When the story about Abdul Rahman, a man who faced death for rejecting Islam and converting to Christianity, broke for the first time, I skimmed right by it.
Religious intolerance and inhumane treatment in the Middle East is not really a new or fascinating topic. Obviously this story has received a lot coverage because it happened in Afghanistan, where the U.S. supposedly ended a horrendous theocratic government and replaced it with something better.
President Bush has found building new utopian democracies a little tougher then he thought. I know, a Bush being surprised by a policy failure in the Middle East is nothing new or fascinating either. The Bush administration will never be good at nation-building because it put the cart in front of the horse. The administration's mantra since it gave up on the first two rationales for Iraq was that we'd bring democracy to the Middle East and it will be some kind of shining beacon.
The outcome was inevitable. Democratic elections in Palestine gave us Hamas, Iraq's varying sects vie for votes in power in a de facto civil war and Afghanistan uses Sharia law. Changing the government's structure is no way to change the hearts and minds of people living in the Middle East. All this does is shuffle around the upper classes.
If we want to see peace in the Middle East, or an even loftier goal of a universal suffrage and religious tolerance, we're going to have to reach past the governments and communicate with everyone in the Middle East. So far we've only tried to do this with bombs and bullets, which rarely make any friends. What we need to do is take a lesson from our ancient ancestors.
During the Middle Ages, Europe was at war basically all the time. When they wanted to make peace they would sign a treaty and then seal the pact with a marriage, the idea being warring entities would be tied by blood.
Now I'm not proposing that we ship every woman in America off to Saudi Arabia. Granted there are times, usually in shoe stores, when I'm quite tempted to do so. I'm proposing that we start engaging in a real cultural exchange with the Middle East. We should be encouraging Americans to go there and people from the Middle East to come here. We should offer tuition credits to Middle Eastern students who want to study here. We should also be using funding to encourage kids to spend the semesters abroad in the Middle East.
We should take some of the money we have earmarked for our next war in Iran, and start using it to fund initiatives to improve cultural norms in the Middle East. Want to build an international school? Here's a pile of cash. Want to open an independent radio station or newspaper? Here's a pile of cash. With funding tied to upholding modern standards of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, we could give moderate and progressive voices the funding and shelter that their current regimes could never provide.
These plans won't be cheap. They'll cost us both in increased foreign aid and possibly through retaliatory oil price increases.
But in the end it will be cheaper than waging war after war across the Middle East, because those will never end. Every war we wage fuels imperialist fears and creates terrorists from the "collateral damage." Our other option is to withdraw from the Middle East, leaving another section of the world in the hands of tyrants and despots.
Our best option is to start taking the war for the hearts and minds of the Arab world seriously. We used to talk about it, but that talked died out when we discovered that it directly conflicted with maintaining a military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to start taking the cultural aspect of this war seriously now or we really are going to be in for the Pentagon's newest buzzword. A "long war" indeed.
