Winning hearts and minds

Today on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, "Bodies of 49 Iraqi Soldiers Found Near Iran" (3:18)

Liane Hansen: What about the American attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. How is that going?

Anne Garrels: Not very well. I mean Iraqis say they live in fear whether from criminals or from insurgents. So 17 months after the U.S.-led military operations began here most say they're worse off. They see the U.S. as being in charge even now despite the handover of sovereignty and they blame the Americans for just about everything

The implication is that we're losing the war to the "insurgents" who spend most of their time murdering Iraqis. It doesn't sound like these guys are exactly winning anybody's "hearts and minds" either. At best they're asserting domination through murder, fear and intimidation.

The current strategy of the "War on Terror" has been to spread freedom and democracy, starting in Iraq, in part by "winning the hearts and minds" of the Iraqis. I don't particularly care whether we "win the hearts and minds" of the Iraqis. All I care about is that the threats to us from Arab fascism and militant Islam are neutralized. If winning hearts and minds achieves that, fine. If there are other ways to achieve that, fine. I'm willing to believe that spreading democracy and "winning hearts and minds" in the Muslim world will cost more years, lives and resources than our country would ultimately be willing to commit. It's possible that a quicker, safer (for us) and more cost-effective approach to converting the Muslims into a non-threat is to forget about "winning hearts and minds" and instead, well, terrorize them into leaving us alone.

It does seem like terrorism and brutality are the normal language of political discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds. It's not unreasonable to believe that Saddam didn't create brutality in order to rule Iraq so much as Iraq demanded to be ruled by a brutal dictator. Every other Muslim country in the region differs from Saddamite Iraq only in the degree of repression and tyranny. I've long posited that the reason that political terrorism is used more often by Muslims than others is not because they're more "oppressed" by foreigners than others (they're not) and not so much because terrorism is effective against the targets of Muslim terrorists (it is not) but because of projection -- Muslims see themselves as susceptible to intimidation through terrorism and therefore assume that everybody else is too.

If we were to deal with the threat of Islamist terrorism using overwhelming brutality and force, we would probably be more effective at stopping it than we have been heretofore. (I observe that Japanese nationalism has not been a serious threat since the bombing of Nagasaki. The Syrian branch of the Islamic Brotherhood has been more subdued since the Hama massacre). But we're not prepared as a society to inflict that kind of destruction on anybody at this time.

Spreading freedom and democracy by winning hearts and minds is a more noble and uplifting aim than, say, explaining the war against Islamofascism as merely an activity of beheading copperhead snakes with a hoe. Of course we should keep trying to win hearts and minds and help plant the seeds of democracy in a desert where it has never before bloomed. I hope it works. It wouldn't make sense to keep at it indefinitely and at an unbounded cost of lives and treasure, unless we're making adequate progress. Ultimately, it's up to those in the Muslim world to take freedom for themselves and shape it into a flourishing democracy. If they don't, then at least we will have tried. But at some point, and I'm not sure when that point would be, we might have to make a choice between being loved or being alive.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 24, 2004 11:56 PM