Military

DATE=10/17/2001

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01002

TITLE=ON THE LINE: THE WAR OF IDEAS

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY -- 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Anncr: On the Line -- a discussion of United States policy and contemporary issues. This week, "The War of Ideas" Here is your host, David Aikman.

Host: Hello and Welcome to On the Line. America is waging the war against terrorism on several fronts. One of the most important is the information offensive. The U.S. believes it is essential to counter the hateful messages of Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taleban regime, who have tried to incite Muslims all over the world to violence in the wake of U.S. efforts to smash bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.

America's message to the Arab world is a simple one: the war against terrorism is not a war against Islam. In fact, American Muslims enjoy more freedom to practice their religion and spread their faith than Muslims of any other country in the world. But as U.S. officials have admitted, America obviously needs to do a better job of getting that message out. Inside Afghanistan, the U.S. is dropping leaflets to explain that the attacks are aimed at fighting terrorism, not the Afghan people. U.S. officials are giving interviews to the satellite television channel al- Jazeera, which had been giving free rein to the views of terrorists, including bin Laden. And the U.S. is beaming radio broadcasts to Afghanistan. Clearly, the battle to get the truth out is just beginning. How does America wage a successful war of ideas to counter a hostile propaganda based on lies and nourished by deliberate anger and hatred?

Joining me today to discuss the war of ideas and the campaign against terrorism are three experts. Khalid Duran is the author of Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews and editor of TransIslam, a journal of analysis and opinion on Islamic culture and politics. Dimon Liu, originally from China, is an independent human rights activist. And Martin Schram is a columnist with Scripps Howard news service. Welcome to the program.

Marty Schram, let me ask you this: Do you think as some people have said, including Representative Tom Lantos, that the U.S. is basically losing, at this point, the war of ideas?

Schram: I think the United States is failing to win the war of ideas, but is not losing at this point; it's just not winning. And I'm a little surprised at the inability of the administration to jump on this full-bore, in all ways, and really conduct the sort of orchestrated and concerted information campaign that I think they need to be doing. I fully praise them for dropping food as they did for the Afghan people, for the leaflets, and so on. But that's only a start of what I would suggest.

Host: Khalid Duran, what do you think the war of ideas is about?

Duran: I see it as a basic problem here that the American administration so far has failed to make a very important distinction. Coming from the world of Islam, what is most important for us today is the fact that we have an old religion, Islam, and we have a new political ideology called Islamism. The European press has learned that, in the last ten years, and the United States is only learning slowly, slowly. Now as long as that distinction is not being made, there will always be confusion and a hotchpotch. You will have President Bush receiving a whole bunch of Islamists, receiving them as representatives of the Muslim community in America, and in that way offending the Muslim community in America -- because from the viewpoint of the Muslims, those five million in America, that bunch of people, those Islamists, are impostors. They have no right to speak in our name; they have no mandate from the community. It's very offensive. And this has been going on for several years now. American policy has been run in a very incompetent way. And the same thing also over there in those countries. You see in Afghanistan the vast majority of people are against the Taleban regime. It's not only the Northern Alliance. As a matter of fact, the Northern Alliance are not even the best people to deal with. Some of them are real good guys, and I salute them. But then there are others also who actually belong [before The Hague international tribunal] as criminals of war.

Host: Before we get too detailed, Khalid Duran, could you explain for the benefit of our audience, what is the difference between Islam and Islamism?

Duran: Islam is an old religion. Fourteen hundred years it has always been there. There you have the whole panorama of different attitudes and beliefs. Some are just cultural Muslims. You even have some people who are maybe agnostics or atheists, but they still belong to or identify with this culture. You have the Sufis, the popular religion and so on, which is the majority anyway, almost everywhere. And you have the traditionalists, who are sometimes called the orthodox. That's a panorama of different attitudes. The Islamists, that's something totally different. That's actually fascism in the world of Islam -- the specific manifestation that fascism adopts everywhere and anywhere. Fascism in Italy was slightly different from that in Germany. In Spain it was again different from that in Italy. And in Chile it is different from that in Spain. But they have enough common factors to be one family in a sense. So, similarly, when fascism now in the world of Islam adopts an Islamic symbolism, Islamic terminology -- very similar to Spain, and in Spain we didn't say fascism, we had "Nacional Catholicismo," National Catholicism, you see. And in Chile, the type of people I got to know were publishing religious literature -- of course they would condemn the Pope as a Communist, and most of the literature would be against liberation theology and so on and so forth -- but a production of religious literature. Similarly our Islamists produce religious literature. They have a rhetoric that appears very religious. But their concern is power.

Host: Right. Well, Dimon Liu, let me ask you this. You come from a country which has been described in the past as totalitarian because of the government's control of information and education and ideas in general. How does a free society like the United States combat the ideas of fascism or a totalitarian version of Islam?

