U.S. losing the war of ideas in Muslim world

Arnab Neil Sengupta The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

Two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American pundits and policymakers are still asking: Why do they hate us?

But what was an area of almost total darkness has since been illuminated by a torrent of in-depth studies, opinion polls and, of late, bad news from Iraq.

Perhaps Americans should beseech God, as the old school prayer advises, to grant them the serenity to accept the things they cannot change.

True, this would be too fatalistic an attitude for most United States foreign-policy analysts. But do their own diagnoses and panaceas stand up to scrutiny?

In an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Williams College professor Marc Lynch says: "Arab public opinion is a more complex phenomenon than conventional notions of a cynical elite and a passionate, nationalistic 'Arab street' suggest." Arabs and Muslims are "angered at being treated like children" and "feel the sting of contempt in being objects of manipulation".

In a similar vein, the Independent Task Force on Public Diplomacy, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, commented that "at the root of the negative attitudes is Americans" perceived lack of empathy towards the pain, hardship and tragic plight of peoples throughout the developing world. Their pervasive sense of despair and hopelessness -- in the face of America's unprecedented affluence =-- also leads to envy and a sense of victimhood, often accompanied by anger and mistrust".

These exercises in introspection, though timely and admirable, suffer from at least three flaws. For one, they take no notice of moral relativism. Consider the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts on the one hand and the birth of independent East Timor on the other.

Westerners regard their intervention in these crises as a triumph of morality over realpolitik. Religion played no part in triggering their responses, or else they wouldn't have gone to the aid of Muslims on two occasions and Christians on just one.

In the Middle East, however, the general impression is different: All three were essentially conflicts between civilizations in which Muslims came out losers because of the Western powers' religious bias.

In the Balkans, the transatlantic allies did not act quickly enough to stop the ethnic cleansing because the victims were mainly Muslims who, unlike Kuwaitis, did not sit atop fabulous oil riches.

By contrast, Indonesia's decision to hold a United Nations- organized referendum in predominantly Roman Catholic East Timor is cited by West Asian columnists as an example of a powerless Muslim country forced to obey the West's diktat.

Since the declaration of U.S. President George W. Bush's war on terrorism in 2001, this perception gap has grown. So has the "hatred" he famously referred to in his Sept. 2001 speech to Congress.

A second blind spot of American foreign policy scholars concerns the media. The detention of Tayseer Alouni, Al-Jazeera's star correspondent facing charges in Spain of being an active member of al-Qaeda, may be an extreme case, but it illustrates the problems of credibility facing the new Arab media.

In exhorting U.S. administration officials to engage the region's powerful Fourth Estate, they assume the latter meets Western standards on fairness and accuracy. Yet a cursory comparison of the political terminologies and value systems of the Arab and Western media shows the two schools of journalism have evolved very differently.

Some fundamentals of journalism are: Never editorialize. Report the facts dispassionately. Use a range of sources so several viewpoints are balanced against each other.

These rules would sound unfamiliar in many Middle East newsrooms. Even if journalists wished to abide by them, the fact that they are discouraged from getting the "other side" in any Arab-Israeli conflict-related story, diminishes the scope for fair reporting. Efforts by Arab satellite TV channels to get alternative viewpoints, especially of the American kind, amount to no more than token gestures.

None of this means growing anti-Americanism in the Middle East and the Islamic world is unrelated to the Bush administration's fondness for military interventions and coercive diplomacy.

Prof. Lynch says in his Foreign Affairs essay that "a more honest and less overbearing diplomacy by the Bush administration might have produced greater international support for a campaign against Saddam Hussein, even in the Arab world".

Others suggest a more even-handed approach to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and a less unilateralist method of handling Iraq would have done wonders for America's image in the Arab and Muslim world.

But past experience provides a useful reality check. Under president Bill Clinton, when Washington was unquestionably more internationalist and the "war on terror" was not even a gleam in Bush's eye, America's standing with the Arab publics was anything but high. Clinton's decision to fire off a few cruise missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan in response to the August 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa was seen as a diversionary tactic of a politically embattled president.

At the same time, his all-out bid to break the Oslo deadlock by bringing together Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in a series of peace conferences, fairly or unfairly, earned him the label of "the most pro-Israeli U.S. president in living memory".

In fact, Clinton's reputation took such a beating among even Arab and Muslim Americans that it galvanized the two communities into voting en masse against his vice-president, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore, in the 2000 election. Moral for Bush and his successors? Better safe than sorry.

Against this backdrop of deep-seated mistrust, the rift between the Arab "street" and American public opinion is likely to remain, at least in the medium term, unbridgeable.

The religious and cultural divide is so huge, the political narratives are so divergent and the fundamentals of journalism as practiced in the U.S. and Middle East so dissimilar, to think robust public diplomacy and cross-cultural dialogue will enable Americans to win the war of ideas, is naive if not fanciful.

Beseeching God to grant one the serenity to accept the things that one cannot change does not seem so fatalistic after all.