I like Richard Clarke. I don't agree with everything he says, but when I read him or hear him speak, I never feel like I'm being played. So I'm glad that he's signed on to do a weekly feature on national security in the NYT Sunday Magazine. (Update: I think the feature will run monthly.) This week he wrote about the prospects for democracy solving the problem of terrorism. It's like getting a national security briefing every Sunday - except unlike BushCo, we can pay attention to what Clarke says:
President Bush's democracy-promotion policy will be appropriate and laudable at the right time in the right nations, but it is not the cure for terrorism and may divert us from efforts needed to rout Al Qaeda and reduce our vulnerabilities at home. The president is right that resentment is growing and that it is breeding terrorism, but it is chiefly resentment of us, not of the absence of democracy. The 9/11 Commission had a proposal similar to the president's, but more on point: a battle of ideas to persuade more Muslims that jihadist terrorism is a perversion of Islam. Most Middle East experts agree, however, that any American hand in the battle of ideas will, for now, be counterproductive. For many in the Islamic world, the United States is still associated with such acts as having made the 250,000 person city of Falluja uninhabitable. Because of the enormous resentment of the United States government in the Islamic world, documented in numerous opinion polls, we will have to look to nongovernmental organizations and other nations to lead the battle of ideas.
They don't hate us for our freedoms. They hate us for what we do.
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