Muslim hearts are hard to win after years of hypocrisy (Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

Brown must understand that we won't win the fight against terrorism until we live up to our own high moral claims

David Clark
Wednesday August 15, 2007
The Guardian

~snip~ In the first two decades of the cold war, the CIA and MI6 set up numerous publications and front organisations, such as Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as instruments of political warfare. These attracted heavyweight intellectual backing before their intelligence links were exposed in the late 60s, and many of those involved were left feeling compromised and cynical. Should intellectual and cultural life be manipulated in the interests of the secret state? Wasn't that the Soviet way? Instead of clarifying the ideological divide, these methods blurred it.

Another reason for questioning the appropriateness of the cultural cold war model is the failure it encountered in precisely those parts of the world where the west now needs to succeed. While the intellectual battle against communism was won relatively easily in Europe, thanks largely to the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, it was lost in places where the struggle to overcome colonialism was of more pressing concern. It is worth recalling that the Soviet Union continued to gain ground in Africa and Asia even as it was collapsing at home. Developing countries that didn't join the Soviet camp often adopted a form of non-alignment that leaned heavily in its direction.

By acting as inheritor of the European colonial tradition, the US led many sincere democrats to conclude that its values were a sham. Whatever claim to moral leadership it may have had was squandered by the habit of overthrowing elected governments and imposing dictatorships in the name of freedom. It is true that American strategists delivered their heaviest blow to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but only thanks to the Frankenstein creation of jihadism. With hindsight, it wasn't exactly freedom's finest hour.

Similar mistakes have been made in the discredited war on terror. Our selective concern for the sanctity of UN security council resolutions, the ease with which we have discarded human rights and embraced torture and extraordinary rendition, the rogues' gallery of tyrants we now treat as indispensable allies - these and other foreign policy errors have done far more to undermine our position in the Muslim world than Osama bin Laden ever will. ~snip~

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2148983,00.html

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd because that's all I can do. nt