hard v. soft power

[nostatic]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4999114.html

I'm not convinced that Kerry can pull it off, but Nye is a pretty smart guy:

GOING IT ALONE Hard/soft power To fight terror requires allies
Joseph Nye
September 26, 2004 NYE0926

Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a professor at Harvard and author of "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics."

Polls show that President Bush has a significant lead over Sen. John Kerry on the issue of terrorism. Despite the statement of the 9/11 commission that it found no evidence to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks on 9/11, the president talks about the Iraq war as part of the general war on terrorism.

Kerry has argued that the Iraq war made the struggle against terrorism worse by diverting resources and by reducing America's attractiveness in the world. Kerry's pledge to work with allies in a more sensitive manner has earned the scorn of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Stepping back from campaign rhetoric, where does our country really stand on this crucial issue? Terrorism is nothing new, nor is it a single enemy. It is a longstanding method of conflict frequently defined as deliberate attack on the innocent with the objective of spreading fear. The attacks on New York and Washington of 2001 were dramatic escalations of an age-old phenomenon. Terrorism today, however, is different from what it was in the past.

Nowadays, instruments of mass destruction are smaller, cheaper and more readily available. Hijacking an airplane is relatively inexpensive. Finally, the information revolution provides inexpensive means of communication and organization that allow groups once restricted to local and national police jurisdictions to become global. Al-Qaida is said to have established a network in 50 or more countries.

Terrorists in the mid-20th century tended to have relatively well-defined political objectives, which were often ill served by mass murder. Governments supported many covertly. Toward the century's end, radical groups grew on the fringes of several religions. Most numerous were the tens of thousands of young Muslims who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, where they were trained in a wide range of techniques and many were recruited to organizations with an extreme view of the religious obligation of jihad.

These technological and ideological trends increased both the lethality and the difficulty of managing terrorism. In the 1970s, the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and attacks by groups like the Red Brigades galvanized world attention at the cost of dozens of lives. In the 1980s, the worst terrorist incident killed 300 people. The attacks on America of September 2001 cost several thousand lives. All of this escalation occurred without using weapons of mass destruction. If one imagines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or nuclear materials, it is possible terrorists could destroy millions of lives. To kill so many people in the 20th century, a destructive individual like Hitler or Stalin required the apparatus of a totalitarian government. It is now all too easy to envisage extremist groups and individuals killing millions without the help of governments.

In that sense, President Bush was correct to make terrorism and weapons of mass destruction the central issue of our foreign policy. But Kerry agrees with that priority. His criticism is over the unilateralism of the administration's approach and the loss of American attractive or soft power that is so important in winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority of moderate Muslims in the world. The hard power of the American military was correctly used to remove the Taliban government that had supported Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, but the administration's use of hard power without a broad coalition of allied support in Iraq undercut our soft power.

If a campaign to suppress terrorism is based on broad coalitions that focus on de-legitimizing attacks on innocent noncombatants, it has some prospect of success. Indeed, one lesson of the efforts since 2001 is that there is no way to avoid broad cooperation. In that sense, the metaphor of war -- with its emphasis on military force -- is misleading.

The metaphor of war was understandable in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, but it creates as many problems as it solves. How long will the war last and how does it relate to civil liberties at home and to alliances abroad? Bombing is not an option for fighting terrorist cells in Hamburg, Singapore or Detroit. Only close civilian cooperation in intelligence sharing, police work across borders, tracing financial flows, and working to pre-clear cargo manifests and passenger lists can cope with such a threat. Countries cooperate out of self-interest, but a country's soft or attractive power, not only its military might, affects the degree of cooperation.

That is why critics argue that Bush's policy in Iraq was a mistake. It squandered American soft power, diverted attention from Afghanistan and Al-Qaida, and created a dangerous new haven for terrorists. If Kerry's appeal for a more sensitive approach to the fight against terrorism means that he would work more closely with other countries and combine American hard and soft power more effectively, then "sensitive" might best be translated as "smart."

