Shame Game Psychology is a Terror War Tactic [from The International Herald Tribune]

Shame Game Psychology Is a Terror War Tactic

Jim Hoagland The Washington Post [This editorial was copied from The International Herald Tribune; not the Washington Post]

Thursday, October 18, 2001

WASHINGTON George Orwell saw beyond 1984. The British author might as well have been thinking of the challenges the United States faces today as it bombs Afghanistan when he wrote the opening sentence of his 1936 essay "Shooting an Elephant":

"In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me." The essay candidly describes Orwell's own experience as a colonial police officer who detested both colonialism and the colonized - the sneering faces, muttered insults and petty dirty tricks of the villagers he was there to police and at times to protect. The tale: A tame elephant that may be mad kills a local man. Orwell investigates after borrowing a high-powered rifle. As a mob gathers around him, Orwell understands that picking up the rifle has condemned him to shoot the elephant. "To come all that way, rifle in hand, with 2,000 people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing - no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at."

He shoots the beast, thereby removing a real danger to him and the village. The villagers fall on the carcass and strip it for meat and ivory - and add the shooting of a locally owned elephant to their list of crimes that Orwell has committed against them.

The United States has gone on a big hunt with a powerful rifle in hand. Although there are enormous obvious differences - the United States has no colonial face to maintain in the East and since Vietnam it thankfully does not fight wars to maintain international "credibility" - Orwell's essential points apply. The United States is important enough to be hated. As a global power, it can expect no gratitude from those it helps or humiliates, whether by its policies, its wealth or its very existence as a strong independent actor in settings of chaos and impotent.

Orwell focuses on the psychological dimension of the challenge. So must Americans as they struggle against Qaida and the Taliban in the wake of Sept. 11. This is a more important task than the narrowly focused exercises in "message development," the campaign that U.S. officials have belatedly undertaken by giving interviews to Arab journalists and changing politically incorrect Pentagon code words.

It is fine to try such tactics. But they should not be mistaken for strategy. They will not be sufficient to win the hearts and minds of those in the Arab "street" who mistake the United States as the cause of their economic poverty, political oppression or cultural stagnation. Nor will superficial wordplay remove the "shame factor" from the equation.

I encountered the shame factor as a Middle East correspondent. Emirs and cabdrivers alike responded to questions about failings in the Arab world with tirades about America's support for Israel. I concluded I was deliberately being put on the defensive for tactical purposes: I was to be too ashamed to pursue my own goals when they cut across those of my interlocutors. Shaming is a powerful force in Arab politics and diplomacy. A foe or rival who can be made to feel shame is a weakened opponent. Saddam Hussein has created shame about economic sanctions against Iraq and prospered. When America's open, essentially generous society resorts to force or coercion abroad, it is especially vulnerable to this tactic. The shame game helps explain why so little gratitude is manifested toward the United States and NATO for having rescued Muslim populations in Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo during the past decade. To expect Arab and other regimes that wield the sword of shame to surrender it easily is naive.

The United States must be clear in its aims: It must shoot the Qaida rogue elephant and defend itself. There will be time afterward to act on perceived and real injustices felt by others, and America's place in those feelings. But Washington must not be distracted - or shamed - into trailing feebly away from the task at hand.

From Molly Ivins' editorial, below:

While some of us are talking about how to build a civil society, achieve energy independence and settle long-standing international disputes, others are reacting like the waitress in an Austin drinking establishment, who refused to serve the East Indian guest of a regular patron, repeatedly calling him a terrorist and insisting that he leave. That's the reaction gap that concerns me.

I wish Molly would have read the editorial, published in The Washington Post, that I posted, before she wrote her piece below:

U.S. Having Two Debates

by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN — Afghanistan is to nation-building what Afghanistan is to war — pretty much the last place on earth you'd choose, if you had any choice at all. I point this out not to oppose the idea, about which I think we have no choice, but to underline that the task is hard, long and incredibly complicated. President Bush has said that from the beginning, but it cannot be said too often.

There are some signs of what could become a dangerous division in what has been an unusually unified America since this crisis began, and they have to do with a class difference in information. To oversimplify, those who are getting their information from the Internet and/or a broad range of publications are having conversations with one another that are radically different from those heard on many radio talk shows.

This is more than the simplistic jingoism that is a constant in American life; this is simplistic jingoism with a dangerously short attention span. The "let's nuke 'em" crowd is still looking for a short, simple solution, and there just isn't one. More stark evidence of this is the poll of Pakistanis just released by Newsweek, and the numbers need to be read carefully: While 51 percent support their government's cooperation with the U.S. during the crisis, 83 percent are sympathetic to the Taliban, and almost half believe Israel was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fortunately for us, bin Laden and the Taliban are taking care of that theory. I think one of the few mistakes the Bush administration has made so far in this was to criticize the networks for putting on bin Laden — we want everybody to hear him claim credit for those attacks.

While some of us search for the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" the voices on radio talk shows are answering, "Who cares? Nuke 'em." Those inclined to think that's not a bad plan might keep in mind the already-classic lead by Barry Bearak of The New York Times: "If there are Americans clamoring to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, they ought to know that this nation does not have far to go. This is a post-apocalyptic place of felled cities, parched land and downtrodden people."

One downside to the short-simple-answer school is that those folks are going to become extremely frustrated. As others have observed, talk radio is often not so much a forum for discussion as it is a medium for venting anger, so perhaps it serves a useful purpose. But it also seems to foment anger.

In a continuing effort to focus on the practical, I see no reason not to lay out the evidence against bin Laden. It's being leaked to the media so widely one can only assume that's a policy. The Taliban are now saying they will turn bin Laden over to a third party if they see evidence.

We don't want to negotiate? Fine, we don't have to talk to them. We can just make the information public for everyone, with the exception, obviously, of shielding investigative tools. The money trail offers insights on the daunting complexity of what we face. Some of the charitable money we are questioning, from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, goes to the madrasas — religious schools of varying quality. Some offer education, some educate solely for jihad; many of the Taliban are graduates of these schools.

The madrasas, in addition to religious education, provide room and board for the boys of poor families. In Pakistan, where almost the entirety of the budget goes to the military and debt service, the madrasas represent almost the whole of civil society for the poor. When experts talk about building a civil society, they mean from scratch.

While some of us are talking about how to build a civil society, achieve energy independence and settle long-standing international disputes, others are reacting like the waitress in an Austin drinking establishment, who refused to serve the East Indian guest of a regular patron, repeatedly calling him a terrorist and insisting that he leave. That's the reaction gap that concerns me.

Copyright 2001 The Daily Camera

Well, before you so rudely cold-cocked me with Molly, I was going to post something to the effect that there certainly is a clash of cultures between the arab world and the Western world.

I'm quite confident that the Taliban was absolutely shocked that Bush wouldn't negotiate his demands, because EVERYTHING is negotiable in their culture, and a statement that something isn't negotiable is merely a negotiating ploy. They still can't believe it.

But as far as shame goes, America is in no danger of feeling that, at least for right now.

Nobody felt any shame for the way we defeated Japan at the time. It was only later when the girlieman PC crowd gained political power that the Smithsonian depicted the Hiroshima bombing as a war crime, etc.

Maybe the Taliban ought to hit us up for reparations in about 30 years, but for right now they should forget shame as a weapon.

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