How
To Lose Friends And
Encourage Extremists
By William Fisher
16 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
One of my proudest moments as
an American working in Egypt always came at about this time of year,
when the U.S. State Department issued its annual report on the state
of human rights around the world. I remember sitting in front of a computer
in a Cairo living room a year before 9/11, while a group of young journalists,
human rights activists and academics downloaded the report from the
Internet, eager to see what the world's most trusted authority on the
rule of law had to say about their country and their region.
Their reaction was what made me grateful for having been born in the
U.S.A. Because they were bright, well-informed, and fiercely pro-democracy,
they quibbled about how the report phrased a particular human rights
abuse or why this or that infraction hadn't been given more or less
emphasis.
But there was not the slightest doubt among them that this report spoke
truth or that, of all the world's countries, only the United States
of America had the performance record to speak with authority and credibility
on this subject.
When this year's Human Rights report appeared last week, I e-mailed
it to six of these old friends and asked them for their reactions "off-the-record".
They had a lot to say, but it all came down to this consensus: The United
States had forfeited its right to report on abuses committed by others
by committing its own, failing to correct them, and then holding no
one in authority accountable. They said they would have expected this
behavior in their own countries, but not in mine.
The keywords in their e-mails to me included Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,
Bagram, imprisonment without trial, ghost prisoners, kidnappings, renditions,
unilateralism, bribing journalists, and Bush & Company and their
whole Iraq adventure.
One of them wrote, "What kind of democracy is George Bush trying
to spread anyway?"
Lest Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney are immediately tempted
to attack the people who wrote to me, they need to know that these men
and women were as disbelieving and horrified by 9/11 as was most of
the rest of the world. Many of them had attended American universities.
They put their freedom on the line every day by fighting autocratic
rule. They are people who once thought of us as the world's last best
hope for progress and equity. And, yes, they are all Muslims.
In short, these are precisely the people our current public diplomacy
maven, Karen Hughes, is supposed to be reaching through her efforts
to "win hearts and minds".
But perhaps the job description of this culturally-challenged Friend
of Bush ought to ask, "How Do We Win Back the Hearts and Minds
of Friends We Have Lost?"
Through exchange programs? By trying to bond with Muslim women by telling
them that she, too, is a Mom? By insisting they drive the cars they'd
rather have their drivers drive? By denying or remaining silent on what
her country has become and by slavishly justifying whatever her boss,
the President, does in the name of the "Global War on Terror?"
One of the young women I wrote to summed it up this way:
"We're used to the iron fist of government in Egypt. We expect
it. We used to have someone we could count on to show our leaders how
to lead by setting an example of good governance without the iron fist.
It was America. Now that's gone. Now, the only people who are motivated
by what America is doing are the very people it's trying to defeat -
Muslim extremists."