Hard and Soft Power:

Washington Means to Use Both

To Take Iraq and the Middle East Away From Islam

For Muslims, the Middle East is not just a piece of southwest Asia; and it’s not the crazy place you find sand, oil, and terrorists—no matter what FOX news says.

For Muslims, the Middle East is an indispensable resource. We aren’t talking about fossil fuels or geographic locations now, but the treasure of ideas. The area is the birthplace of Allah’s Last Prophet (SAAW) and the final Message he brought to mankind. It contains the places where he lived, worked, and fought. (There are also sunny courtyards of historic masjids where a red-necked Muslim father from a far, cold country might stroll with his little boy and suddenly recognize themselves in the long parade of Muslim history.) On a more basic level, the Middle East is the heartland of Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and the other works that are the foundation of Islamic thought.

We must remind ourselves about these things often, because there won’t be an Islamic intellectual revival if it doesn’t involve the Middle East. The naļve desis and Muslim-Americans who insist that we don’t need Arabic (or those “baffling” Arabs—“the French of the Islamic world”!) to bring Islam back are flat-out wrong.

Unfortunately, the Middle East that Islam once ruled has been squandered.  Today, we have a severely divided patchwork of dictatorships, kingships, and mullah-cracies; all of which oppress their peoples by disregarding Islam altogether or subordinating it to “realities on the ground.”  But besides these corrupted governments, the Middle East of today has a much bigger problem: the United States of America.

Of course, ruling circles in the US don’t want the Middle East’s Islamic ideas. Back in 1979, President Jimmy Carter once said, "The long-range plan is for the West to control the Middle East by the military so it can control the price of oil.” Notice that he didn’t say cheap oil, though many average Joe Americans understood Carter’s words that way. No, the key phrase was “control the price of oil,” making it high or low as needed. Washington recognizes the Middle East as the strategic heart of the whole eastern hemispheric world-island: the country that controls its resources controls the whole earth. Therefore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US redirected its energy into getting military bases into this heartland.

It succeeded. We now know that the US conned Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1990. April Glaspie, Washington’s ambassador at the time, told Hussein, “I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.”

She also told Hussein that the US had no opinion on inter-Arab disagreements, including Baghdad’s border dispute with Kuwait: thus she gave Saddam a “green light” to send in its troops (Klare, p. 38). The resulting invasion gave the US a golden opportunity to consolidate its hold in the Middle East. After the first Gulf War, Democrat and Republican Presidents constantly exploited the “threat of Saddam Hussein” and lied about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as an excuse to position their troops, planes and ships.

Do not believe the promises that America will leave Iraq when the Iraqis “can defend themselves.” The Washington Post reported (5/23/05) that the US is planning four new giant military bases inside Iraq to replace the current ones, a major facility for each military wing. The emphasis is “giant”: these bases will be the size of small cities, with room to station thousands of troops and their families. (They remind us of the enormous “cantonments” that the British built near cities like Meerut and Bangalore to protect their Indian Raj.) According to the Post article, these heavily fortified permanent bases will generate their own power and withstand the heaviest of mortar fire. The estimated cost is expected to reach many billons of dollars.  They are, in other words, the kind of bases a country builds when it plans to stay for a very, very, long time.

In addition, the United States today has over 20 military bases throughout the Middle East. Of course, this number does not include CIA or other hidden installations; and we still know little about the outsourcing of torture and other services to the mukhabarat (secret police forces) of local rulers in “partnership against terrorism.” Nevertheless, the bases keep proliferating as the US’s grip over the Middle East tightens. Below is a map of their locations so far, because, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words

 

But in the end, this map is simply a skeleton. In anatomy, a network of bones protects the body, and more importantly, provides a structure about which the body can flourish.  In politics, a network of military bases is a kind of skeleton too: they project Washington’s military might—its “hard power”—and they are also launching points for the “soft power” that can corrupt the Ummah forever.