[ed martin]

What exactly are you saying? It sounds as if you're trying to present this middle eastern terrorism as some sort of a growing trend, prehaps normal or even a healthy expression of Muslim Fundamentalist frustration. Perhaps therapy should be introduced or perhaps a mild sedative. The events of 9/11 were historically unprecedented. Thousands of Americans just going about their daily lives were brutally murdered for what cause? What, tell me, is their cause? Seems to me it is unmitigated, unbridled hatred. To adress this we need sensitivity? As for Hussien, you mentioned something about nation states and their ability to develope and implement weapons of mass destruction. Yes history so far seems to have demonstrated this to be true. Hussien after all was a dictator in charge of a totaliaristic nation state, hell bent on the aquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Even if he had none in his posession at the time of our invasion, how long before a man with that much power and money and a shared hatred for the West, would it be before some Russian malcontent would sell him nuclear technology? Or for that matter North Korea. As far as waiting for the a coalition of willing nations to adress this problem, that wasn't going to happen. After all, for all these nations, France, Germany and Russia- to remove Hussien was a conflict of interest as far as lining their pockets. That includes the UN. They are sore as hell that we slaughtered thier cash cow. As far as the soft and hard thing goes, history seems to demonstrate the hard approach to totaliaristic dictators as being pretty effective. Remember Facism and Nazism? Lets see, Hitler was piosened by his own hand and Mussolini was strung up by his. Funny thing, you don't hear too much support for either of those causes anymore. Soft power? That seems like an oxymoron. Oh you mean soft power like the UN wields? You mean high minded discussions of moral authority and what is right while defenseless people in the Sudan are being wholesally slaughtered?

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Bill Nye is smarter.

[nostatic]

I think you're missing the point. Yes, dictators and regimes can be dealt with via hard power. Terrorism is a very different story. And soft power comes in lots of different forms.

[nostatic]

I think you're missing the point. Yes, dictators and regimes can be dealt with via hard power. Terrorism is a very different story. And soft power comes in lots of different forms.

And as far as I can tell, we (US) haven't used hard or soft power to try and effect change in Sudan.

[Aurel]

Terrorism and the suicidal nihilism found in Islam may have its root in polygamism. At least, this is what this interesting article suggests:

Title: The Suicide Bachelors of Polygamous Islam , By: Tucker, William,

IN MARCH, ISRAELI SOLDIERS DISARMED a 14-year-old Palestinian youth as he attempted to blow himself up at a checkpoint on the West Bank. After the bomb was cut from his body, the suicide bomber said, "I don't want to die."

In Osama, the grim cinematic portrait of life under the Taliban, currently making the rounds, a prepubescent Muslim girl passes herself off as a boy in order to get work to support her widowed mother. While on the job, she is impressed into a madras school where she and her fellows spend all day reading the Koran and training to become gun-wielding Taliban. When her disguise fails, she is sentenced to death. At the last minute, however, she is reprieved and married to an elderly mullah who already has several wives. The other wives bitterly tell her how their lives have been ruined by their forced marriages. Nevertheless, in the end, the elderly religious man leads the girl into an attic to consummate her new life of servitude.

Both these stories are emblematic of the key cultural difference that separates the world's major religious cultures--Western Christianity, Indian Hinduism, Chinese Confucianism, Oriental Buddhism, and Japanese Shintoism--from the Moslem world. This key factor is the practice of polygamy.

Anthropologists like to recount how 75 percent of the world's cultures practice polygamy. This provocative academic exercise is true but highly misleading. The vast majority of these cultures are individual tribal units counted as separate entities. Seventy five percent of the world's people live in cultures that prohibit polygamy and sanction monogamy.

Among major population groups, polygamy is largely limited to tropical Africa and the Middle East. In East and West Africa, it is a holdover from tribal society that survived into modern life. In small villages, a successful man may have three or four wives. In contemporary urban settings, leading business magnates and politicians can accumulate anywhere from 20 to more than a hundred wives.

Islam is the only major religion that specifically sanctions polygamy. This has a historical context. The nomadic desert tribes that first embraced Islam in the seventh century were already practicing polygamy (just as the Ancient Hebrews practiced a mild form of it during the wandering years of the Old Testament). The Koran's prescription that a man may have five wives is actually a limitation. (Muhammad himself had this number.) Even so, many sheiks and sultans have managed to skirt the Koran. Osama bin Laden's father had 52 children by an estimated 11 to 16 wives.

When Western Europe first encountered polygamy during the 16th to 18th centuries, the earlier flirtations of Greek and Hebrew culture with polygamy had been long forgotten and monogamy was a hallmark of Western culture. Polygamy was an error of heathenism. Then, as the 19th century concept of Evolution took shape, polygamy was perceived as a primitive form of marriage that had evolved into monogamy as humanity grew more civilized.

