Bush Does Not Get It and Friedman Weeps

Thomas L. Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times reminds me of that great scene in the movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days. At the height of the crisis, with the world holding its breath, a four-star Navy General orders a warning shot be fired across the bows of the Russian ship steaming toward Cuba. A Kennedy aide rushes to stop him shouting ‘You just don’t get it!’ He points out to the General that every military ‘move’ is really a political move. This is not a conventional war he says. ‘This is President Kennedy communicating with Prime Minister Khrushchev’.

Today, every ‘move’ (for instance, the failure to stop the sack of Baghdad, setting up Quantanamo Bay, flouting the rule of law, the dilatory prosecution of the guilty of Abu Ghraib) is the democratic world communicating to the combatants in a civil war taking place within the Muslim world, for the future of Islam, between the modernising moderate Muslims and the Jihadi-fundamentalists.

Not ‘getting it’, President Bush is holding up the publication of the Third UN Human Development Report on the Arab World. Why this is such a bad 'move' is explained by Friedman:

‘In 2002, the U.N. Development Program sponsored a group of courageous Arab economists, social scientists and other scholars to do four reports on human development in the Arab world. The first one, in 2002, caused a real stir in this region - showing, among other things, that the Arabs were falling so far behind that Spain's G.D.P. was greater than that of the entire Arab League combined. That first report, published in Arabic and English, was downloaded off the Internet one million times. It was a truly incisive diagnosis of the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment retarding the Arab world. In 2003, the same group produced a second Arab Human Development Report, about the Arab knowledge deficit - even tackling the supersensitive issue of how Islam and its current spiritual leaders may be holding back modern education. This was stuff no U.S. diplomat could ever raise, but the Arab authors of these reports could and did. So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. It was going to be pure TNT, because it was going to tackle the issue of governance and misgovernance in the Arab world, and the legal, institutional and religious impediments to political reform. These are the guts of the issue out here. I waited. And I waited. But nothing.”

President Bush is ‘apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed - as if language 10 times worse can't be heard on Arab satellite TV every day. And until it's changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report delayed or killed altogether. And they have an ally. The government of Egypt, which is criticized in the report, also doesn't want it out - along with some other Arab regimes’.

As Friedman comments ‘It makes you weep’. It should make us weep because we do ‘get it’. The doctrine of ‘international community’ set out by Tony Blair in his Chicago speech of 1999, was lauded by Robin Cook recently (December 3 Guardian) as in line with the latest UN strategic thinking. Maybe they should join forces to demand President Bush release the UN Report (AJ).