Liu: First, one must recognize that in unconventional warfare, which is the war that we are fighting now, winning or losing is not on the ground, but in the battle of ideas. This is the decisive battle. Now I'll just give you some experience of the United States fighting in Korea and in Vietnam. If you [consider] airplanes and warships, there is no way that anybody can surpass the United States. But in the Korean War, the United States was fought to a standstill. In the Vietnam War, the United States lost. Now this is not simply a loss of the United States; it is a loss for civilization, for the civilized world. And yes, like Martin, I am very disappointed in the administration for not being more competent in waging this war, not using our resources better, not aiming more clearly and more focused on the battle of ideas. Now we're dealing with a complex civilization. Islam is a venerable complex civilization, as China's was, as India's civilization. In any complex civilization, there exists extremism. There exist different strains of thought at the same time. Now, we've reappeared to some other idea, for instance Samuel Huntington [of Harvard University}.

Host: That's the argument about the clash of civilizations.

Liu: Exactly, the clash of civilizations. I don't know very much about Islam. I know quite a bit about Confucianism. Mr. Huntington does not know what he's talking about. To blend a great civilization as one way, you've lost the battle right there and then. To blend Islam as one way, you've lost the battle, without even fighting.

Host: So what we have to do, essentially, is to distinguish between that portion of Islam that Khalid Duran mentioned, Islamism -- to distinguish between that and the broader civilized concepts of the faith of Islam.

Liu: Exactly. This is the winning of the hearts and minds. You have to address the concerns of the people, not the concern of the extremists. And that is where the White House went wrong.

Schram: You know in part that's because the President started only lately, rather late in his thinking after the planes hit the World Trade Center, with the position that the Afghan people are our friends. The initial comment was: our war is not against them, it's against the terrorists. And he started with that; that was his initial construct. Well that's one set of thought. And then when you go from -- but eventually, he did come around to the position of saying, the Afghan people themselves are our friends, etc. My point is, the administration's thinking has been slow to evolve in exactly the sort of things that you're both talking about. I think they're kind of getting there, but it's not been their major priority, and there's been no major sense of purpose pushing them.

Host: Okay. I'd like to take a moment to remind our audience that this is On the Line. I'm David Aikman and we're speaking with columnist Martin Schramm, human rights activist Dimon Liu, and TransIslam editor Khalid Duran about the war of ideas.

Now, there have been wars of ideas in the past, and obviously during the Cold War you had a protracted struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union about notions of democracy, freedom, and so forth. What is different,

Khalid Duran, about this particular war of ideas in comparison, let us say, with the war of ideas in the Cold War period?

Duran: Well I don't see it actually as very different. There are a number of similarities; in a way it's actually a continuation also to some extent. You know, one thing that is extremely important here is to give people -- Muslim people in this case, because that's the present crisis -- a feeling of American reliability. They want to know the Americans are really meaning what they are saying at this moment, and not again tomorrow something else, and so on. You know, the example of Vietnam was mentioned, and I would also love to mention that, because I think it was -- Vietnam, I personally don't think that was a war of liberation; I think it was the north conquering the south in Vietnam. And then it became the terrible, in terms of human rights, one of the worst affairs in the world. So it was lost, the war in Vietnam, because people had lost faith in the United States. Many of those who would have preferred the United States to be there and continue as friends, but everybody started losing faith. Now, you see the Afghans again, they are now confronted with a terrible situation. The Americans are at the moment there, and they are trying to get hold of bin Laden -- and I think are concerned with a bunch of terrorists, but bin Laden primarily. For Afghans, that's also important, certainly, because bin Laden is the one who has committed some of the worst crimes in Afghanistan too, including the demolition of the Buddha statues. It was bin Laden, his Arabs, who instigated. . .

Host: Dimon Liu.

Liu: Because I'd like to make one difference. When we were waging the war during the Cold War, it was a battle of ideas. Now the difference when it was waging, the United States was helping the friends of freedom, like [Andrei] Sakharov, like [Poland's] Solidarity. Now, in the war currently, I don't see the United States helping the right side in the Muslims; I do not see the United States helping. . .

Schram: I agree, and that's mainly because it seems to me that the United States government and its leaders -- going from Bill Clinton and previously, now George Bush -- have not made it a priority to show you that. And the thinkers within the administration haven't been focused in that direction. Start with a very basic thing: I just went back this morning and reread Adlai Stevenson's presentations during the Cuban missile crisis at the United Nations. This was the question, do you have the evidence? The world was very skeptical at that point about missiles in Cuba from the Soviet Union. And he got up there, he challenged them, he laid out the evidence -- this is the evidence -- and he was very forceful at it. It might have been a good idea if the administration had found a way to compromise some, but not all, of its intelligence sources, in order to lay out the evidence as to who flew those planes into the World Trade Center and who was funding them and so on and so forth. A lot of the world doesn't see us the way we do. We have to show them.

