by John Feffer

President Obama is definitely “into” Africa. As much as possible in a world riven by multiple crises, the president has made the continent a focus of his policymaking. Turning his own Kenyan heritage into a personal bridge to the region, he has visited Africa three times as president – [...]]]> via LobeLog

by John Feffer

President Obama is definitely “into” Africa. As much as possible in a world riven by multiple crises, the president has made the continent a focus of his policymaking. Turning his own Kenyan heritage into a personal bridge to the region, he has visited Africa three times as president – in 2009, 2011, and 2013. He has touted his administration’s multi-billion initiatives such as Power Africa to bring electricity to millions of homes, a fellowship program for young African leaders, and the continuation of efforts to fight HIV-AIDS and other infectious diseases.

At a time when criticism is mounting about the way the president is handling the rest of the world, Africa is shaping up to be Obama’s major play for a legacy.

This week, to better position this effort, Obama welcomed delegations from 51 African countries to Washington for an unprecedented summit. As part of its press blitz, the White House released a fact sheet that detailed all the State Department’s high-profile programs including support for democracy in Nigeria, an expansion of civil society activity in Liberia, and an open government initiative in Sierra Leone. Many of these initiatives are indeed admirable, and I can imagine State Department staffers grumbling that the media focus on Ebola and Boko Haram has left no space for these more upbeat stories.

But don’t be fooled by all the talk of Obama’s special relationship with the continent or all the snazzy new entrepreneurial initiatives or the commitment to democracy reflected in his statement in Ghana a few years ago that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.” Most of U.S. policy toward Africa, alas, is business as usual. Yes, the President is “into Africa.” But more often that has translated into facilitating the entry of U.S. businesses into Africa so that they can do what outsiders have done for centuries: extract the continent’s wealth.

Strip away all the modern PR and prettified palaver and it’s an ugly scramble for oil, minerals, and markets for U.S. goods. Everyone wants a piece of Africa: drooling outsiders, corrupt insiders, cynical middle men. “We kind of gave Africa to the Europeans first and to the Chinese later, but today it’s wide open for us,” General Electric chief executive Jeffrey Immelt said at the summit, inadvertently providing a compact definition of neo-colonialism. And for all the talk of good governance and transparency, the political status quo of “guided democracy” with a sprinkling of genuine dictators provides the presumed stability and secure access to resources that the U.S. government, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, and businesses like General Electric value.

First, let’s dispense with the nonsense that China is the only country that behaves with no scruples when siphoning everything of value from Africa. The State Department’s Johnnie Carson provided an unvarnished U.S. perspective in a Wikileaks cable: “China is a very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals.” Well, It’s true that China has developed a reputation for dealing with dictators like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, failing to hire local workers or purchasing local materials, and engaging in horrendous labor rights abuses in the mines it runs.

But China’s relationship is evolving. It is Africa’s leading trade partner, and a million Chinese are living in Africa. “A growing number of Africans say the Chinese create jobs, transfer skills and spend money in local economies,” writes the rarely China-friendly Economist. “African democracy has so far not been damaged. China turns a blind eye to human-rights abuses, but it has not undermined democratic institutions or conventions.”

The United States, meanwhile, presents itself as Africa’s ethical friend. It likes to point to the Dodd-Frank Act to prove that U.S. businesses are scrubbing their supply chains of unethical purchasing. The Act requires companies to disclose their payments to governments and contains specific provisions requiring producers to make sure that they’re not buying “conflict minerals” from armed groups in Congo.

But the first requirement hasn’t been implemented, and the second provision has produced decidedly mixed results. “The first round of conflict mineral investigations was due June 2, but only 6 percent of audited companies satisfied adequate compliance standards,” reports one watchdog organization. “Worst of all, of the nearly 1,000 enterprises that submitted reports pertaining to conflict minerals, 94 percent failed to validate their suppliers’ sourcing tactics.”

Dodd-Frank, in any case, affects only a small fraction of U.S. business dealings with Africa. Let’s look at the larger category of foreign direct investment (FDI). For all the high-minded talk, the United States and China have exactly the same record when it comes to FDI and governance. Both receive a score of -.1 in a Brookings index that puts Japan on top in terms of directing FDI toward more accountable governments (.5) and France at the bottom (-.3) for basically not giving a merde. In other words, both the United States and China basically go where the return on investments is most promising, regardless of political environment.