Of the two kinds, America’s “soft” power is more deadly to Muslims. Joseph Nye of Harvard University defines this force as a country’s ability to control areas of the world through its “attractiveness” to the people living there, and this grows from three sources. One of these centers about the way a superpower presents itself before the world. If the great power frames policies that seem to satisfy the interests of lesser ones, then the people in the target countries will feel  included and empowered, leading them to accept the great power’s influence as legitimate.

In Iraq, for example, the American occupation pushed quickly for elections to set up a puppet local government, where supposedly all groups are heard.  Of course, this was simply an attempt to create “soft power” to maintain a situation where the US can keep troops on the scene and pull the strings from behind.  It always is amusing to see Washington’s mouthpiece, Ibrahīm al-Jaafari, say things like, “We are going to ask the US troops to stay in Iraq,” or “Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries”, as if they had other choices! These soft power techniques are used in other parts of the Middle East too, including Palestine and Egypt.

A second type of soft power comes from an imperial power’s stated values and ideals. In the Muslim world, the US is selling its ideology of capitalist secular democracy as snake oil the sick Ummah desperately needs. America, however, faces a problem doing this: Muslims of the Middle East already have their own ideology of Islam. To get around this obstacle, the US has started investing hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to squeeze Islam into the Western box.  The US knows this fact, which is why they are now investing hundreds of millions of dollars into this specific objective.  (For more information about how the US wants to change Islam, see the article “Islamic Reformation” in our archives.)

The third type of soft power is a superpower’s popular culture. For the US, this means everything from Hollywood to Harvard.  On the surface, this type of soft power might seem innocent enough: what could possibly be wrong with a McDonald’s or a Starbuck’s in the Middle East?  But we must remember that the governments of the Middle East are puppet governments, with no will to distinguish “bad” from “good” popular culture, let alone vaccinate or protect their peoples from it. In essence, the puppets will allow the US to advertise or sell almost anything to make a buck. The result will be a continuing American effort to plant the seeds of consumerism, hedonism, and secularism into future generations of Muslims through rap music, soft MTV porn, and slick propaganda. 

But let’s make something very clear. We are not criticizing the West’s methods here; because, ironically enough, this is exactly the same method by which Islam was spread.  For example, when Islam reached India it didn’t just magically spread by sufi barakah. Instead, the Khilafah (working through sultans in Ghazni and later Delhi) conquered India and set up a strong military presence there. Under the protection of the Islamic army, the “Callers” preached and spread Islam to the people who either accepted it or left it alone; and this is the way Islam spread throughout most of the world.  The West is using the same method today, applying first hard power then soft power; but make no mistake about it, there are fundamental differences how it applies these forces.

When the West, led by the US, spreads its ideology, it is ruthless. There are no scruples about supplying weapons and money to cruel dictators in Africa and the Middle East in return for control over the locals. Moreover, the West clearly has no problems with bombing and killing innocent civilians in order to achieve its goals, nor misgivings about killing, torturing, and raping its prisoners.  The West has no qualms with desecrating a people’s land and culture by creating demands for pornography, alcohol, and prostitution. Their use of hard & soft power is guided by man-made laws and ideas, like winning votes and making money, Geneva Conventions and UN Resolutions notwithstanding.

On the other hand, when the Islamic State spread itself through jihad, the Muslims never dishonored a land or its people. They avoided killing innocent civilians and torturing prisoners, and they never supported oppressive dictators to rule over people. Most importantly, they never were liars and hypocrites about their intentions.  The Khalifah never hid the fact that the Islamic System had come to free the people from their old man-made systems of life, whether they became Muslims or not. All this happened because the Muslims were guided by Allah and His Messenger, a fact that we should never forget.

The purpose of this article is exposing the US’s true intentions in the Middle East. Washington is lying to the world: invading Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction or removing the dictator Saddam Hussein. The real game is global domination, and the US is looking to stay in the Middle East for decades and decades to come. 

So the question becomes, what can we Muslims do about it today?  As far as the American bases are concerned, not much right now—but this shouldn’t be our focus anyway.  Our objective should be creating an Islamic intellectual revival that can help us resist America’s soft power. (For more about what an intellectual revival entails, please feel free to read our other articles archived at halalfoodforthought.com) (Submitted 7/25/2005)