DOD Report: We're Screwing Up the War on Terra

In a quietly published report, submitted to the administration in September, but not made available until Thanksgiving, the Defense Science Board has concluded that we're losing the battle for hearts and minds in the middle-east.

From Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian:

They discovered more than a government sector "in crisis", though it found that: "Missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation." As it journeyed into the recesses of the Bush foreign policy, the taskforce documented the failure of fundamental premises. "America's negative image in world opinion and diminished ability to persuade are consequences of factors other than the failure to implement communications strategies," the report declares. What emerges is an indictment of an expanding and unmitigated disaster based on stubborn ignorance of the world and failed concepts that bear little relation to empirical reality, except insofar as they confirm and incite gathering hatred among Muslims.
The Bush administration, according to the defence science board, has misconceived a war on terrorism in the image of the cold war. However, the struggle is not the west versus Islam; while we blindly call this a "war on terrorism", Muslims "in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration" against "apostate" Arab regimes allied with the US and "western modernity - an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a 'war on terrorism'".

In this conflict, "wholly unlike the cold war", the Bush administration's impulse has been to "imitate the routines and bureaucratic ... mindset that so characterised that era". So the US projects Iraqis and other Arabs as people to be liberated, like those "oppressed by Soviet rule". And the US accepts authoritarian Arab regimes as allies against the "radical fighters". All this is nothing less than a gigantic "strategic mistake".

"There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-US groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the US so determinedly promotes and defends." Rhetoric about freedom is received as "no more than self-serving hypocrisy", highlighted daily by the US occupation in Iraq. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom', but rather they hate our policies." The "dramatic narrative ... of the war on terrorism", Bush's grand storyline connecting all the dots from the World Trade Centre to Baghdad, has "borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars". As a result, jihadists have been able to transform them selves from marginal figures in the Muslim world into defenders against invasion, with a following of millions.

Not to worry fellow citizens, inside the heart of every person in the middle-east beats the heart of a person who wants to vote in an election. Food, water, power, a job, oh, and maybe a little less shrapnel come second.

Holy crap. these folks are real assholes, aren't they? Things just look worse and worse.*


*I know, I know, Attaturk beat me to this a few days ago, but as this is my first week I'm taking the liberty of chiming in where I am so moved.