Dignity Promotion Isn’t All It’s Stacked Up to Be, Part II
According to Spencer Ackerman, the concept of “dignity promotion is at the heart of Obama’s outlook on foreign policy.” Dignity promotion is the idea that if the US can drawn the swamp of misery in much of the developing world, it can greatly reduce anti-Americanism and allow “liberty, justice, and prosperity” to take root. This notion is supposed to counter the neoconservative idea that the roots of terrorism can be found in a lack of responsive, democratic governments in the Middle East.
As an example for why a dignity-based perspective is valuable, Ackerman points to the Muslim Brotherhood making gains in Jordan because the government is viewed as illegitimate and nonfunctioning as a result of the run up in food prices. And his argument makes intuitive sense: if we had more humane and sensible food/poverty policies, it would prevent Islamist extremists from being so popular in the Middle East:
And here’s where the choice really is between whether you want to win or lose a winnable fight against extremism. If you want to win, you’ll support what it takes to feed people. If you want to win, you’ll ask yourself who you want a poor family in Jordan to turn to in its hour of crisis: the U.S. or the Muslim Brotherhood. If you want to win, you’ll stand with the politician that wants the U.S. to be the ones that family turns to…And if you don’t want to win, you’ll say that what happens in Jordan is a Jordanian problem and we can’t feed the world and anyway poverty and terrorism are different issues.
At the risk of not wanting to win, I’ll say that while poverty in the developing world is a huge issue (actually, by many utilitarian reasonings, the hugest), it has very little to do with the fight against terror and extremism – and Spencer’s example proves it.
The problem with Ackerman/Power/Obama approach is that it adopts some of the crucial premises of the expansive, neoconservative approach to terrorism. Namely, it aggregates all extremist, Islamist and jihadi groups into one hulking terrorist mass. The approach necessitates this aggregation because the one terrorist group that actually has the capabilities and intentions of attacking the United States (with the exception of groups in Iraq) is Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda has nothing to do with poverty or hunger.
If you look at the 9/11 hijackers or those who have attempted AQ attacks, they are hardly the wretched of the earth. Instead, they’re generally college educated and middle class. Al Qaeda, as opposed to the traditional guerilla/insurgent/political terrorist group, doesn’t actually depend on the type of grass roots support that such a group would generally need to survive. They, instead, depend on the donations and support of ideologically motivated types that want to bring about the global caliphate, get American troops out of the Holy Kingdom and generally hate the United States.
And so, the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Jordan, although a regrettable side-effect of our essentially taking on the British imperial mantle in the Middle East, probably doesn’t increase the risk of anti-American terrorism all that much. Especially in Jordan, where because of the 2005 Amman bombings, the public mood has turned decisvely against Al Qaeda. And although Jordan isn’t exactly the most pro-American place around, it’s hard to interpret their embrace of the Islamic Brotherhood – which, as Ackerman notes, is greatly opposed to Al Qaeda – as a sign that terrorist attacks against America are going to be launched from Jordan. If Jordanian public support for the US is important, than the dignity promotion agenda seems like an odd place to start.
That’s because, when you ask Arabs about why they don’t like the US, they point to policies that the US is currently engaging in – occupation of Iraq, one sided support for Israel etc – not the lack of development assistance or Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Of course, Ackerman supports changing those policies, which would then lead to some change of Arab opinion of the US and help drain the swamp of anti-Americanism. But the effect of that real policy change is likely to be much, much greater than some vague committment to “dignity.”
And here’s my initial post looking at “dignity promotion.”