Then there’s the question of arms sales. No doubt China’s deliveries to Sudan and Zimbabwe are unacceptable, and its sales of small arms definitely fuel conflicts in the region. But according to a Norwegian study of the period 1989 and 2008, the United States provided more military assistance in dollar value to dictators in Africa than China did. In the last few years, the United States has made sales to the following unsavory governments in Africa: Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, and Nigeria.

Since 2001, writes Nick Turse this week in China, America, and the New Cold War in Africa, “the United States has steadily increased its military footprint, its troop levels, and its missions on the continent — from night raids in Somalia and kidnap operations in Libya to the construction of a string of bases devoted to surveillance activities across the northern tier of Africa.” The State Department alone devoted $15 billion to security operations in Africa from 2005 to 2012, while the Pentagon has lavished a larger but unknown sum on its counter-terrorism operations in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and elsewhere. The results have been less than inspiring: coups, collapsed states, and burgeoning terrorist organizations. China, meanwhile, has built roads, made friends on all sides of conflicts, and positioned itself for the long game.

The Obama administration wants us to understand that, like China, it is transforming relations with Africa. “We do believe we bring something unique to the table,” national security advisor Ben Rhodes said last week. “We are less focused on resources from Africa and more focused on deepening trade and investment relationships.”

That sounds nice. But it’s not actually true. The leading trade partner for the United States in Africa is Nigeria, and the leading U.S. import is oil. In 2013, the United States imported from Africa $26.3 billion in crude oil, $3.2 billion in precious stones, and nearly $1 billion in ores like titanium. That represents 77 percent of all imports. The remainder is largely raw materials such as cocoa beans, rubber, and unroasted coffee beans.

Of course, trade is a two-way relationship. As the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said at the summit, “The United States has benefitted from AGOA [the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act] as well, not just from the stability that comes with increased global prosperity, but also from the market opportunities that accompany Africa’s rise. Since 2000, U.S. exports to sub-Saharan Africa have increased fourfold, from $6 billion to $24 billion. Last year, these exports helped support nearly 120,000 American jobs.” In an ideal world what’s good for Africa is also good for America. But too often, these economic deals preserve the same old inequitable relationship.

Consider the new agricultural initiatives. At the summit, the United States announced billions of dollars more in agricultural assistance to Africa. Although some of the funds will go to support local farmers growing food for domestic consumption, like sorghum, most of the money comes in the form of pledges by corporations like Coca Cola to source from Africa. Farmers make up two-thirds of the workforce in Africa. The challenge is to make their farming more sustainable. Tying farmers into volatile market relationships with immense multinationals is a spin of the roulette wheel, not a sure way of lifting Africa out of its dependency on the outside world.

Because of its “resource curse,” Africa’s oil and minerals and coffee beans have profited a narrow elite that has served as the middlemen to outsiders. This curse has undermined democracy and embedded corruption into the very circulatory system of the continent. If we were really “into Africa,” we would work to ensure that these resources benefit the largest number of Africans possible.

Some of what the Obama administration has done points in the right direction. But it is overwhelmed by the more powerful plays of the Pentagon and the multinationals. The president should be reining in these powerful players rather than opening the door wider for them to get into Africa. Only if this happens can the resource curse become a resource blessing. It’s the rare country like Norway that has accomplished this feat. But if Obama can help make this happen for Africa, his legacy would indeed be secure.

This article was first published by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright FPIF.

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By John Feffer

via Tom Dispatch

Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all [...]]]> Obama’s “Smart Power” Foreign Policy Not Smart at All

By John Feffer

via Tom Dispatch

Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global — has been a smart move politically at home.  It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.

Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.

His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts — muscle, backbone, cojones– to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis.

Obama didn’t take the bait. “When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one — the only one — who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start,” his response ad intoned. “Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.”

Like most successful politicians, Barack Obama could be all things to all people. His opposition to the Iraq War made him the darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace candidate, for he always promised, as in his response to that phone call ad, to shift U.S. military power toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr. Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama’s protean abilities have come to the fore in his approach to what once was called “soft power,” a term Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. For more than 20 years, Nye has been urging U.S. policymakers to find different ways of leading the world, exercising what he termed “power with others as much as power over others.”