It was only the discovery of a few true hunting-and-gathering societies in the early 20th century that upset this thesis. True hunter-gatherers are monogamous, just like contemporary Eastern and Western cultures. Since mankind spent its first five million years as hunter-gatherers, this insight has revised the story of human sexual evolution. Anthropologists now believe that monogamy may have been the first step that led to emergence of human civilization. There are several tantalizing clues in the fossil record: (1) early humans traveled in small bands with approximately the same number of males and females; (2) with the emergence of homo erectus, males and females became approximately equal in size (a wide dimorphism usually indicates polygamy); and (3) our earliest male ancestors had lost their enlarged canine incisors, a common weapon in the intense male competition that characterizes polygamous societies.

It is now fairly certain that we emerged from five million years of hunting-and-gathering as monogamists. After that, certain cultures seem to have diverged into polygamy. (All societies have practiced it at one time or another.) But the most advanced and successful civilizations of East and West have sanctioned monogamy and made it standard practice.

This changes the equation between polygamy and primitive societies. Whereas it was once assumed that small, stagnant cultures adopted polygamy because they were backward, it may be that societies remain stagnant and backward precisely because they have adopted polygamy.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT POLYGAMY that keeps a society from advancing? The answer lies in simple arithmetic.

Biologically, approximately the same number of males and females are born into each society. If the society practices monogamy, then every male and every female has an equal chance of mating--there is "a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl."

If even a small number of predominant males are allowed to accumulate more than one wife, however, the equation begins to change. There is now a "female shortage" and competition among men for finding mates becomes much more intense.

Societies solve this problem in different ways. One is the "brideprice," a fee that families charge for an eligible daughter. (Brideprices are the signature of polygamy, while dowries--a bonus to make a daughter more attractive--are the signature of monogamy.) Brideprices encourage men to be more productive, since it costs money to get married. Older and more established men are favored. If the woman shortage becomes too intense, a society may resort to child marriage--where an adult man is betrothed to a prepubescent girl and must wait until she reaches maturity.

The more common outcome, however, is that young, single men become an unattached cohort with very little chance of mating--the "bachelor herd" of mammalian biology. Life in the bachelor herd is often nasty, brutish, and short. Status competition is endless, with males vying for the few positions where they may get the chance to mate. A handful of "social" species (baboons are the best example) have incorporated the bachelor herd into the troop as a kind of praetorian guard, banished to the perimeter but kept on hand for defensive purposes.

Human societies that practice polygamy have tried various strategies for dealing with the bachelor herd. Long stretches in the military were common. The attendants to the king's harem were made eunuchs. The Mamluks, an all-male Egyptian military culture of the 13th through 16th centuries, dispensed with women altogether and kidnapped their male progeny. The best solution, however, has always been to try to harness the violence and point it outward as aggressive defense or conquest.

IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC societies, polygamy constitutes about 12 percent of marriages. This is not as high as Africa (where it can approach 30 percent), but sizable enough to leave a small, solid residue of unattached men. In Africa, these are the "school-leavers," an amorphous urban mass that creates social unrest and provides easy recruits whenever a revolutionary army arrives on the scene. In Islamic societies, on the other hand, the mass of unattached men is tightly organized by religion.

Fundamentalist Islamic societies quell unrest by attempting to control every aspect of sexual and personal life. Women are a scarce resource, to be hidden away and reserved for parceling out by families and the religious hierarchy. This is why women are required to wear burkas and veils and forbidden to show their faces or feet in public. Nothing can threaten the process of doling out this scarce resource more than a little hanky-panky in the ranks.

Young men, on the other hand, are required to repress their sexual impulses by devoting all their energies to religion. In a recent lengthy portrait in the New York Times Magazine, Mansour Al-Nogaidan, a prominent Saudi Arabian dissident, recounted his own enlistment into the ranks of fundamentalist Islam. "You can't have a girlfriend in this society," he said. "It's too expensive to marry and as a young man, all you're thinking about is sex. So the teachers tell us, 'Don't worry, no need now, when you kill yourself you'll have plenty of girls in heaven.'"

In a society where not all men will be able to reproduce, excess males have very little social value. Therefore, it is not surprising to find among this bachelor cohort three major characteristics: (1) an excess of pent-up sexual frustration, (2) an internalized sense of personal worthlessness, and (3) an extremely nihilistic--shall we say "suicidal"--disposition toward self-immolation and violence. Suicide bombers are easily recruited in these ranks.

