Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS DO MENTION THE WAR! TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Zareer Masani Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 16.11.06 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 19.11.06 2130-2200 Tape Number: PLN645/06VT1046 Duration: 27.43 Taking part in order of appearance: Zulfi Bukhari CEO of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, London Danielle Pletka Vice President for Foreign and Defence Policy Studies, the American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC Michael Clarke Professor of Defence Studies, King’s College London Michael Gapes, Labour MP for Ilford South and Chairman Foreign Affairs Select Committee, House of Commons Nick Cohen, writer and ‘Observer’ Columnist Dr Abdeslam Maghraoui Director of the Muslim World Initiative set up at the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC Rouzbeh Pirouz Chair of the Civility Programme at the Foreign Policy Centre, London Professor Steven Simon Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC MASANI: Last week’s American mid-term elections were a damning verdict on the Iraq War. Even President Bush had to concede the need for “a fresh perspective” when he accepted the resignation of his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Here in Britain there’s no doubt that Iraq has alienated a whole generation of Muslims. BUKHARI: When we started our activism route six years ago for the Palestinian cause, you wouldn’t find Muslims at marches. You’d find a few, but you wouldn’t find a community. But by the time of the Iraq War, the Muslim community were turning out in numbers. MASANI: Zulfi Bukhari heads a London- based pressure-group called the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. BUKHARI: What they saw this was … is an intervention on behalf of a) a foreign policy that was demonising Muslims and going to kill loads of Muslims for absolutely no justified reason. We had stupid terms like ‘the axis of evil’, which our Prime Minister didn’t correct; b) the link between Osama Bin Laden, oh let’s attack Iraq – we didn’t think that was a coincidental issue; and then thirdly the Israeli link. We’ve had a huge pro-Israeli foreign policy for a very, very long time, whichever shade of government. If you have a look at all the people that were the biggest war chairleaders, if I can use that word, they were always pro-Israeli. So they didn’t go for North Korea, they didn’t go for some of the other despotic regimes around the world, but what they did do is they said let’s go for Iraq. I think there’s a direct link. If you listen to Mohammed Saddiq Khan, the bomber after 7/7, he was talking about foreign policy. Osama Bin Laden when he makes his statements, he’s talking about foreign policy. Now nobody likes what they did, but why did it have such a resonance with a lot of people, and that’s Muslims and non-Muslims? MASANI: As we tread the minefield of Muslim grievances, we might wonder whether Western governments can ever hope to get it right, especially in the Middle East. Even though the attack on Saddam Hussein’s secularist regime was patently not an assault on Islam, that’s how it was perceived in the Muslim street. Would a rapid withdrawal now really limit the damage? And do we need a wider foreign policy re-think to win hearts and minds in the Islamic world? Danielle Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington has been close to the Bush Administration in recent years. She firmly rejects any suggestion that terrorism is the price we pay for meddling in the Muslim world. PLETKA: I think that’s a disgraceful allegation and I’m really almost amazed that it has the currency that it does. People do not decide after being kindergarten teachers that they want to be suicide bombers because they’re watching what’s going on in Iraq. These people are terrorists; they have proclivities in that direction. And for the United States, this is an important war that we need to fight on a front that isn’t in the middle of Manhattan, and from my standpoint the idea that we should be fighting it in Ramadi is far more appealing than the idea of fighting it at the Pentagon or fighting it in New York City. Oh and I’m sure for Britons, it’s something that they would rather fight in Iraq than fight in the London tube. MASANI: Of course the process that turned a Leeds kindergarten teacher into a July 7 bomber was far more complex than any one event. Al-Qaeda terrorism pre-dated the invasion of Iraq, but does it still make sense to see Iraq as a vital front in the so-called “War on Terror”? Michael Clarke, Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College, London, is a seasoned observer of global terrorism. He believes there’s an important conceptual difference between British and American approaches to the problem. CLARKE: I think one of the problems that we in Britain have with the neo-con view of terrorism is that they interpret it as a war and any war is better to fight as far away from the homeland as possible. The danger of fighting terrorism as far away as possible is that you tend to fight it insensitively, you tend to make it worse, and eventually of course you bring it back onto your own streets in that way. MASANI: Is there anything in the argument that Iraq has tied down the resources of Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups in a way that has actually made them less active in Britain or other European countries? CLARKE: I know some of the neo-cons say that Iraq is a good campaign because it has pulled Al-Qaeda into it. But if