WASHINGTON, 29 October — The US campaign in Afghanistan is in its third week of airstrikes, and Middle East experts are beginning to fear a backlash from our regional policies.
Yesterday’s papers held a surprising sampling of “red flags” from columnists and experts.
In an editorial entitled “Anti-Arab Advocates Risk US Interests,” Georgie Anne Geyer examines US risks in the Middle East:
Beyond the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, Geyer says, “a smaller war of interests, beliefs and realities is going on beneath the surface, which could endanger the final outcome of everything that has been accomplished since Sept. 11. So far, this parallel conflict is being contained by cool heads in the administration, but that could change at any time.”
She examines the “Get Iraq” campaign by “pro-Israeli hard-liners in the Pentagon such a Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle, but also from hard-line neoconservatives, and some journalists and congressmen.”
Geyer says this group, in diplomatic and political circles, is called the “Israel-firsters, meaning that they would always put Israeli policy, or even their perception of it, above anything else.”
This has lead to another campaign, Geyer notes, noticeably in think tanks and Congress, to a “bitter attack on both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which seeks to discredit both, partly to discount the idea that the Palestinian conflict plays a core role in terrorism against the United States, and also partly to diminish, or ruin, US relations with any Arab state.”
Geyer says US diplomats are “uniformly enraged by these campaigns.” One former ambassador, furious at the blind attacks against America’s allies in the Mideast, said: “It’s a very simple proposition. Now’s the chance for ‘us’ to get rid of all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East.”
Another diplomat said: “It’s the same old story, Israel simply can’t bear to see any Arab countries close to the United States.”
She then focuses on “Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon” who has “refused even to temper his attacks against the Palestinians, despite President Bush’s constant requests. Even many of his own coalition say that he wants to destroy the Palestinian Authority, to see the Palestinian radicals installed as the next ‘government,’ and then to work toward driving the Palestinians into Jordan.”
To ally the United States with Israel against its Mideast allies, says Geyer, “would be the worst kind of madness to isolate the United States in this difficult, poisonous struggle.”
Cal Thomas focuses on the general ignorance of America’s media in the Middle East: “Few in the media know the basics about Middle Eastern culture, politics and history, or Islam and its myriad teachings. Newspaper editors and television executives should require that reporters take a crash course on these topics, or hire people who already have the information and can present it fairly and accurately. ..”
Finally, Richard Holbrook, US permanent representative to the United Nations during the Clinton administration, writes on the public campaign war that, until now, Osama Bin Laden has been winning: “…Every expert on Islam, every analyst of what is happening the Muslim world, agrees that Osama Bin Laden has gained the initial advantage in this struggle by arguing that this is a war against Islam, rather than, as President Bush correctly says, a war against Islam.”
Holbrook says that part of Bin Laden’s success “lies in his shrewd mix of modern media technologies and medieval symbols: That high quality video tape from the desert is the best recent example. Another fact is his exploitation of the seething resentment of Arabs toward US support of Israel.”
“What should concern us most urgently is the apparent initial failure of our own message and the inadequacy of our messengers,” writes Holbrook. “If we fail to convince Muslims that this is not a war against Islam but a war against terrorism, if Bin Laden succeeds in defining the struggle on his own terms, then he will have succeeded in his goal.”
Holbrook then explains how to “fix this problem.”
“First, the message. President Bush did the right thing in visiting the Islamic Center in Washington and meeting with leading Muslims and Arab Americans right after Sept. 11. But since those powerful actions, things have gone downhill.”
Holbrook says Islamic experts have told him “that so far the American public information campaign is a confused mess. Examples abound: The failure to open a sustained public discussion with key Muslim intellectuals over how the Qur’an has been twisted by extremists into an endorsement of murder.
The failure to publicize the fact that hundreds of those killed in the World trade Center were Muslims.
The failure to prove to Muslim women that their quest for progress and improved lives would be set back centuries by Bin Laden and his ilk. The failure to find credible Arabic-speaking Muslims to speak the truth about Bin Laden…”
All of these are important “red flags” that the US government urgently needs to consider.
