[Mb-civic] The New Pentagon Paper

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit


http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/12/02/pentagon/print.html

The New Pentagon Paper

A scathing top-level report, intended for internal consumption, says that
Bush's "war on terrorism" is an unmitigated disaster. Of course, the
administration is ignoring it.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Who wrote this -- a pop sociologist, obscure blogger or antiwar
playwright? "Finally, 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 of
course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but
nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims
they are really just talking to themselves."

This passage is not psychobabble, punditry or monologue. It is a
conclusion of the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on
Strategic Communication, the product of a Pentagon advisory panel,
delivered in September, its 102 pages not released to the public during
the presidential campaign, but silently slipped onto a Pentagon Web site
on Thanksgiving eve, and barely noticed by the U.S. press.

The task force of leading strategists and experts within the military,
diplomatic corps and academia, and executives from defense-oriented
business, was assigned to develop strategy for communications in the
"global war on terrorism," including the war in Iraq. It had unfettered
access, denied to journalists, to the inner workings of the national
security apparatus, and interviewed scores of officials. The mission was
not to find fault, but to suggest constructive improvements. There was no
intent to contribute to public debate, much less political controversy;
the report was written only for internal consumption.

The task force discovered more than a chaotic vacuum, a government
sector "in crisis," and "Missing are strong leadership strategic
direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of
measurement and evaluation." Inevitably, as it journeyed deeper into the
recesses of the Bush administration's foreign policy, the task force
documented the unparalleled failure of its fundamental premises.
"America's negative image in world opinion and diminished ability to
persuade are consequences of factors other than the failure to implement
communications strategies," the report declares. What emerges in this new
Pentagon paper is a scathing indictment of an expanding and unmitigated
disaster based on stubborn ignorance of the world and failed concepts that
bear little relation to empirical reality except insofar as they confirm
and incite gathering hatred among Muslims.

The Bush administration, according to the Defense Science Board, has
misconceived a war on terrorism in the image of the Cold War --
"reflexively" and "without a thought or a care as to whether these were
the best responses to a very different strategic situation." Yet the
administration seeks out "Cold War models" to cast this "war" against
"totalitarian evil." However, the struggle is not the West vs. Islam; nor
is it "against the tactic of terrorism." "This is no Cold War," the report
insists. While we blindly and confidently call this a "war on terrorism,"
Muslims "in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic
restoration" against "apostate" Arab regimes allied with the U.S. 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 responses and
mindset that so characterized that era." So the U.S. projects Iraqis and
other Arabs as people to be liberated like those "oppressed by Soviet
rule." And the U.S. accepts authoritarian Arab regimes as allies against
the "radical fighters." All of this is nothing less than a gigantic
"strategic mistake."

"There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among 
Muslim
societies -- except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate
tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends. (Original
emphasis.)" Rhetoric about freedom is received as "self-serving
hypocrisy," daily highlighted by the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "Muslims do
not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies." The "dramatic
narrative since 9/11" of the "war on terrorism," Bush's grand
justification, his story line connecting all the dots from the World Trade
Center to Baghdad, has "borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of
particulars." As a result, jihadists have been able to transform
themselves from marginal figures in the Muslim world into defenders
against invasion and attack with a growing following of millions.

"Thus," the report concludes, "the critical problem in American public
diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of 'dissemination 
of
information,' or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message.
Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none
-- the United States today is without a working channel of communication
to the world of Muslims and of Islam. Inevitably therefore, whatever
Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and
the 'loud and clear' channel: the enemy."

Almost three months ago, the Defense Science Board delivered its report 
to
the White House. But a source on the board told me it has received no 
word
back at all. The report has been studiously, willfully ignored by those in
the White House to whom its recommendations are directed.

For the Bush administration, expert analysis as a rule is extraneous, as
it is making clear to national security professionals in its partisan
scapegoating of the CIA. Experts can only be expert in telling the White
House what it wants to hear. Expertise is valued, not for the analysis or
evidence it offers for correction, but for propaganda and validation. But
no one -- not in the Bush White House, the Congress, or the dwindling
"coalition of the willing" -- can claim that the ever-widening catastrophe
has not been foretold by the best and most objective minds commissioned 
by
the Pentagon -- perhaps for the last time.

[Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President
Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for
Salon and the Guardian of London.]

----


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option 
D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone 
forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an 
email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.



Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20041212/ef661262/attachment.html