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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (3231)	8/19/2003 12:36:32 PM
From: tsigprofit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Howard Dean - and a few others might. Whoever wins the primary - needs to tell it like it is, and I think they can win next year.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (3231)	8/20/2003 4:08:33 AM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 20773

CAPITAL JOURNAL By GERALD F. SEIB Iraq Mess Is Mere Symptom Of a Broader War of Ideas Amid Tuesday's television pictures of smoke rising from the bombed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, it would be easy to conclude that the most important foreign-policy question facing the U.S. is how to pacify that nation. It isn't. The mess in Iraq and the broader war against Islamist terrorism are symptoms of the true mega-issue: Can the West and the Islamic world learn to exist in harmony? Americans shouldn't delude themselves. The battle of ideas between the West and radical Islam figures to dominate global politics for the next decade, much as the ideological battle against fascism dominated the 1930s and the struggle against communism dominated the decades that followed. The U.S. isn't winning this new conflict. In fact, with things sliding backward, the danger is that Iraq, the country where the Bush administration had hoped to build an American-style democracy that could serve as a kind of bridge between the U.S. and the Islamic world, will serve only to widen the chasm. U.S. officials suspect radical Islamic forces may have had a hand in the recent wave of attacks there, including Tuesday's. Whether that is true or not, such forces are surely using those attacks to their benefit. They will continue to argue in the Islamic street that the U.S. is incurring such wrath because it is an illegitimate occupying force in the Islamic world, whose presence inevitably brings chaos and destruction. The goals of Islamic militants are clear: Roll back that U.S. presence, eradicate governments friendly to the U.S. and install Islamic rule. To the extent that militant Islamic forces can latch on to nationalist movements -- unhappy Palestinians in the occupied territories, for example, or Baathist elements in Iraq -- and turn their fights into an Islamic cause, they will, as graphically illustrated by a suicide bombing Tuesday in Israel for which two radical Islamic groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility. The problem isn't simply that this trend can imperil U.S. access to Middle East oil or inhibit America's ability to protect its interests in Asia, though it certainly can do that. The deeper problem is that it threatens to squash America's friends in the region and hijack the politics of an entire swath of the globe, where many citizens, though devoted Muslims, don't share the radical Islamic agenda. In fact, many of them actually value Western political ideas. Interviews by the World Values Survey, an effort to canvas global opinions that is overseen at the University of Michigan, show that popular support for democracy and democratic ideals in the Islamic world is essentially as strong as in the West. The disconnect lies not in disdain for Western political values, but distaste for Western cultural values. Yet many radical Islamic figures want people in the Muslim world -- and the West, for that matter -- to think that the political systems of Islam and the West are incompatible. To argue that is to ignore genuine desires for democracy and freedom in the Islamic world, but it is an argument that is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If radical forces achieve power by proclaiming Islam's views and Western values are incompatible, there will, in fact, be no bridging of the gap. What to do about all this? The Bush administration may have done a fine job handling the military response to Islamic terror since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but it has done a lousy job of waging the underlying war of ideas. It has articulated its case for cultural coexistence badly and sporadically and has failed to appreciate the symbolic clout of the Palestinian cause throughout the Islamic world. What has been most neglected is an effective effort to explain America's values to the world's one billion Muslims. With any luck, that is about to change. Watch for two developments in coming weeks, both little noted so far outside the halls of the State Department, that could make a real difference. First, Margaret Tutwiler, lately the U.S. ambassador to Morocco and one of the savviest political communicators in the foreign-policy world, is expected to shortly become undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Second, sometime in October a group of experts, convened on order of Congress and led by former Ambassador Edward Djerejian, is expected to issue a report to her office on how to improve the way the U.S. communicates with the Islamic world. Since 9/11, the stakes are huge. The message from the U.S. has to be that, despite its backing of monarchical regimes in Saudi Arabia or even its one-time support for Saddam Hussein, it seeks neither to defend the status quo represented by corrupt Muslim regimes nor to become a military occupier, but to help Muslims find freedom and democracy within their own cultures. It will take time to sink in. But only if it does will the explosions stop. Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com