism and its ability to remake Muslim societies in its image are debatable. The significant lesson from Iraq is that neither military power nor democracy can douse terrorism. America needs a new anti-terror strategy that intelligence alone can’t produce. Intelligence is like the trap that zaps mosquitoes but can’t do anything about the swamp that breeds them. That swamp is made up of Muslim resentment caused by American policy. America’s political and intellectual establishments don’t like to talk about those grievances and hence are quick to blame Islam and Muslim backwardness for anti-American terrorism.

But ignoring those grievances wouldn’t make them – or terrorism – go away. It’s time America faces up to the fact that Muslims resent its bases and troops in their lands. Americans need to realize that democratic rhetoric can’t diminish Muslim anger over American support for repressive Muslim monarchies and dictatorships from Pakistan to Morocco, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the torture and humiliation of Muslims in known and unknown American jails and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Muslim countries. America’s “war on terror” won’t go anywhere as long as it ignores the swamp of Muslim rage.

Those of us who had warned the Bush administration that the Iraq invasion would undermine U.S. interests by inflaming Arabs and Muslims were told not to worry because “the Arab street doesn’t rise.” Iraq’s other lesson is that the Arab street has risen and is unlikely to level off soon. This underscores further the urgency of a realistic foreign-policy strategy for Muslim societies. It would be a shame if the Libby trial and brouhaha over the use of intelligence should detract Americans from its pursuit.