The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
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“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue,
and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint
the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.”
CONTENTS
Talking Points: From freedom to justice
Wit and Wisdom: Top 10 Features of Bush’s New Iraq Plan
Eye on the Right: Exposing the global warming deniers
Featured Article: “Newspapers…and After?”
Happenings: Environmental activism training
Endorsements: David Brock
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor
The idea that the United States is fighting for “freedom” in Iraq, and in the greater Middle East, is the last reed the Bush administration seems to be clinging to as the turbulent waters of sectarian civil war rise higher. Unfortunately, it is a weakly rooted reed, and clinging to it has about as much promise as adhering to a strategy of clear-hold-and-build, or clinging to the fragile, suspect Iraqi regime.
The desire to advance human liberty is certainly laudable, but the problem is that the administration has emphasized freedom as a policy goal at the expense of clearly articulating another social value, justice, which is much more deeply rooted in Arab culture. The result has been to cloud our understanding of the conflict, to limit our options for dealing with it, and to distort badly our entire foreign policy in the Middle East.
There are layers of history to this problem. At an immediate level, the war aim of “liberating” Iraq came to the fore as the original justification for the war (WMD) fell by the wayside. More broadly, ever since 9/11, the administration has framed American foreign policy in terms of some kind of apocalyptic battle between freedom and evil – arguing, not without reason, that the spread of freedom and democracy will combat the spread of terrorism by giving people meaningful ways of participating in their societies and by creating governments more friendly to us and to each other. This framing, in turn, reflects the fact that the American right has chosen “freedom” as its essential theme and its banner, insisting, typically, that freedom is not simply a natural right, but a God-given right. (The various ways in which conservative policies actually make Americans less free is rather beside the point, which has to do with the articulation of foreign policy and its relation to cultural realities other than our own. Also beside the point is that fact that progressives, who are usually more comfortable talking about “equality” than about freedom, would do well to begin framing their ideals more in terms of genuine human freedom).
In any event, what must remain clear in our heads is that the concept of “freedom” does not have quite the same resonance, power, or historical weight in Arab Muslim cultures as it does in our own. Higher in the scale of social values is the principle of justice, and American policy-makers drift into error when they fail to recognize that many of our Arab friends would rather live in a just society than a free society (if ever they had to choose). This cultural misunderstanding lies at the root of the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves today in the Middle East.
The Arab emphasis on justice as a cardinal virtue has its own particular history, which helps to explain why, when we open the newspaper or turn on the television, commentators and regular citizens in the Middle East recur so frequently to the theme of having been wronged. Most visibly, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is not hated primarily because it has made the Palestinians less free, but because it is seen as unjust. More broadly, the sense of grievance and resentment of Western policies over the last 100 years is rooted less in a feeling of oppression than in one of injustice.
As early as 1949, the radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb put his finger on an issue that continues to haunt Arab societies, and that in large measure accounts for the rise of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine. “We have only to look,” Qutb wrote in his work Social Justice in Islam, “to see that our social situation is as bad as it can be; it is apparent that our social conditions have no possible relation to justice; and so we turn our eyes to Europe, America, or Russia, and we expect to import from there solutions to our problems…. [And] when it is a matter of importing principles and customs and laws … we cast aside our own fundamental principles and doctrines, and we bring in those of democracy, or socialism, or communism.”
Qutb maintained that justice, among other “fundamental principles and doctrines,” had to be grounded in the Koran, and this insistence should give us pause, for it does seem to invite all the evils of religious intolerance and theocratic oppression. Yet as Majid Khadduri has more recently suggested, in The Islamic Conception of Justice (Johns Hopkins, 2001), the invocation of divine authority to legitimate civil governance is a more complicated matter in Arab cultures than we might expect. The principle of justice is not just about applying sharia, or Koranic law, heavy-handedly, and it has a centuries-long history that involves the whole fabric of human relationships.
Lawrence Rosen, in The Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society (Oxford, 2000), gives a sense of how broad the philosophical underpinning of the Islamic concept of justice is: “Whether it is in the relations among total strangers looking for a basis of mutual comprehension and engagement,” he writes, “or in the heart of the family itself, the sense of the negotiable relatedness of all persons runs as a constant theme in Arab cultural life” (70). Therefore, it “follows that what matters most in evaluating actions is not their connection to a series of abstract propositions that lie behind them but to the consequences that actions have in the world, their impact on those networks of relationships, those webs of obligation, that are constitutive of reality itself” (72).
Similarly, Mahmoud Ayoub, in “The Islamic Conception of Justice,” in Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice (University of Florida, 1996), emphasizes the relational and practical dimensions of justice in the Arab World. He suggests that “justice in Islam is a way of relating to one another without having anyone come up short,” and that at its heart lies the belief that “whatever we develop ought to be developed with a sense of fair, middle ground” (20). The opposite of this social/divine justice, or Qist, he writes, is Zulm, which is “often interpreted as oppression, but it means far more. It goes back to the Islamic notion of justice that implies sharing. Zulm is to get a bigger share than your fellow human being, which creates opacity, darkness, and confusion” (22).
The Uncommon Denominator does not purport to have the last word on Arab ideas of justice, but these cited books are the sort of thing that people in the State Department and the White House need to be reading when formulating American foreign policy, or at least when fashioning our rhetoric. For there remains a serious and debilitating disconnect between our words and actions, on the one hand, and on the other, the actual needs, desires, beliefs, and feelings of the part of the world we are supposedly trying to help.