I was Al-Qaeda, if I was the leadership sitting probably somewhere in Wiziristan, I’d be very pleased at what was happening in Iraq. I mean far from tying Al-Qaeda down in Iraq, it’s tying the West down in more or less un-winnable situations. If I was Osama, I would think to myself well I’ve got the West involved now in two guerrilla wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan. With luck, I might get them pulled into Somalia as well and make the most of that situation. And what I’m doing is I’m making the West fight my sort of war. I’m making them fight the war the Soviets had to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s and I’m dictating the terms of the conflict. MASANI: If the objective was to fight global terrorism, Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan were undoubtedly far more important to tackle as bases for Al-Qaeda. Arguably, the intervention in Iraq has been a diversion from that task and offered a new haven to the terrorists evicted from Afghanistan. But the difficult question now is how best to pull out of Iraq without making things even worse. The Labour M.P. Michael Gapes is Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons, which recently produced a major report entitled “The Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism”. GAPES: I personally believe it would be absolutely criminal for us to just walk away. I’ve met Iraqi politicians, including Barham Salih , the Deputy Prime Minister who was here recently, and others, in Iraq and in the UK over recent months. I believe that we have to support the democratic, federal, constitutional arrangements that there are in Iraq. We have to continue the training of the Iraqi armed forces. I think we may be needed there in an advisory role, in a limited role for a considerable period of time, but in terms of the main deployment military figures were saying when I was last in Iraq in January that it would be about eighteen months. MASANI: And if we did cut and run, what do you think the results would be in Iraq? GAPES: I think we would be betraying the democratic and secular forces in Iraq. It may be that in time there would be some stability, but I think the level of violence would increase significantly. MASANI: The search in both Whitehall and Washington now is for an orderly exit strategy. The window of disengagement, as it’s being called, is expected to be approximately another year. It’s highly unlikely that President Bush will allow his party’s defeat in the American midterm elections to stampede him into cutting and running earlier than that. But according to Michael Gapes, new thinking in the Administration has already begun. GAPES: The neo-con if you like agenda, which does believe or did believe that you could reshape the world and that democracies don’t go to war, therefore you create democracy and you have a domino theory of democracy - I think that’s come up against a bit of reality and there is less support for that approach now. PLETKA: I think there are some evolutions that are bad. The first is frankly a waning commitment on the part of the current Administration to the cause of freedom in the Middle East. MASANI: Danielle Pletka. PLETKA: Three years ago, the United States viewed political reform in Egypt as a top priority. On Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s recent trip there, it didn’t even merit a public pronouncement. You saw that the export of Wahhabism was something of real concern to the United States several years ago, as indeed it is to so many moderate Muslim nations around the world, and frankly in Europe as well. This has suddenly become something we don’t talk about and Saudi Arabia has re-entered the pantheon as a ‘moderate Arab nation’, which is pretty bizarre. So I think that that’s a sorry evolution, a response to some of the challenges that we’ve confronted, and the fact that this has all been rather less than a walk in the park on a Sunday but something that really is difficult. This is something that really is an historic challenge and it will require investment over decades, not just a nice speech and a little fight and then we can all come home and be happy. MASANI: So there’s a danger, as she sees it, of the debacle in Iraq forcing a wider ideological retreat. Her commitment to staying the course on democracy is shared by some on the liberal left in Britain. Observer columnist Nick Cohen was among those who supported the invasion of Iraq as an intervention for human rights. Talking to dictators, he argues, may sound like Realpolitik but could store up more trouble for the future. COHEN: The question posed by 9/11 won’t go away. The question 9/11 posed was: There are all these dictatorial regimes across the Middle East, mainly the Middle East, and they repress their people, and the only outlet for radicalism is ever more extreme versions of Wahhabi Islam and that’s the only place for people to go, and so the answer to that is democracy, human rights, all of that. Now you know you can have what is rather laughingly called a realist foreign policy, so we keep dictators in power, at least they keep the lid on things, but then you’re just going to create more and more radicals competing with each other in ever more violent versions of psychopathic religion. So you know Bush is going to be gone soon, Tony Blair is going to be gone soon and British troops will be out of Iraq - I guess by this time next year they’ll be gone – but that big, big question isn’t going to disappear and a lot of people at the moment want to duck it and say: Oh no, democracy’s not for people with brown skins, democracy’s not for Arabs, you know keep them under dictators- although they don’t quite have the guts to put it as bluntly as I do- but that’s the subtext. MASANI: Idealism apart, enlightened self- interest also suggests continuing to promote democratic institutions and values as part of the long-term solution for the trouble-spots that breed global terrorism. But in the immediate future we may need to accept that democracy can make reform more rather than less difficult. Shortly after 9/11, the American Congress set up a project called ‘The Muslim World Initiative’. Its director, Dr. Abdeslam Maghraoui, spoke to us in his personal capacity. MAGHRAOUI: The point is to be aware of the limits of democracy when it comes to achieving certain objectives. We simply cannot assume that free democratic elections are good for mediating a society’s competition over the distribution of resources as well as substantive, normative issues such as deciding the place of religion in public life. That is simply not the case. I think in a way it is unfair and unrealistic to expect that to happen in the Muslim world. After all, if we look at most Western liberal democracies many of these issues were settled through civil war, through revolutions. They were fairly bloody. I am not saying that in the Muslim world we have to go through a bloody civil war to settle these issues, but what I am saying is that it is best to use consensus, traditional notions of consensus involving traditional tribal leaders. When we use the majority rule that the democratic process implies, we basically have winner takes all and that can make minorities feel very vulnerable. That’s very hard to sustain. MASANI: Through history, the experience of introducing democracy, and not just in the Muslim world, has been that, in the short term at least, it can intensify appeals to sectarian prejudices as rival parties compete for the votes of the masses. MAGHRAOUI: In Morocco, for example, the socialist- led government put forward a reform plan to give women more rights. The Islamist parties, two main Islamist parties reacted by organising these massive demonstrations in Casablanca, in other cities, and the secular political parties that put forward the plan were intimidated. They were thinking about upcoming national elections. They were concerned that they might lose badly and they shovelled the plan immediately. So it took really the monarch himself to revive the plan, working with civil society, with religious leaders, and to pass it to the Parliament. So this is a case where elections will have actually hurt the progressive initiative. MASANI: So a reform-minded monarchy did far more to promote women’s rights than the power of the ballot box. That poses a dilemma for the West when the free elections it urges on Middle Eastern countries return to power Islamists who may oppose our own liberal values. The most recent example was the Victory in the Palestinian elections of Hamas, whom many in Israel and the West regard as a terrorist organisation. Rouzbeh Pirouz heads the Civility Programme of the Foreign Policy Centre in London, which grapples with the delicate issue of how to promote civil society in countries without a democratic tradition. PIROUZ: If the objective was to de- popularise Hamas and weaken them as a force in the long-term, we would have been better served by actually allowing them to govern and to fail, as almost all governments do, than to feed into the idea that whatever failures there are, are a result of our own decision to not give them that opportunity. Perennial opposition has only served to continuously popularise particularly the Islamist groups. If we were to play this game correctly – and it’s very difficult – and actually allow democracy to force for example Islamists to take responsibility and to be accountable for their performance, we would end up in a much better situation where the sort of mythical status that these groups have developed would actually start to fade away. MASANI: So extremists might lose their heroic mystique if they’re given the chance to take power and fail. He’s more optimistic about the democratic process than Dr. Maghraoui. But they both agree that, when it comes to the Muslim world, the West mustn’t only seek friends and allies in its own secular liberal image. MAGHRAOUI: I can say that it should not be based on whether an individual group or movement is critical or not of US or Western policies. We can’t dismiss Muslim voices as radical simply because they are critical of specific policy in the Middle East. I would use general criteria to define moderation. One is really the attitude about the use of violence against civilians. There is no ambiguity in Islamic texts and laws that the deliberate killing of innocent civilians is illegal, prohibited and unethical, so any departure from this tradition is a sign of radicalisation and not moderation. And I think what I’m describing is basically the profile of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. MASANI: But wouldn’t that exclude Hamas, for instance? MAGHRAOUI: Well Hamas - I think that in situations where there is an issue of national struggle, this is very tricky. I mean there is a debate going on whether attacking civilians is acceptable in the case of Hamas, but even in this case the Islamic law would prohibit any attack on civilian innocent life. MASANI: While no one seriously suggests doing business with Al-Qaeda, there is clearly a grey area around groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiah militia, despite their attacks on Israeli civilians. One