The war agianst Islamist religious bigotry

Robert Satloff:

The resignation of Karen P. Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy gives President Bush an opportunity to fix one of the most glaring blunders in his administration's response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a failure to prioritize ideological warfare over public relations.

Today, most Americans believe that the United States is fighting three wars: in Iraq, in Afghanistan and against violent Islamist extremists around the world (i.e., "the war on terror"). But as the Sept. 11 commission pointed out, we are, more accurately, engaged in what can be considered a fourth war, against the spread of the ideology of radical Islamism. In this war, the battlefields are the many cities, towns and villages where extremists seek to impose their absolutist view of sharia-based rule. The stakes in this contest are no less consequential for U.S. interests than those in the other three wars -- perhaps greater.

In terms of the narrow "war on terror," there is considerable evidence that the terrorists are losing. Captured al-Qaeda documents paint a portrait of a movement in distress, fearing defeat. Al-Qaeda and its satellites have failed to overthrow local Muslim governments, galvanize popular support or make headway toward replacing the international order with one based on the collective action of the world's Muslims.

In the ideological battle, however, radical Islamists are doing well. They have taken advantage of the administration's "freedom agenda," and in Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, they have made substantial progress. Elsewhere, Islamists are expanding their influence in other ways, exploiting governmental weakness or failure in educational, financial and social welfare systems.

The U.S. government has a great stake in the outcome of this contest. But our government operates as though this war barely exists and has focused its energies on the wrong problem.

Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has fixated on dismal public opinion surveys in Muslim countries and viewed the core task for public diplomacy to be: "How do we fix foreigners' perceptions of the United States?" The result was that, despite persistent poor results in polls, Hughes succeeded in improving America's public relations capacity. This included creating media "rapid response" teams, energizing diplomats to engage with local journalists, and repairing the content and message of the "speaker abroad" programs.

But these tactical achievements cannot hide a stunning strategic failure. Because Hughes was the most senior government official responsible for the "battle of ideas," her principal task should have been to answer the question: How can the United States most effectively empower anti-radical Muslims around the world to combat the spread of Islamist extremism? After all, the "battle of ideas" is not a popularity contest about us; it is a battle for political power among Muslims, in which America's favorability rating is irrelevant.

Hughes clearly was attracted to polls as a metric of success. In a Sept. 17 Post op-ed, she twice referred to positive poll numbers as signs of progress in the fight against al-Qaeda. In so doing, she lost all right to claim that the ideological struggle is, as she sometimes said, "the work of a generation." Journalists who criticized Hughes for failing to improve America's poll numbers abroad were only judging her by the measurement she chose to extol America's successes.

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The greatest success we have had in the battle of ideas is attributable to al Qaeda's war against non combatants in Iraq. That has been the major factor in turning the Sunnis in Iraq against al Qaeda and has had a similar effect in other countries where the real metric is not the popularity of the US but in the change in attitude toward al Qaeda's main weapon--human bomb attacks. Those attacks are now in significant ill repute throughout the Muslim world. In fact they were a leading indicator that the war was turning against al Qaeda when the Democrats were ready to surrender to the al Qaeda strategy in Iraq.

Where I thought the Hughes effort was lacking was in countering the al Qaeda violence narrative in the media. This was largely a failure of the US media which went with the al Qaeda violence message without questioning the meme, instead they focused on our failure to stop al Qaeda's mass murder of non combatants instead of the wickedness of al Qaeda's war crimes which were never challenged. Al Qaeda's consistent violations of the Geneva Conventions were never a story. It was part of the media double standard on war crimes. Yet it was these war crimes tat eventually turned much of the Muslim world against this wicked ideology. I would have happened sooner had the media not been so biased against our effort.

What the media did not realize was that each of al Qaeda's human bomb attacks to murder non combatants were in fact media events design to get the very coverage the media was giving it. By going along with the violence meme the media was facilitating the enemy's strategy and encouraging the continuing mass murder. Counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen was one of the first to publicly notice this aspect of the enemy's strategy and when Gen. David Petraeus brought him to Baghdad to help with the surge he helped to change the narrative about the war.