If we’re serious about prevailing in “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” as President Bush phrased it in his January 10 address, we can’t simply try to export our own values without a good understanding of the values of our would-be partners. The United States and even our moderate Arab friends have been talking past each other, speaking different languages, and that miscommunication makes it incredibly difficult for us to gain traction in the war of ideas.
It is probably too late for the current administration to understand any of this or to take any of it to heart, but in the years ahead the policy analysts and planners in the American government need start understanding and talking the language of the region they are dealing with. Few changes would have a more salutary effect on our relations with the Muslim and Arab worlds than explaining how our involvement in the region promotes justice there as much as freedom – assuming, of course, we don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk. That means, above all, pushing hard for a just settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, if it’s not too late, achieving a just allocation of resources and reconstruction monies in Iraq. Then we’ll see improvement in our relations with ordinary Arabs, increasing room for our ideas to take root, and some recovery of our squandered international prestige.
Top Ten Features of Bush’s New Iraq Plan
10. Make the war best two-out-of-three
9. Blame it on that crazy New York gas leak
8. Convene blue-ribbon study group; ignore recommendations
7. Consult with Rumsfeld, who’s now working as a casino greeter
6. Sit on ass until January 2009; let Hillary figure it out
5. Send Cheney to Baghdad with a shotgun
4. Tax cuts for the rich
3. Put Giants coach Tom Coughlin in charge of enemy, watch them collapse
2. Raise money for escalation by robbing Mick Jagger’s apartment
1. Dig up Saddam and execute him again
— from The David Letterman Show
If it’s hard to believe that anybody nowadays would seriously question the reality and the causes of global warming, that’s perhaps because global warming deniers have been so good at covering their tracks. Until now, that is. The Union of Concerned Scientists has just issued a devastating report on the surreptitious efforts of ExxonMobil Corporation to confuse the American people about global climate change and to undercut effective governmental action to deal with the problem. The report, titled Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to “Manufacture Uncertainty” on Climate Change, details the various methods by which the oil company has deliberately stymied public understanding of global warming.
Noting that ExxonMobil channeled about $16 million dollars to conservative advocacy organizations between 1998 and 2005, the report explains what the company got for its money. The campaign has “manufactured uncertainty” about global warming by questioning even the best science; it has pursued a strategy of “information laundering” by feeding its message through front organizations; it has promoted spokespeople who “misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings” about global warming; it has “attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action” to address the problem; and it has “used its extraordinary access to the Bush administration” to influence policy and government communications. (Indeed, as Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post reported on Jan. 16, the administration has been cutting back funding for government agencies that monitor climate and weather – an inexcusable affront to good science and good public policy).
To anyone reasonably familiar with the right wing’s “noise machine” (which the 2006 election did not, unfortunately, vanquish) the parties to this campaign of disinformation and manipulation will read like a list of the usual suspects. The participating organizations include such think tanks or advocacy outfits as the Cato Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, among quite a few others. In addition to naming names, giving dollar amounts, and identifying specific actions meant to discredit the science of global warming, the UCS report also includes a variety of primary documents, in facsimile, such as leaked memos, which reveal the thinking and strategizing behind the ExxonMobil campaign.
Ultimately, the truth about global warming will become known, just as the truth about cigarette smoking finally came out. That is in the nature of science. But it is a tragedy that it is taking so long for that to happen, and for our global community to respond effectively. Through its positively immoral pursuit of its own corporate interests, ExxonMobil deserves a large measure of the blame. Read the report, pass it on to others, and always try to do what you can in your own lives to minimize your environmental footprint.
The Union of Concerned Scientist’s press release can be read at: http://www.ucsusa.org/news
The full report itself is at: http://ucsusa.org/assets
The following is an excerpt from John Nichols’s “Newspapers…and After?” which appears in the January 29, 2006 issue of The Nation.
“Newspapers may be the dinosaurs of America's new-media age, hulking behemoths that cost too much to prepare and distribute and that cannot seem to attract young--or even middle-aged--readers in the numbers needed to survive. They may well have entered the death spiral that Philip Meyer, in his recent book The Vanishing Newspaper, predicts will conclude one day in 2043 as the last reader throws aside the final copy of a newspaper. But, as the [Jon] Tester win [in the 2006 Montana Senate race] illustrates, the dinosaurs still have enough life in them to guide — and perhaps even define — our politics.
“Especially at the local and state levels, where the fundamental fights for control of a nation less red and blue than complexly purple play out, daily newspapers remain essential arbiters of what passes for news and what Americans think about it. For all the talk about television's dominant role in campaigns (less and less because of its importance as a source of news for most Americans, more and more because of campaign commercials) and all the new attention to the Internet, newspapers for the most part continue to establish the parameters of what gets covered and how. Moreover, neither broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the level of credibility that newspapers enjoy. So candidates for the House, the Senate and even the White House still troop into old gray buildings in Denver and Omaha, Louisville and Boston, Concord and Des Moines in search of a forum where they can talk with reporters and editors about issues and where those conversations will, they hope, be distilled into articles and editorials that set so much of the agenda for the political debate at the local, state and national levels.”
Read the whole article at http://www.thenation.com/doc
Environmental Activism Training – On January 12, in Mountain View, CA, CI President Katherine Forrest directed a full-day training session for Acterra’s “Be the Change” course, a year-long program for aspiring environmental activists to gain skills and develop related projects.
ENDORSEMENTS
“For all of us who are tired of being on the receiving end of the Republican Noise Machine’s ongoing assault, the Commonweal Institute has provided an antidote. Their report Responding to the Attack on Public Education and Teacher Unions shows how progressives can organize to protect public education and much more. We should all read it and act.” – David Brock, President and CEO of Media Matters for America
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