Forswearing military responses is what we've generally been doing for decades. 9/11 was preceded by a couple decades of attacks against America and Americans. And we didn't respond to most of those attacks with "cruise missiles and armored divisions" and so on. I don't know if it's accurate to say a concern for PR in the Arab world is the only reason for that. But I think it's been part of it.
The question here is this: did we “forswear” a military response in order to appease, or because we lacked the will needed for a military response, or because we recognized that a military response was not likely to be effective against this particular threat?
Our advertising industry is great at selling products and services. But our foreign relations are run by the government. Hard to see anything run by the government being as effective. Maybe we need to recruit more foreign service and government officials from Madison Avenue(?).
Freedom and prosperity sell themselves, given half a chance. We just have to give them half a chance.
OBL was a billionaires son, had vacationed England and Sweden in his youth, and partied in Lebanon as a young man. Zawahiri was an affluent Egyptian doctor. M. Atta had an advanced degree from a German university…These folks had long had at their fingers every thing the west has to offer and chose to give up their lives just to mount a symbolic attack against America.
The idea is not to turn a bin Laden or an Atta into nice guys by converting them to Western liberal materialism. These guys are beyond conversion; they are psychotic vermin and all we can do with them is hunt them down and exterminate them. The idea is to pull the rug out from under the vermin by changing the perspective of the broader society that they rely on for support.
I'm not so sure selling western products is the same thing as winning hearts and minds. Eating McDonalds and buying modern electrical and communications gear doesn't mean one buys into western ideas like equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance, equality under the law, free speech, free markets, democracy, and secular rationalism. How do we sell those things? I don't think they put them in the bag with the Big Macs.
Selling Western products is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Ultimately, the product we are trying to sell is an idea: the idea that people can have better lives, lives that will better satisfy both their material and non-material aspirations, if they will abandon the politics of hate and join the rest of the world. Big Macs and Britney are just the sharp end of the hook. Hooking the fish doesn’t guarantee that it ends up in the boat, but it’s a good place to start.
My main point with all this is that in this conflict time and history are on our side, as they were with the fight against Communism. Our society is to a large extent free, progressive, productive, innovative. Theirs is medieval, repressive, miserable, grotesquely inefficient, economically backward. Their people have every reason to be restive and discontented, and every reason to turn this discontent against their leaders, who are our enemies. We should not fear the appearance of inaction, because calm works to our advantage, not theirs. Every year of peace makes them weaker and us stronger. These phenomena do not in themselves assure victory, but if we recognize and exploit them victory can come at a lower cost. |
