Tenet or Not, CIA Must Learn Mideast's 'Secret Language'

[struggle4progress]

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It makes sense from a Western viewpoint -- and jibes with a stereotypical image of a Middle East where bakshish (bribe money, to the West) opens all doors -- to buy with cold, hard cash "human assets," an intelligence term for living, breathing spies. Yet, as clearly demonstrated in the case of Ahmad Chalabi, who received millions from Washington over the years, money only buys the slyest, sleaziest and ostensibly least useful of agents.

The West's arch-nemeses, the radical, militant organizations that continue to proliferate throughout the region, clearly understand the limitations of money. They know they must appeal mainly to seething religious and national sentiments to recruit agents of such dedication that they would think little of giving their lives for their cause.
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Ironically, it was in the Middle East that the CIA began to gain its once-storied and notorious reputation, when it overthrew the government of Iran's Mohamad Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power in 1953. Yet the Iranian coup d'etat also planted the seeds of anti-Americanism in the region, while a politicized Islam began to present itself as a viable alternative to haphazard Westernization. Fundamentalist Islam has failed as a panacea; at the same time, an America whose worst face was bared at Abu Ghraib remains far from attractive.

Paramount among the lessons learned from half a century of CIA misadventures in the region is that American money and might can no longer buy true friends or intimidate even some of the weakest of foes in the Middle East. Americans, however, are admired for their ingenuity and enterprise, and for the prosperity and liberty they enjoy within their own borders. It will take an administration appreciably more competent and articulate, and appreciably less tainted than present one, to convince Middle Easterners that America has the good faith and the ability to help them achieve the best of America's values while holding on to their own religious and national traditions.

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