After 9/11, when “soft” became an increasingly suspect word, Washington policymakers began to use “smart power” to denote a menu of expanded options that were to combine the capabilities of both the State Department and the Pentagon. “We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural — picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation,” Hillary Clinton said at her confirmation hearing for her new role as secretary of state. “With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.”

But diplomacy has not been at the vanguard of Obama’s foreign policy. From drone attacks in Pakistan and cyber-warfare against Iran to the vaunted “Pacific pivot” and the expansion of U.S. military intervention in Africa, the Obama administration has let the Pentagon and the CIA call the shots. The president’s foreign policy has certainly been “smart” from a domestic political point of view. With the ordering of the Seal Team Six raid into Pakistan that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and “leading from behind” in the Libya intervention, the president has effectively removed foreign policy as a Republican talking point. He has left the hawks of the other party with very little room for maneuver.

But in its actual effects overseas, his version of “smart power” has been anything but smart. It has maintained imperial overstretch at self-destructive expense, infuriated strategic competitors like China, hardened the position of adversaries like Iran and North Korea, and tried the patience of even long-time allies in Europe and Asia.

Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart — and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber.

Mr. Softy Goes to Washington

Mr. Softy went to Washington in 2008 and discovered a backbone. That, at least, is how many foreign policy analysts described the “maturation” process of the new president. “Barack Obama is a soft power president,” wrote theFinancial Times’s Gideon Rachman in 2009. “But the world keeps asking him hard power questions.”

According to this scenario, Obama made quiet overtures to North Korea, and Pyongyang responded by testing a nuclear weapon. The president went to Cairo and made an impressive speech in which he said, among other things, “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But individuals and movements in the Muslim world — al-Qaeda, the Taliban — continued to challenge American power. The president made a bold move to throw his support behind nuclear abolition, but the nuclear lobby in the United States forced him to commit huge sums to modernizing the very nuclear complex he promised to negotiate out of existence.

According to this scenario, Obama came to Washington with a fistful of carrots to coax the world, nonviolently, in the direction of peace and justice. The world was not cooperative, and so, in practice, those carrots began to function more like orange-colored sticks.

This view of Obama is fundamentally mistaken. Mr. Softy was a straw man created from the dreams of his dovish supporters and the nightmares of his hawkish opponents. That Obama avatar was useful during the primary and the general election campaign to appeal to a nation weary of eight years of cowboy globalism. Like a campaign advisor ill-suited to the bruising policy world of Washington, Mr. Softy didn’t survive the transition.

Consider, for example, Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009. This inspiring speech should have signaled a profound shift in U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. But what Obama didn’t mention in his speech was his earlier conversation with outgoing president George W. Bush in which he’d secretlyagreed to continue two major Bush initiatives: the CIA’s unmanned drone air war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and the covert program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program with computer viruses.

Obama didn’t just continue these programs; he amplified them. The result has been an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military power through unmanned drones in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan as well as Somalia and Yemen. The use of drones, and the civilian casualties they’ve caused, has in turn enflamed public opinion around the world, with the favorability rating of the United States under Obama in majority Muslim countries falling to a new low of 15% in 2012, lower, that is, than the rock-bottom standard set by the Bush administration.

The drone campaign has undermined other smart power approaches, including that old standby diplomacy, not only by antagonizing potential interlocutors but also by killing a good number of them. Along with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, often cited as one of Obama’s signal accomplishments, the drone war has by now provoked a slow-motion rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad.

The covert cyber-war initiative against Iran’s nuclear program, conducted with Israeli cooperation, produced both the Stuxnet worm, which wreaked havoc on Iranian centrifuges, and the Flame virus, which monitored its computer network. Instead of vigorously pursuing diplomatic solutions — such as the nuclear compromise that Brazil and Turkey cobbled together in 2010 that might have defused the situation and guaranteed a world without an Iranian bomb — the Obama administration acted secretly and aggressively. If the United States had been the target of such a cyber attack, Washington would have considered it an act of war. Meanwhile, the United States has set a dangerous precedent for future attacks in this newest theater of operations and unleashed a weapon that could even be reverse-engineered and sent back in our direction.

