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Week of July 24, 2005 - July 30, 2005

From GWOT to GSAVE to Gee Whiz

July 29, 2005, 9:26PM

In the very first America Abroad post Ivo argued that the Global War on Terror (GWOT, in military jargon) had disappeared, that the Administration had decided it had been won. I responded that in fact it had been subsumed under the War Against Tyranny. Now it appears it has become the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, or GSAVE. Fred Kaplan has a marvelous piece on this change in Slate, in which he quotes NSC Adviser Stephen Hadley saying: "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and present a positive alternative." We may be losing the war of ideas, which is the real war we have to be fighting -- see Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek column this week -- but we have the war of slogans covered.

Muslim Self-Marginalization?

July 29, 2005, 10:21AM

A while back I suggested that fighting the war on terror might have as much to do with the ability of EU countries to employ and integrate young Muslim men as it does securing some kind of decent government in Iraq (don't get me wrong, I think both are critical). But a very interesting article in The Globalist by Tariq Ramadan, author of Western Muslims: Isolation or Integration, describes the ways in which Western muslims also marginalize themselves.

China, Saudi Arabia, and National Security

July 29, 2005, 9:48AM

Matthew Yglesias recently called for a "real national security debate," jumping off of Flynt Leverett's op-ed in the New York Times about how the U.S. should treat Saudi Arabia. Matthew argues that the bigger issue here is:

"Faced with notionally pro-American dictatorships, do liberals think we ought to try harder to prop them up or should we try harder to distance ourselves from them unless and until they clean up their acts in terms of human rights and democracy. I'd put myself squarely in the latter camp. You don't need to be invading countries willy-nilly in order to stand for traditional liberal efforts to build a better, more humane world. Fear that withdrawing support from autocratic governments will lead to radical Islamist takeovers isn't crazy, but that fear's been driving our policies for decades and what seems clear to me is that it's an unsustainable policy."

I would say that the bigger issue still is the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.

The Dulling of Outrage

July 28, 2005, 3:27PM

Cry, the Beloved Country. That of course is the title of Alan Paton’s great novel about the crime and the moral degradation of apartheid in South Africa, a work first published in 1948 and republished in 1976, when I was in college. He came to Princeton then, to speak to a standing-room-only crowd of Princeton students who were pressing the Princeton administration to divest any university investments in South Africa. His shame at the stain that blotted his country was palpable, as was his conviction that he and all right-minded South Africans had to do everything possible to end it.

Cry, the beloved country. Those words kept echoing in my brain as I read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece “The Experiment,” a reference to a quote from one of her interviewees describing all of Guantanamo as “one giant human experiment” (if anyone out there can find a link to the full piece, pse send it in; this is a link to an interview with her). How on earth is it possible that we are reading about American doctors and psychologists advising members of our military and intelligence branches on how to inflict pain or degradation or humiliation on individuals being held captive by us – without charge, without lawyers, without trial before an independent judge?

Terrorist Recruitment 101

July 24, 2005, 10:13AM

In the ongoing debate about whether potential terrorist recruits are motivated more by opposition to specific terrorist policies or by a more general alienation born of being on the wrong side of globalization, read Olivier Roy's op-ed in the International Herald Tribune. Fighting terrorism may have as much to do with the state of the European economy and the ability of European societies to integrate Muslim immigrants successfully as it does with creating security and participatory government in Iraq and moving toward a Palestinian state.