The Carrott And The Stick

I am afraid that a policy like the one Mr. Friedman is advocating in his column dated July 22^nd 2005, “Giving Hatemongers No Place To Hide” could devolve into the forming of a right wing, political correctness truth squad with anyone who disagrees with current administration policy being labeled as soft on extremism. We have seen this here in America before. Let us not need to be reminded of the McCarthy era, anti communist persecutions.

Criticizing government policy and attempting to understand what motivates terrorism is not condoning it. We can harshly denounce terrorism and at the same time recognize the self serving fallacy inherent in the argument that Islamic terrorists hate us for who we are. No, that is not the reason they hate us. They hate us for what we do. They want us out of the Islamic world. They envy our successes and resent their own failures. Obviously we cannot leave the Islamic world. We need their oil. We still however need to understand their motivations in order to devise a strategy to defeat the terrorists that moves beyond naked military force. We must reach out to the young Arab populations. We must win their hearts and minds.

We have an under utilized weapon. This weapon is American popular culture. We must, with all deliberate speed, use this culture to put a kinder, more attractive face onto the American image in the Arab world. Many religious Arabs will always hate us for the perceived decadence of our culture but many others will be attracted by the hope of a better life and by the hope of liberty which is so characteristic of American culture. Young people are inherently optimistic. We must win the war with the fundamentalists. We must beat them and co-opt this optimism. We must emphasize both the carrot and the stick if we are to win the war on terrorism.