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Analysis: Top 10 Ways to Lose The War on Terrorism
The Tavis Smiley Show: May 3, 2004
Connie Rice Commentary: Top-10 Ways to Lose War on Terror
TAVIS SMILEY, host:
From NPR in Los Angeles, I'm Tavis Smiley.
Over the last few days, the Pentagon and the Bush administration have come under fire for a mounting death toll in Iraq and reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US military guards. But our regular commentator Connie Rice says just in case the White House was looking for ways to make things more difficult, she's come up with a list of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror. As always, we're glad to have Connie join us here in our LA studio, and we're gonna jump right into the list.
OK, Connie, number 10 on your list is: Declare that the war on terror is not against Islam, and then reveal that you consulted your Christian God before deciding to launch a crusade during Ramadan on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
CONNIE RICE (NPR Commentator): Tavis, could I make this up? This is actually the way the president framed the launch of the war, and he didn't even think about how the Arab world was gonna interpret this. How in the world could you talk about crusades when you're talking about invading an Arab country. It was just amazing. This is out of Mad magazine and "Saturday Night Live," don't you think?
SMILEY: Number nine: Fail to grasp that through most Arab eyes, you look like a white Western Christian army of infidels invading, occupying and incompetently restructuring an Arab country.
RICE: Once again, how culturally clueless can you get. I think that what we're really failing to do is to understand that there are really two completely different ways of looking at what's going on. And you'd think that the Western and Arab media were covering two entirely different events when you look at Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. Everything from the language, Tavis, invader vs. liberator, civilian carnage vs. what we say as we're taking care of civilians. We're failing to see that what the Arab world thinks is critical to our safety, because they're the only ones who can snuff out this ideology of jihadism.
SMILEY: Number eight of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror: Rely on intelligence from exiles who haven't set foot in Iraq for 30 years.
RICE: Tavis, have they gotten anything right? I mean, has Chalabi--he was wrong on WMD, he as wrong on the uranium from Niger, and he was wrong about showers of flowers greeting the troops. They can't even tell us how many people were in Sadr's Mahdi army, and he's been there for a year now. You know he couldn't tell us anything if he hadn't been in Iraq since he was 14. I don't get it. We're still paying this guy $300,000 a month. We're gonna lose we keep depending on these folks.
SMILEY: Number seven of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror: Enrage the Arab world by condoning Israeli assassinations, and then quickly kneecapping Mubarak, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, and the king of Jordan with a surprise approval of Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan to keep the West Bank.
RICE: Tavis, how many things are wrong with this picture? It doesn't really matter what the plan was. It was the fact that there was absolutely no consultation, no show of respect. This was a completely humiliating series of events that the Bush administration did without even talking to our closest allies in our Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East. I can't imagine this administration being this obtuse. But then again, I hope they're not on a campaign to permanently alienate every moderate Arab and Muslim on the planet, Tavis. What are they doing?
SMILEY: Number six: Continue to fulfill Osama bin Laden's wish list. Explain.
RICE: I'm sorry, Tavis. I think--look, bin Laden has got to be helping the Bush campaign. Everything we've done, in my opinion, has propelled jihadism, Tavis. They were a network. They were a well-financed network before we got into. But, Tavis, they're now a global movement with an eternal recruitment line. How did we do this? We have managed to make every Arab country furious at us. Jihadism is now a global movement. It doesn't even matter whether we get bin Laden or not. It's true that we really do have to get progressive democratic regimes, but the way we're going about it, we're gonna make bin Laden a permanent fixture in our lives from here on out.
SMILEY: Number five of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror: Conduct collective punishment and midnight home invasions where Iraqi men are deeply humiliated in front of their wives and their children.
RICE: When you go on to satellite TV, Tavis, and you go to the Arab coverage, it is astonishing how picture after picture and story after story, it's just massive humiliation. And it's not fair and balanced, but it is what Arab countries are seeing, and I feel like going and getting a banner and unraveling it in front of the White House and it saying, `It's the humiliation, stupid.' Because when you've got countries and cultures that are proud and have been humiliated by both our invasion--even though we've got rid of a butcher--they're still feeling the humiliation, and everything that we do from here on out that adds to that humiliation puts us further behind in the game of winning terror.
SMILEY: Number four: Proclaim democracy and freedom for all of Arabia, and then shut down an Iraqi newspaper exercising First Amendment rights.
RICE: You simply can't have these double standards. And there was a way--nobody read that newsletter that they shut down. It was Moqtada Sadr's newsletter, and of course it's hostile and anti-American. But when they shut it down, he gave it jet propulsion fuel. Everybody's reading it now when no one was reading it before, and we look like hypocrites for not upholding freedom of speech.
SMILEY: Number three of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror: Fire 200,000 Iraqi soldiers, forget to confiscate their weapons, and then leave huge Iraqi weapons depots and nuclear storage sites unguarded and lootable.
RICE: Well, Tavis, the rocket-propelled grenades our poor troops are facing at Fallujah, they came from those stockpiles. What can I say?
SMILEY: Number two: Continue excluding needed allies while embracing psychotic warlords.
RICE: Well, Tavis, in Afghanistan we've got a warlord and a war criminal we agreed to install. His name is General Dostum. He just took over a province and is now challenging Karzai. Are we ever gonna learn to stop funding psychopaths?
SMILEY: The number-one way of the top 10 ways to lose the war on terror, and I can see why it's number one: Keep failing to understand that this is a war against an ideology, and that the military can't win it.
RICE: This is a war within Islam between extreme jihadists, who want to regress to the seventh century, and between moderate Muslims. We've got to make sure the moderate Muslims get a modern view of Islam. That's an ideological war, Tavis. You can't do it with tanks and Humvees and Howitzers.
SMILEY: Hmm. Connie Rice is a civil rights attorney, the co-founder and director of The Advancement Project and a regular commentator on this program.
Connie, I love these top-10 lists. Nice to see you.
RICE: Great to see you, Tavis. Take care.
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