Blumenthal: You call this liberation

[kskiska]

Pentagon experts have made a discovery: Muslims do not hate America's freedoms, but its policies

Who wrote this - a pop sociologist, obscure blogger or anti-war playwright? "Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic - namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is - for Americans - really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is ... heightened by election-year atmospherics, but none the less sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims, they are talking to themselves."

Actually, this is the conclusion of the report of the defence science board taskforce on strategic communication - the product of a Pentagon advisory panel - delivered in September. Its 102 pages were not made public in the presidential campaign, but, barely noticed by the US press, silently slipped on to a Pentagon website on Thanksgiving eve.

The taskforce of military, diplomatic, academic and business experts, assigned to develop strategy for communications in the "global war on terrorism", had unfettered access, denied to journalists, to the inner workings of the national security apparatus. There was no intent to contribute to public debate, much less political controversy; the report was for internal consumption only.

(snip)

"There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-US groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the US so determinedly promotes and defends." Rhetoric about freedom is received as "no more than self-serving hypocrisy", highlighted daily by the US occupation in Iraq. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom', but rather they hate our policies." The "dramatic narrative ... of the war on terrorism", Bush's grand storyline connecting all the dots from the World Trade Centre to Baghdad, has "borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars". As a result, jihadists have been able to transform them selves from marginal figures in the Muslim world into defenders against invasion, with a following of millions.

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5076422-103677,00.html

[Elidor]

1. Tragic

"The Bush administration, according to the defence science board, has misconceived a war on terrorism in the image of the cold war. However, the struggle is not the west versus Islam; while we blindly call this a "war on terrorism", Muslims "in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration" against "apostate" Arab regimes allied with the US and "western modernity - an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a 'war on terrorism'".

"In this conflict, "wholly unlike the cold war", the Bush administration's impulse has been to "imitate the routines and bureaucratic ... mindset that so characterised that era". So the US projects Iraqis and other Arabs as people to be liberated, like those "oppressed by Soviet rule". And the US accepts authoritarian Arab regimes as allies against the "radical fighters". All this is nothing less than a gigantic "strategic mistake."

[susu369]

2. Blumenthal wraps it up beautifully in last paragraph

thanks for posting.

:kick:

[Demit]

4. He does. It's a real case of: Will the last expert analyst leaving this

administration please turn out the lights?

[dummy-du1]

3. Pretty late

If Pentagon experts had read Naomi Klein's article "Brand USA", they could have saved a lot of time:

http://www.alternet.org/story/12617