Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 25, 2004
WASHINGTON — In calling for a sweeping overhaul of American diplomacy in
the Middle East, the Sept. 11 commission last week joined a growing consensus
that the United States had not done enough to win over the world's huge Muslim
population.
The bipartisan panel urged in its final report that the
government engage more deeply in a "struggle of ideas" against Islamic
radicalism and develop a preventive strategy that was at least as political as
it was military.
"We need short-term action on a long-term strategy, one
that invigorates our foreign policy with the attention that the president and
Congress have given to the military and intelligence parts of the conflict
against Islamic terrorism," the report said.
The fight against terrorism
needs to be "balanced," involving "diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law
enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy and homeland
defense," the report said.
The commission also argued that the
administration must ste p up its public diplomacy to stanch the spread of
anti-Americanism, and should challenge authoritarian regimes that had been
allies to carry out democratic reforms. "We should offer an example of moral
leadership in the world," it declared.
The report's language echoed
several other official and unofficial diagnoses of the problem. A report issued
last fall by a State Department panel headed by Edward P. Djerejian, an ex-aide
to former Secretary of State James A. Baker, found that the United States was
failing to promote America or its values.
In the nearly three years
since the Sept. 11 attacks, a broad agreement has developed that the United
States needs to do more to advance its values — and to convince an
increasingly fractious Middle East that Americans really are the good guys they
believe themselves to be. There is far less agreement on how well the Bush
administration has been handling this job, and how these principles of "soft
power" can be reconciled with the other goals of su ppressing Islamic
militants.
The theme has been struck by Republicans as well as
Democrats, and by administration officials in moments of candor. The
commission's report cites a 2003 memo in which Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld fretted that the United States needed a long-range strategy for
preventing the growth of a new generation of young Islamic militants. The
report said Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had worried aloud in
an interview with the commission that Americans had been exporting "our fears
and our anger, not our vision of opportunity and hope."
The issuance of
the report set off an immediate debate over the administration's commitment to
using diplomacy, aid and other nonmilitary tools to head off
anti-Americanism.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor,
insisted that though the commission had called on the administration to do far
more, its recommendations were perfectly in keeping with White House efforts.
"The hearts-and-minds issues are ba ck, maybe in an even more real way than they
were in the Cold War," she said.
Rice contended that Bush had pushed
harder for democratization in the Arab world than any president since World War
II.
Other analysts, however, saw the commission's recommendations as a
challenge to the administration's policy.
Edward S. Walker Jr.,
president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, said that the
administration "hasn't been very energetic on the question of Islam, and the
administration is vulnerable on it." The administration "has always walked away
from it, partly because of the divisions between the Pentagon and the State
Department that left the State Department isolated," said Walker, a former
assistant secretary of State for the Middle East.
Peter W. Singer, in
charge of the Brookings Institution's project on U.S. policy toward the Islamic
world, said the commission was "not the first group calling for these kinds of
sensible recommendations. But we just don't see them execu ted yet by the
administration…. I'm afraid these again will fall on deaf ears."
Singer said that although the administration had given rhetorical support to
democratization and reform in the region, it had devoted few resources for the
task. He noted that the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative
had a first-year budget of $27 million for a region of 300 million people.
(Funding rose to $130 million in the second fiscal year, 2004.) Yet even if the
administration devotes huge amounts of money to the effort over many years, it
may be difficult to reconcile the goal of fostering reform with other
values.
Nathan J. Brown, director of Middle East studies at the Elliott
School of International Affairs at George Washington University, said the
panel's recommendations would be difficult for policy makers because they failed
to explain which of many conflicting goals should have priority.
For
example, Brown said, the panel urged U.S. officials to push for reform and
challe nge less democratic regimes. Yet it praised U.S. support for Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup, he said.
Likewise, the panel called for a free media in the Middle East, yet it condemned
Al Jazeera satellite television, the kind of channel that would probably become
widespread if television in the region were deregulated.
Brown said the
recommendations reflected the growing consensus that "it is time for us to
rethink the principles that have guided us for the last half century…. But
they pulled in different directions, and they didn't help policymakers to
understand how to prioritize them."
And he said that they dodged one of
the most important — and sensitive — questions: whether the war in
Iraq would help reduce terrorism or cause it to grow.
The commission
wrote that polling had shown anti-Americanism, a longtime fact of life in the
Islamic world, had soared since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in
the aftermath of Sept. 11.
The report cited polling data indicating
that in Egypt, which had received substantial U.S. aid, 15% of the public had a
positive view of the U.S. in 2002.
Fresh polling shows that in the
aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and continuing media coverage of Iraqi
casualties, the numbers have worsened considerably. Recent polling by Zogby
International found that the share of Egyptians who disapprove of the United
States government increased from 76% in 2002 to 98%, while sympathy for Al Qaeda
has risen.
The commission's report said militants built support by
playing on grievances widely felt throughout the Islamic world — "against
the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, policies perceived as anti-Arab
and anti-Muslim, and support of Israel."
The commission also
recommended ways the administration should treat some individual Islamic
countries.
The report called for new candor in dealing with Saudi
Arabia. "The problems in the U.S.-Saudi r elationship must be confronted
openly," so that the relationship "is about more than oil," it said. It called
the Saudis a "problematic ally in combating Islamic terrorism."
It
praised the administration and Congress for their support of Afghanistan and
called for a "long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan."
Although the report criticized Pakistan's government for past support of the
Taliban, it said Musharraf's government nonetheless "represents the best hope
for stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan."