It's January 2002. The war in Afghanistan is dying down (or at least it seems so). The President calls you to his office: "Angry Moderate, I want to win this war on terror, put an end to evil and all those who hate freedom. I'm sick of swatting flies. I've got a half trillion dollars or so to spend; I'm willing to put a couple hundred thousand troops in the field; I can handle a few thousand casualties, maybe more. Cheney says I should invade Iraq, and if that goes well, Iran and Syria to boot. Wolfowitz wants to build a democracy in Iraq, no kidding. What do you think?"
"Well, Mr. President, as you know I'm not fond of the 'war on terror' paradigm. We have a problem with Salafi-jihadist terror that needs to be policed through military, law enforcement, and intelligence actions. We're doing a reasonable job on that, and let's budget 50 billion to keep hunting down AQ and other Islamist terrorists and gathering intelligence to prevent attacks."
"The harder question is what to do about the popularity of the Salafi-jihadist ideology itself. It's clearly part of a worldwide trend of reactionary religio-political mobilization that has manifested itself in the rise of Likudnik/Orthodox fundamentalism in Israel, the BJP in India, John Paul II's assault on Vatican II, and the Republican Party in the USA. As such, it's clearly beyond the scope of US foreign policy."
"Tell that to Wolfowitz, Angry Moderate."
"I can never figure out if he takes all that stuff seriously, Mr. President, but back to the half trillion. We can, perhaps, at least try to address two problems: i/the extremity and popularity of political Islam; and ii/its targeting of the US in particular. Most analysts would agree that the extremity and broad popularity of political Islam has something to do with the fact that the Arab world has no working democracies and an alarmingly high percentage of the world's most horrendously despotic states. The rest of the Muslim world is better, but not much."
"Truer words never spoken, Angry Moderate, but what's that got to do with killing Americans."
"Well, we provide huge financial assistance and military goods to some of the more atrocious regimes in Middle East, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, in days gone by, Iran. Second, we provide huge amounts of military, financial and political assistance to Israel and back their colonization of the West Bank. In the 1990s, there were a series of Islamist uprisings in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine and elsewhere that failed to dislodge their local despots."
"This gradually led to what Ayman Al-Zawahiri called the theory of the near and distant enemy. The near enemy was the indigenous Muslim tyrant (or Israeli occupier), who could not be defeated because of support from the distant enemy: the US. If the distant enemy could be forced to withdraw its support, the near enemy could be defeated. So AQ and others turned against the US, just as the Algerian Islamists attacked their distant enemy, France, in the mid-1990s. This is of course a simplification (we'd need to talk about the role of partially assimilated European Muslim immigants too), but enough to base a plan on."
"You're a bore, Angry Moderate, but go ahead."
"So my plan has three prongs, Mr. President.
- Let's adopt a position of neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We all know that a just solution to the problem has been worked out with the Geneva Accords. Let's make them official US policy. If Israel accepts them, we back Israel. If they don't, and Sharon won't, we don't threaten them, we just say that we regret we can no longer provide them with 3 billion a year or with a veto at the UN, nor can we call them a strategic ally. Same with the Palestinian Authority. If they support Geneva, we support them. If not, let them deal with the Israelis on their own. Let's get out of the way. Of course, we support the right of Israel to exist as we do all UN recognized states.
- We stop supporting Muslim dictatorships. We stop giving them money. We stop selling them arms. We stop calling them friends. We don't try to overthrow them or arm their oppositions, but we make clear that we condemn their human rights abuses, support social, political and economic liberalization. We cease to be their distant enemy."
"Nice, Angry Moderate, and you haven't cost me a dime. More tax cuts, I guess."
"Not quite, Mr. President:
3. We take our 450 billion (plus another 5 billion a year from Israel and Egypt if they don't cooperate) and we use it to support social, political and economic liberalization in the Muslim world. We don't need immediate democratization - look where that led in Algeria. We need gradual purposeful reform. Any states willing to open up their public sphere to free debate, willing to allow freedom of association, willing to liberalize their economy, willing to allow some forms of popular representation will be rewarded with lavish financial support. That support won't go into the leader's pocket (well, I'm sure some will find its way there) but direct grants ala Soros to various open society projects, organizations and so forth. If states don't want to participate in the program, fine. It's voluntary."
"So, Mr. President, it's simple. We cease doing what the PEOPLE of the Muslim world hate and start doing what they like. Worth a shot?"
"I see, Angry moderate, that you hate freedom and will let Rove know that you're a likely candidate for another nasty memoir."
What would you do with half a trillion and the use of the US army?