Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified
at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee to vote on her nomination yesterday, she was
easily approved. And thus with no discussion and no debate, Hughes
takes over the least noticed, least respected and possibly most
important job in the State Department. Her formal title is
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. In
plain English, her job is to fight anti-Americanism, promote American
culture and above all to do intellectual battle with the ideology of
radical Islam, a set of beliefs so powerful that they can persuade
middle-class, second-generation British Muslims to blow themselves up
on buses and trains.
Presumably, President Bush selected Hughes for this task because
she was very good at running his election campaigns. And indeed, in
the testimony she gave last week to a nearly empty room, she sounded
like she was still running an election campaign. Like Hillary Clinton,
she said she wanted people around the world to know that she would be
"listening" to them: "I want to learn more about you and your lives,
what you believe, what you fear, what you dream, what you value most."
Like Jesse Jackson, she deployed alliteration, alluding to the four
"E's": "engagement, exchanges, education and empowerment."
Unfortunately, Hughes's most important constituents aren't going
to respond to engagement and empowerment, let alone exchange and
education, unless the latter involves those flight schools where they
don't teach you how to take off or land. It has become clear in Iraq,
if it wasn't already, that what we call the "war on terrorism" is in
fact a small part of a larger intellectual and religious struggle
within Islam, between moderates who want to live in modern countries,
and radicals who want to impose their extreme interpretation of
sharia , or religious law. So far, most of the money, and most of
the "public diplomacy," has been channeled to the radicals. Consider,
for example, an extraordinary report published this year by the Center
for Religious Freedom, a division of Freedom House, which surveys more
than 200 books and pamphlets collected at mosques and Islamic centers
in U.S. cities. Most were in Arabic. All were published by the Saudi
government or royal family, and all promote the extreme form of
Wahhabi Islam found in Saudi Arabia. The books reflect contempt for
the United States, condemn democracy as un-Islamic, and claim that
Muslims are religiously obliged to hate Christians and Jews. Most
insidiously, the documents denounce moderate Muslims, especially those
who advocate religious tolerance, as infidels. If a Muslim commits
adultery or becomes a homosexual, one pamphlet -- published by the
Saudi government's ministry of Islamic affairs -- advises that "it
would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and take his money."
I am citing this study not merely to finger the Saudis, but also
to show what we are up against. The Saudi king's own Web site boasts
of his support for mosques and schools in Lagos, Islamabad, Madrid,
Buenos Aires and elsewhere. A friend reports recently seeing a new
Saudi mosque in Kosovo. We have to assume that the materials found in
the United States exist in all of those places, too.
To fight these ideas, friendly state visits from Laura Bush will
not suffice. Neither will more Britney Spears songs for Muslim
teenagers, which is what we play on U.S.-funded Farsi and Arabic radio
in the Middle East. Instead, we need to monitor the intellectual and
theological struggle for the soul of Islam, and we need to help the
moderates win. This means making sure that counter-arguments are heard
whenever and wherever Muslim clerics and intellectuals are talking,
despite the impact of Saudi money.
The United States has engaged in a project like this once
before. In the 1950s and '60s, the West European left was also
bitterly divided, with social democrats on one side and pro-Soviet
communists on the other. We backed the social democrats. CIA money was
used, for example, to found Encounter, a small but influential
magazine whose editors promoted not just pro-Americanism but also the
principles of democracy and capitalism, largely through allowing both
sides to argue their cases.
I concede that the analogy is not exact, that the present case
is far more difficult and that we have a long way to go. At the
moment, the State Department probably spends more money denying visas
to moderate Muslim scholars than it does funding magazines for them to
write in. The traditional tools of public diplomacy -- American
libraries, Fourth of July parties, "citizen ambassadors" -- are
uniquely unsuited to the task of encouraging debate within Islam as
well. But Hughes has nothing to lose by dropping the four "E's," going
back to the rest of the alphabet, and thinking way, way outside the
box. Judging by Bali, Madrid, London and Sharm el-Sheikh, not to
mention New York and Washington, whatever we're doing right now, it
isn't working.