difficulty is they’re not just political organisations but social movements whose actual influence can be far greater than that of governments. Professor Steven Simon, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at Washington’s Council on Foreign Relations, is a terrorism expert who served in the Clinton White House in the 1990s. According to him, the old guard in the Bush Administration has had a problem getting to grips with new realities in the Middle East. SIMON: What they failed to I guess acknowledge was the growing importance during the years that they were out of office of sub-state actors. That is that groups like Al-Qaeda, for example, could play a pivotal role in the international order even though they were not states or really affiliated with states in a collaborative way. You know this was a conviction, among others, that drove the Administration to respond to the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Iraq. Now in this sense they were wearing ideological blinders and it led them to disregard the possibility that Al Qaeda acted on its own and without the support of a state. These were really strong beliefs that got the US into a very serious jam. MASANI: But looking to the future, what implications do you think this very useful concept you have of recognising non-state players, how would you apply that to American foreign policy looking ahead? SIMON: It’s going to be very difficult for the United States – certainly this Administration but even beyond – to grapple with the emergence of this social movement really. Attitudes about the United States now are, as is well known, very negative, so for example the United States is not just disliked because it supports Israel or because it’s in Iraq; the United States is disliked as a licentious country, one that oppresses women, one that fosters a heedless and brutal form of capitalism. When these attitudes about the United States combine, they become really very, very difficult to counter, particularly by changes in policy. MASANI: And it’s not just the Americans, but the West generally that is the focus of a visceral xenophobia across much of the Muslim world. As we saw from the reaction to the Pope’s rather academic remarks about medieval Islam, the smallest spark can ignite a forest fire of rage. Rouzbeh Pirouz thinks we’re dealing here with a degree of suspicion that borders on paranoia. PIROUZ: Conspiracy theories of all kinds are extremely prevalent throughout the Arab world, in Iran, in Turkey. In fact now it’s spreading to most Muslim countries, even in South East Asia and so on, in terms of various things that the West has done. Regardless of that, it’s been a very convenient way for people in the region to understand the world because it’s quite simplistic. It’s contributed without a doubt to the political problems we have today because it’s led to a lot of cynicism, polarisation and negativity in terms of the outlook of people in the region. And my view is that the other effect that this sort of widespread conspiratorial mentality if you like has is that it actually induces a kind of passivity because it makes people think that in reality they have no power and no responsibility and everything that happens is at the behest of outside and greater powers. MASANI: The most obvious focus for this tendency to blame outsiders for all the ills of the Middle East is, of course, the Palestine issue, still undoubtedly the number one grievance against the West. And while it might exaggerate the power of Western governments to impose terms on Israel, according to Danielle Pletka it also offers Arab leaders a convenient alibi for their own domestic failures. PLETKA: While I think that it has been lovely for a whole panaplea of Arab dictators to mouth their allegiance to the great Palestinian cause over the years, the proof has been in the pudding - they’ve absolutely done nothing for them. We only need remember how the Kuwaitis kicked out 400,000 Palestinians after the liberation of Kuwait in the early 1990s and nobody seemed to care, least of all those in the Arab world. The same of course is true with the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon. People are really only concerned with how the Jews treat the Palestinians, not how the Arabs treat the Palestinians. So as far as that’s concerned, I don’t think that it goes to anybody’s bona fides. I think it is very, very important for the Israelis and for the Palestinians. I don’t think that it is important for the Iraqis or for the Iranians or for the Saudis. Their problems are their own and we have for too long allowed them to shunt responsibility onto somebody else and not take responsibility for their own tyranny. MASANI: But, nevertheless, doesn’t the situation in Palestine allow terrorist groups and Al-Qaeda to mobilise support on the Muslim street in a way that otherwise wouldn’t be possible? PLETKA: I think that it does to a certain extent, but I think that the ability to stir people up on the basis of this has really diminished over the years. The credibility of these leaders when they say no, no, no, you can’t vote in your own country – you, you Iraqi; you, you Iranian; you Saudi. You can’t step up to the ballot box and change your government because I want to hold you hostage until the Palestinians are free. That really rings quite hollow. MASANI: While Middle Eastern governments can’t shelter forever behind hatred of Israel, it’s clearly still an invaluable recruiting aid for Islamic militants. But Danielle Pletka is right to suggest that an Arab-Israeli settlement wouldn’t of itself bring