We've met the dead-enders...

...and they are us:

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted," Rumsfeld said.

The four paragraphs quoted above from the Reuters story are a perfect capsule summary of everything that's wrong with the Bu$h misadministration and the global War on Whichever Noun It Is We're Fighting Today. Anybody who could speak that second paragraph ("Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide...") is prima facie too stupid to breathe, much less run a major government department--or, God forbid, our defense policy.

Modernization has nothing whatsoever to do with winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide. We can be as (post-)modern as we want--or not modern at all--and it will make less difference than a fart in a Category V hurricane if we can't convince Muslims worldwide that we're not out to enslave them all, or to denigrate their religion, or to pillage their countries for whatever material or cultural resources they may have. They're not pissed at us because we're technologically advanced and most Muslims are not. They're pissed at us because they've been convinced (and the Shrubbery has not only not done a damn thing to disabuse them of the notion, but also done quite a bit to reinforce it in their minds) that we're out to wipe them off the face of the earth simply because they're Muslims. So long as we make it clear that's not our goal, and back it up with some convincing actions on our part, it won't matter whether we get that message out via al-Jazeera or by illuminated manuscripts on vellum, or even cuneiform tablets.

And is it any surprise that "our country has not adapted" well to new technologies, given that the party in complete control of our government does not understand technology, does not value it, and actually fears the democratization that technology makes possible? In a party that operates on the imperial model (or, to put it in more modern terms, the Führerprinzip) of one capo di tutti capi and hordes of disciplined, loyal followers, technology that makes it possible for dissentient voices to expess themselves in opposition to the leader, or in contravention of the prevailing party message, and to connect with other dissidents--without having to pass the communications through, or have them vetted by, the party headquarters--is automatically going to be suspect.

That Republican technophobia (even from people like Rumsfeld who use a lot of sophisticated technological widgets themselves) is compounded by the fact that the Shrubbery is, by and large, still mired in the Cold War. That's the ideology they espouse, the discourse they prefer, the terminology and the ideological structure within which they frame most of their policies. Small wonder they're unprepared for the viral nature of modern communications and the tactics of the "insurgents" whom they have repeatedly assured us for lo, these last two years, are absolutely on their last legs. Really, we mean it this time!

Then again, you go to war with the leaders you have, instead of the leaders you wish you had... The fucking idiots.

Comments

[Bryan]

They don't have electricity or running water, but we are reaching them because there's no US.blogspot.com they they are going to read because they also lack computers.

I wonder who waters Rumsfeld, because he's not smart enough to a be member of the animal kingdom.

I don't suppose he would consider the fact that we have killed tens of thousands of people in Iraq to be a possible cause of dissatisfaction with the US around the Persian Gulf? Or the fact that we don't have the native speakers to explain what we pretend we re doing there?

[Michael]

There's also the fact that many Muslims are only barely literate (if that)--and then only in Arabic. Last I heard, the military was scrambling to replace a bunch of Arabic-language students because they'd discovered they all liked dick a little too much.

[Bryan]

The linguist thing was a while ago and it wasn't just Arabic linguists, but it did wipe an entire Arabic class in a 47 week course. {I'm a Defense Language Institute alumnus, and there are several in this area.}

Arabic is the most common language that can be read in that area, the problem is that many Dari and Urdu speakers cannot read their native language but can read Arabic, the same way Jewish kids can read Hebrew, and most Catholic kids could read Latin 50 years ago, because it is part of religious instruction.

The majority are functionally illiterate in their native tongues.

This is one of the problem at road blocks in Iraq, the Iraqis can't read the warning signs.