June 21, 2015
Rarely
has amateurism in American foreign policy in the Middle East been as glaring
and shocking as it has been in the past year in relation to Washington’s policy
on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the United States during the
past two weeks I have had the opportunity to follow more closely than usual
news, analysis and political discussions about how the U.S. should respond to
the threat of ISIS, and the experience has been frightening.
In
almost every aspect of American policy related to Iraq, Syria and ISIS—threat
analysis, addressing key underlying causal factors, policy formulation,
geo-strategic coordination, military strategy and operations, and public
diplomacy—Washington’s approach has consistently asked the wrong questions,
identified the wrong threats, used the wrong tools, and applied wrong policies.
No wonder it has resulted in cumulative failures.
The
most recent disappointment is how the U.S. government (and many other Arab and
European states, to be fair) emphasize public diplomacy and offering a
“counter-narrative” to ISIS’ message as a key pillar of the strategy to defeat
ISIS. This is part of a wider mistaken and failed response to ISIS, Al-Qaeda
and other such criminal movements, one that seeks to emphasize and activate
“moderate Muslims” and “moderate Islam” or to highlight the brutal and barbaric
acts of ISIS as a means of reducing the flow of its recruits. Ever since the idiocy
of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror from 2001-2002, the American
government has assumed that positive media messages through a public diplomacy
campaign would dry up recruits to Al-Qaeda, and now to ISIS.
Well,
that approach has proved to be a colossal failure and waste of money, despite a
succession of consistently clueless strategies that have spent billions of dollars
on television, radio, websites, social media and other means to check the
growth of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The result to date is that Al-Qaeda and ISIS today
are the fastest growing political brands in the Arab world, and are
infiltrating some other parts of the world as well.
What
do American leaders need to finally get the point that public diplomacy as a
core weapon in the fight against ISIS is no weapon at all, but a terrible
self-induced delusion and hoax? It seems that day is still far off, because
this week we learn via the New York Times of an internal State
Department memo that, “paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama
administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message
machine.”
The
memo to Secretary of State John Kerry by Richard A. Stengel, the State
Department’s under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, paints a
sad picture of a public diplomacy multi-national coalition in disarray, but
also proposes a more focused and enhanced effort to do more of the same kind of
messaging using social media to counter ISIS narratives. The Times notes
that, “State Department officials have repeatedly said that ‘countermessaging’
the Islamic State is one of the pillars of the strategy to defeat the group.
But Obama administration officials have acknowledged in the past that the group
is far more nimble in spreading its message than the United States is in
blunting it.”
The
tragedy is not just that public diplomacy procedurally has failed; it is also
the profound analytical failure of emphasizing “messaging,” which totally
misses the point of why people from many different backgrounds gravitate to
ISIS, or simply do not resist it. ISIS and Al-Qaeda can only be fought by
cutting out from beneath their feet the combination of policies and conditions
in the Arab region that deeply offend and threaten ordinary citizens, and
ultimately turn a very small number of them into ISIS recruits.
ISIS’s
appeal to those people succeeds because their real life conditions—poverty,
corruption, tyranny, occupation, subjugation, colonization, drone attacks,
foreign invasions, humiliation, hopelessness—push them into desperate quests
for something that offers them an alternative life. Some end up in ISIS—not
because of ISIS’ messaging, but because the policies of Arab, Israeli,
American, British, Russian and other governments over the past several decades have
sucked the life and hope from the lives of hundreds of millions of Arab men and
women.
ISIS’
appeal is that it offers a shock-therapy alternative to the dismal conditions
that define the precarious lives of perhaps half the Arab world’s 375 million citizens—maybe
over 150 million people who barely meet their daily basic needs, have no
educational qualifications for decent work, and face a future of almost
certain perpetual poverty and misery. That kind of desperation is the
consequence of failed governance across the Arab world.
The
world’s most powerful country should snap out of its analytical silliness and
political dishonesty, and admit that this kind of dark dynamic that is tearing
apart the Arab world cannot be fought with Facebook likes.
Rami
G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and
now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and
International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter:
@ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G.
Khouri -- distributed by Agence Global