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By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

From the smoke and ash of 9/11 rose a rare strategic consensus about the nature of the threat facing America. The danger went far beyond Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The United States confronted not only growing tensions between a globalizing West and an Islamic world resistant to modernity but also an ideological struggle within the Muslim faith between moderate reformers and radical fundamentalists. Analysts widely believed that empowering Islamic reformers was essential to long-term success in the global war on terrorism.

That strategic consensus gave rise to the Bush Doctrine of democratization as the antidote to the repression at the heart of so much Islamic existence, especially in the Arab Middle East. With the post-9/11 winds at its back, the United States pressured Saudi Arabia to end its export of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam, and Pakistan to reform an education system that funneled so many willing recruits from its madrassa religious schools to the ranks of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Bush administration established its so-called Greater Middle East Initiative to support democracy movements and civil-society programs in the region. Bush designated one of his most trusted advisers, Karen Hughes, as the point person for burnishing America's image abroad and harnessing its vast communications capabilities to win the war of ideas.

Perhaps the most unpleasant surprise of the past five years is just how utterly those efforts have failed. Bush's new surge in Iraq and his public threats against Iran and Syria, as well as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent shuttle diplomacy in the region, are tacit acknowledgments that the forces of radicalism are on the march in the Middle East. Meanwhile, bin Laden remains free and the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Far from empowering moderates, elections have advanced the cause of militant Islamists and sectarian forces in Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq itself. America's image abroad has hit a historic nadir among Muslims and among traditional allies that were looking for U.S. leadership in the war on terrorism.

Consider a single revealing data point of that remarkable reversal of fortunes: Just after September 11, U.S. officials held out longtime ally and NATO partner Turkey as a model of Islamic reform and a nation that had successfully melded a modern democracy with the traditions of an overwhelmingly Muslim population. Five years later, a September 2006 survey by the German Marshall Fund revealed that Turks now feel twice as much "warmth" toward Iran as they do toward the United States.

"In the United States, I don't think people fully appreciate the degree to which the Bush strategy in the war on terror has produced exactly the opposite of its intended consequences," said Fawaz Gerges, a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo and the author of The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global [PDF]. That strategy has weakened moderate, pro-Western governments and delegitimized liberal voices for reform, he said, while supplying ideological ammunition to radicals who have increased their influence in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestine territories, Sudan, and Syria. "This rise of radical Islamists is amazing to someone like me, who predicted that it would take a miracle to revive their fortunes after 9/11," Gerges said. "By extending America's war on terror with an ill-considered invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration supplied that miracle."

While the bloody conflict in Iraq is the prime culprit in sullying the U.S. image among Muslims, experts say that other Bush administration policies have contributed. The Muslim world widely views as illegitimate the U.S. policy of indefinitely detaining suspects in the war on terrorism at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, outside the reach of international or domestic law. The administration's seeming disengagement from America's traditional role as mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its close identification with the government of Israel have also infuriated many traditional Muslim allies. Finally, many in the region see the administration's short-term focus on elections, absent the institutional underpinnings of democracy, as advancing the cause of Islamist parties in the Middle East.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, said, "At its core, this conflict is fundamentally a war of ideas, and I don't think we're winning that war." Hamilton was quoted in a report [PDF] by the independent Council on Global Terrorism. "I find that very frustrating, because American ideas and ideals are powerful and compelling, and they should work to our advantage. Unfortunately, we have not conveyed our ideas or shaped our ideals into policies in ways that have improved our relationship with the world's 1.3 billion Muslims." [an error occurred while processing this directive]

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