Host: Khalid Duran, do you believe that the United States has convincingly laid out the evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the Trade Center bombings?

Schram: Publicly.

Duran: No, certainly not. In a sort of repetition of what happened with the first World Trade Center [bombing], the story: when I was consulted actually I was at the very early stage shown all those documents, because they didn't have enough people to study Arabic, and there were some very philosophical texts with those terrorists, a very special kind of literature, that had to be analyzed. And I was surprised [with] what I saw there: tons and tons of evidence, and the public hardly ever got to know about that, only some small portions. So similarly this is the case here. That evidence has not been made sufficiently clear. On the other hand of course, again, they are the Islamists, who are playing their games, by pretending that this was done by Israelis or that it was done by Americans themselves, like Oklahoma [City bombing] and so on and so forth. You see, there is one very important point here that all of you have touched upon, and I simply have to deepen that a bit. Give an example; take Iran. In Iran, a game is being played. There are some people in the government now who play, the reformists, which is hilarious. I know President [Mohammad] Khatami personally, because when I was working in Germany he was imam there at the mosque, for several years. And we stopped going to the mosque because of him. The man is anything but an intellectual; he is anything but well-meaning. He is just the same like [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini was; he is a tyrant. But he is clever, and he is playing this game. Now, sometimes one gets the impression that the American administration really doesn't understand that, but it has some really dire consequences; because there is an important opposition movement in Iran, the People's Mojahdin, which is in a sense one of the most important movements in the world of Islam at the moment, in the sense of being an anti-fundamentalist movement, an anti-Islamist movement. One of the best books available here in the United States is a book that was published here in Washington, D.C., in I think 1993, by a gentleman with the name of Muhammad Muhaddaseen. It's "Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat." I wish people had paid attention to that book. He predicts, in a way, all that happened since then. But, surprisingly now, the Iranian government is on the list of terrorist-supporting states. During Madeline Albright's time in the State Department, she put the Iranian opposition, the People's Mojahedin, on the list of terrorist organizations. Now you have a unique case here, that an entire nation is on the terrorism list, the government and the opposition to this. But that doesn't work. These things have some very negative impacts on the rest of the Muslim world -- not only on the Iranians, because others look at it and say, what is going on over there? Whom are these Americans actually supporting and whom are they against?

Host: Dimon Liu, you wanted to comment on that.

Liu: Yes, because you cannot win without helping your friends. And you cannot win by abandoning your friends. And that is the problem of Afghanistan. The United States did help the Mujahedin to win the war against the Soviet Union -- and yet it's not wrong to help them; it was the right thing to do. But it was wrong to abandon them to their fate. And this was what led to the extremism that is in Afghanistan today. The second thing I want to add is that this is a very clear line. And President Bush has made it clear: either you are with us or you are against us. V-O-A broadcasting [Taleban leader] Mullah Omar's speech is not helping civilization.

Host: In a way, Martin Schram, aren't we dealing with a battle not so much between civilizations, which is the argument by Samuel Huntington in his essay of 1993, but really a battle between civilization itself -- which certainly includes Islam, or at least parts of Islam -- and barbarism? How is this message best conveyed, do you think, to the Arab and the Islamic world in general?

Schram: The thing that has frustrated me the most is that I have not seen the United States government calling on Islamic leaders to help draw the distinction. I don't know whether all would agree that it's a proper thing for secular leaders, such as presidents of the United States, to do -- and he is still a secular leader. But nevertheless, I would like to see the leaders of the Islamic religion talking about what their religion really does stand for, and what it does not condone. It is not about flying a plane into a building and killing six-thousand people.

Host: Khalid Duran, do you think American Muslims can play a role in persuading the Islamic world as a whole about the real issues in this conflict?

Duran: Oh, definitely. There is always one problem that you have here in this situation in the United States, that the Islamists are also extremely powerful. There is probably no country in the world where they are as powerful as here in the United States at the moment, and that's the irony in this whole case here. And they say it openly, that the United States is our stronghold, because here they can do what they want to do and nobody has ever checked them and so on. Now it has started, that some of them who were praying in the National Cathedral -- there have been some investigations, that only a few months earlier they were shouting here in front of the White House, "We warn you, America! The wrath of God will be upon you, America!" and so on. Now there is some awareness among Americans that we have to really find out here who is who. But they have enormous resources; they have especially financial resources that allow them to steamroll the entire community. And it would need really a resolve on the part of the American administration to help the common, normal Muslim people in the United States to get their voice and get heard.

Host: I think that really brings us to the point that the war is going to be a battle of ideas, not just overseas but here in the United States. And unfortunately that's all the time we have for this week. I'd like to thank our guests -- columnist Martin Schram, human rights activist Dimon Liu and TransIslam editor Khalid Duran -- for joining us to discuss the war of ideas. This is David Aikman for On the Line.