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I heard another, less kind, phrase recently that described this
symbiotic relationship as Bin Laden’s useful
idiots. kwc Bin Laden's little helper US administration lectures about God delivered to Muslims are a
dangerous folly By
Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian UK, Friday September 30, 2005 President
Bush has no adviser more loyal and less self-serving than Karen Hughes. As
governor of Texas, he trusted the former Dallas television
reporter-turned-press secretary with the tending of his image and words. She
was mother hen of his persona. In the White House, Hughes devoted heart and
soul to Bush as his communications director until, suddenly, she returned home
to Texas in 2002, citing her son's homesickness. There were reports that Karl Rove,
jealous of power, had been sniping at her. From her exile, Hughes
produced Ten Minutes from Normal, a deeply uninteresting and unrevealing
memoir. Long stretches of uninformative banality are broken by unselfconscious
expressions of religiosity - accounts of how she inserted Psalms 23 and 27 into
Bush's speeches after 9/11, the entire sermon she delivered aboard Air Force
One on Palm Sunday. Hughes quotes the then national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice: "I think Karen missed her calling. She can preach." When two
undersecretaries of state for public diplomacy resigned this year in
frustration, in the face of the precipitous loss of US prestige around the
globe, Bush found Hughes a new slot. She may be the most parochial person ever to
hold a senior state department appointment, but the president has confidence
she can rebrand the US. This week, Hughes
embarked on her first trip as undersecretary. Her initial statement resembled
an elementary school presentation: "You might want to know why the
countries. Egypt is, of course, the most populous Arab country... Saudi Arabia
is our second stop; it's obviously an important place in Islam and the keeper
of its two holiest sites ... Turkey is also a country that encompasses people
of many different backgrounds and beliefs, and yet is proud of the saying that
'All are Turks'." Hughes appeared as one
of the pilgrims satirised by Mark Twain in his 1869 book Innocents Abroad, on his trip on the Grand
Holy Land Pleasure Excursion. "None of us had ever been anywhere before;
we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty... We always took
care to make it understood that we were Americans - Americans!" Hughes's simple,
sincere and unadorned language reveals the administration's inner mind. Her
ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward.
"Terrorists," she said, "their policies force young people,
other people's daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves
up." That is: somehow, magically, these evil-doers coerce the young to
commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. "Many people
around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in
Americans' lives," she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired
why Mr Bush mentions God in his speeches, Hughes asked him whether he was aware
that "previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our
constitution cites 'one nation under God'." "Well, never
mind," he said. With these
well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proofs for Bin Laden's
claims about American motives. "It is stunning to the extent Hughes is
helping bin Laden," says Robert
Pape, a University
of Chicago political scientist who has conducted extensive research into the
motives of suicide terrorists and is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
"If you set out to help bin Laden," he says, "you could not have
done it better than Hughes." Pape's research
debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic
fundamentalism or some "Islamo-fascist" ideological strain,
independent of certain highly specific circumstances. "Of
the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there first
must be the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the
terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the
combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that
it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by
religious goals. "If you read
Osama's speeches, they begin with descriptions of the US occupation of the
Arabian peninsula driven by our religious goals and that it is our religious
purpose that must be confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful, not only
to religious Muslims but also secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes
their case." The undersecretary's
blundering tour of the Middle East might be the latest incarnation of Innocents
Abroad. "The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them,"
Twain wrote. "We bore down on them with America's greatness until we
crushed them." But the stakes are
rather different from those on the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion. "It
would be a folly," says Pape, "were it not so dangerous." ยท Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior
adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1581335,00.html |
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