For decades we have been taught that all cultures are equal and that intolerance of cultural differences is the only sin. This is not true. Different social customs produce different outcomes.

Monogamy is the ultimate biological fulfillment of the principle that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." It is a deeply rooted--although little understood--social contract which says that everyone should have a reasonable chance of finding a mate and having children. The inherent peacefulness of Far Eastern and Western societies is a result of this social contract.

The suicidal nihilism and the love of death proclaimed by Islamic militants, on the other hand, is the fruit of a long and deeply rooted social tradition which says that a certain portion of the male population is worthless, expendable, and not needed for the society to reproduce itself.

Aurel

[ed martin]

Interesting, but how would you account for somebody like Osama Bin Laden, who has much wealth and the capacilty for many wives?

[nostatic]

Originally posted by ed martin
Interesting, but how would you account for somebody like Osama Bin Laden, who has much wealth and the capacilty for many wives?

he's gay?

[ed martin]

He has a number of wives, doesn't he? And besides he would spend all his time and energy at the discos singing and clapping to the musical strains of Maddona wouldn't he? And besides if he were gay he certainly wouldn't have all those nose hairs.

[Aurel]

Osama Bin Laden is not the one who blows himself up.

Aurel

[tabs]

Kerry needs a good dose of Viagra..but with that Harpy of a wife I don't know if that would be such a pleasurable experience...didja ever think thats why he always walks around with a grimance on his face...maybe thats why he is such a proponent of soft power.

[Aurel]

An ugly wife never prevented Clinton from smiling

Aurel

[fintstone]

Originally posted by nostatic
I think you're missing the point. Yes, dictators and regimes can be dealt with via hard power. Terrorism is a very different story. And soft power comes in lots of different forms.

And as far as I can tell, we (US) haven't used hard or soft power to try and effect change in Sudan.

We took it to the UN. I cannot think of any "softer" power......except maybe Clinton's attempts to "get" Bin laden.

[Mule]

Soft power my a$$. This war must be won by making the pain great enough that the enemy submits. This is how all wars are won.

Aurel said: "The Koran's prescription that a man may have five wives is actually a limitation. (Muhammad himself had this number.)"

This is incorrect. Big mo put the limit at 4 but had over 20 for himself (not counting concubines), in the haddith it is said that mo banged 'em all every day (how studly can you get). The youngest of mo's brides he married at the ripe old age of 6 (he was 53). Because mo was such a stand up dude, he didnt throw her "the bone" 'till she was 9. How can any other religion's holy men compare to mo?

[Overpaid Slacker]

Soft power may exist, and may be influential, but it is impotent w/o hard power to back it up.

Aurel -- great article. I wonder if the relationship is causative or correlative, but the author makes a good causation case.

JP

[island911]

Originally posted by tabs
Kerry needs a good dose of Viagra..but with that Harpy of a wife I don't know if that would be such a pleasurable experience...didja ever think thats why he always walks around with a grimance on his face...maybe thats why he is such a proponent of soft power.

"Harpy of a wife" !?

To be fair, i would say that kerry has that problem licked. (ah, yes -- nothing butt soft-power)

[bryanthompson]

"soft power" sounds like some lame ass democrat attempt at making a nuance for something that's really pretty simple. Kill the enemy, then there's no problem. Instead they have to invent a whole new concept of "soft power." makes them look "sophisticated" and more intelligent.

Wars aren't won that way, wars are won by killing the bad people.

[tabs]

Originally posted by Aurel
An ugly wife never prevented Clinton from smiling

Aurel

Clinton is at least true to his ideology...he is an equal opportunity fker...Race, creed, colour, nor age matters to him..

[Superman]

Clever jokes. Namecalling. But I have yet to see any indication that the conservatives here can see the obvious. Military action works great when you have real estate to overcome, and where you have a central authority from whom to seek a surrender.

But I wonder if any of the folks here who are enjoying the "war" so much will ever begin to notice that the clean-up operation for our international reputation will take DECADES longer than the rebuilding of Iraqi infastructure. C'mon. How 'bout one of you guys show us that you have the capacity to think.

[Mule]

I will if you will! According your little bit of wisdom our only hope is to submit & beg for mercy. I say we lay the smack down on terrorists, thier supporters & followers. Make it hurt!