peace and stability to the Middle East. The key to that lies in the transition of Arab states to more democratic and accountable forms of government. As we’ve heard, the West can and must continue to engage with that process in ways that are sensitive to local circumstances. And according to the defence expert Michael Clarke at King’s College, London, the rhetoric of the War on Terror, with its echoes of an earlier crusade against Communism, may not be helpful. CLARKE: A lot of people make this connection between the War on Terror and the Cold War because, as George Bush has said, you know this is a war for our way of life, this is a war to defend what we think of as basic freedoms. But in reality, I don’t see very much read- across from the Cold War to this War on Terror. The Cold War was between different states who all had more or less complete control over what they were doing. The War on Terror is a much more incoherent struggle that is both internal and external. It’s about ideas, but it’s also about behaviour. It’s about criminality as well as guerrilla tactics. It’s a very, very different sort of war altogether. And I think if we try to assume that it should be fought in the way that the Cold War was fought – and that’s what the American military do tend to assume, they take the same principles of : Engage as far forward as possible, destroy, deny, deter; they use all these basic military concepts to say we used to apply them to the Soviets, now we apply them to the terrorists - that ultimately must fail because terrorism is a different type of phenomenon. It’s essentially an internally- driven phenomenon, which has to be addressed by more internal means. MASANI: The Cold War certainly never presented us with the kind of home-grown militancy we now find within some of our own Muslim communities. But there’s clearly also a major global dimension to their discontents and the terrorist networks that seek to recruit them. That’s something our foreign policy needs to address ideologically and not just militarily. But according to the author Nick Cohen, with the best planning in the world we may still not be able to control the outcomes. COHEN: Islamism is a great dynamic force, as dynamic as Communism and Fascism before it. People keep talking as if the West holds all the cards and if only we could get the right attitude like develop the right strategy to win a chess game, we would be fine. It may not be up to us. It may not be that we can have the luxury of sitting here and deciding what we do about it. We may have to react rather than be the instigators. It’s a very comforting and very parochial idea that people sitting in London, Paris, Washington hold all the cards and if something goes wrong it’s all their fault; if it goes right it’s all their success. Not so. MASANI: You don’t think there is a role for disengagement - for saying, as we did during the Cold War, we you know throw up a kind of Iron Curtain or Cordon Sanitaire and say, you know do what you like, a plague on all your houses and just leave us alone? COHEN: You put it far more bluntly - with admirable bluntness, if I may say so, than most people do. That’s really the European position, a Liberal Democrat position of … You know they don’t like being as blunt as you because they like to pretend they’re all principled, moral people as well. Is that possible though? Is that possible with Europe’s Muslim minority, is that possible with borders breaking down, the Internet, the spread of weapons of mass destruction? I suspect that this is something you can’t just close the gates of Fortress Europe on. MASANI: Even if Europe can’t pull up the drawbridge, might the Bush Administration, with its fingers burnt in Iraq, become paralysed by failure or retreat into isolationism? Whatever one thinks of his policies, George Bush has been one of the most internationally-engaged presidents in American history. And even the Administration’s critics agree that its involvement in the Middle East hasn’t been driven by a cynical lust for oil. But could everything be about to change in the wake of last week’s elections? Steven Simon at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. SIMON: I don’t see a new isolationism because you know the baseline for American global engagement is already so high. The United States might become somewhat gun shy for a couple of years, but within maybe five or six years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam in the wake of what was undeniably a significant defeat, the United States embraced a programme of military build up of unprecedented scope, that is since World War Two - this was during the Reagan Administration - and embraced a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union. Okay it took five or six years, but you know in national policy terms that’s really the blink of an eye, so I don’t see why that wouldn’t be the case after the US withdraws from Iraq. MASANI: Of course, the parallel with the Cold War isn’t exact, because in the Middle East we’re not just dealing with states, and there’s no Berlin Wall to pull down. The other big difference is the West’s deep unpopularity across large swathes of the Muslim world, which is bound to limit our room for manoeuvre. London and Washington may well have to be far more pragmatic about whom they do business with, instead of seeking friends in their own image. That’s likely to mean closer cooperation with regimes they dislike in Syria and Iran and an uncomfortable acceptance that developments in the Middle East will remain volatile, unpredictable and largely outside Western control. 1