Nor was diplomacy ever actually on the table with North Korea. The Obama team came in with a less than half-hearted commitment to the Six Party process — the negotiations to address North Korea’s nuclear program among the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas, which had stalled in the final months of George W. Bush’s second term. In the National Security Council, Asia point man Jeffrey Bader axed a State Department cable that would have reassured the North Koreans that a U.S. policy of engagement would continue. “Strategic patience” became the euphemism for doing nothing and letting hawkish leaders in Tokyo and Seoul unravel the previous years of engagement. After some predictably belligerent rhetoric from Pyongyang, followed by a failed missile launch and a second nuclear test, Obama largely dispensed with diplomacy altogether.

Hillary Clinton did indeed move quickly to increase the size of the State Department budget to hire more people and implement more programs to beef up diplomacy. That budget grew by more than 7% in 2009-2010. But that didn’t bring the department of diplomacy up to even $50 billion. In fact, it is still plagued by a serious shortage of diplomats and, as State Department whistleblower Peter van Buren has written, “The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier.” Meanwhile, despite a persistent recession, the Pentagon budget continued to rise during the Obama years — a roughly 3% increase in 2010 to about $700 billion.  (And Mitt Romney promises to hike it even more drastically.)

Like most Democratic politicians, Obama has been acutely aware that hard power is a way of establishing political invulnerability in the face of Republican attacks. But the use of hard power to gain political points at home is a risky affair. It is the nature of this “dumb power” to make the United States into a bigger target, alienate allies, and jeopardize authentic efforts at multilateralism.

A Kinder, Gentler Empire

Despite its rhetorical flexibility, “smart power” has several inherent flaws. First, it focuses on the means of exercising power without questioning the ends toward which power is deployed. The State Department and the Pentagon will tussle over which agency can more effectively win the hearts and minds of Afghans. But neither agency is willing to rethink the U.S. presence in the country or acknowledge how few hearts and minds have been won.

As with Afghanistan, so with the rest of the world. For all his talk of power “with” rather than “over,” Joseph Nye has largely been concerned with different methods by which the United States can maintain dominion. “Smart power” is not about the inherent value of diplomacy, the virtues of collective decision-making, or the imperatives of peace, justice, or environmental sustainability. Rather it is a way of calculating how best to get others to do what America wants them to do, with the threat of a drone strike or a Special Forces incursion always present in the background.

The Pentagon, at least, has been clear about this point. In 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued for “strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” The Pentagon has long realized that a toolbox with only a single hammer in it handicaps the handyman, but it still persists in seeing a world full of nails.

At a more practical level, “smart power” encounters problems because in this “integration,” the Pentagon always turns out to be the primary partner.  As a result, the work of diplomats, dispensers of humanitarian aid, and all the other “do-gooders” who attempt to distinguish their work from soldiers is compromised. After decades of trying to persuade their overseas partners that they are not simply civilian adjuncts to the Pentagon, the staff of the State Department has now jumped into bed with the military. They might as well put big bull’s eyes on their backs, and there’s nothing smart about that.

“Smart power” also provides a lifeline for a military that might face significant cuts if Congress’s sequestration plan goes through. NATO has already shown the way. Its embrace of “smart defense” is a direct response to military cutbacks by European governments. The Pentagon is deeply worried that budget-cutters will follow the European example, so it is doing what corporations everywhere attempt during a crisis. It is trying to rebrand its services.

Always in search of a mission, the Pentagon now has its fingers in just about every pie in the bakery. The Marines are doing drug interdiction in Guatemala. Special Operations forces are constructing cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The U.S. Navy provided post-disaster relief in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, while the U.S. Army did the same in Haiti. In 2011, the Africa Command budgeted $150 million for development and health care.

The Pentagon, in other words, has turned itself into an all-purpose agency, even attempting “reconstruction” along with State and various crony corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is preparing for the impact of climate change, pouring R & D dollars into alternative energy, and running operations in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been smart about its power by spreading it everywhere.

Dumb vs. Dumber

As president, Obama has shown no hesitation to use force. But his use of military power has not proven any “smarter” than that of his predecessor. Iran and North Korea pushed ahead with their nuclear programs when diplomatic alternatives were not forthcoming. Nuclear power Pakistan is closer to outright anarchy than four years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, and an arms race is heating up in East Asia, fueled in part by the efforts of the United States and its allies to box in China with more air and sea power.

In one way, however, Obama has been Mr. Softy. He has shown no backbone whatsoever in confronting the bullies already in America’s corner. He has done little to push back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupation policies. He hasn’t confronted Saudi Arabia, the most autocratic of U.S. allies. In fact, he has leveraged the power of both countries — toward Iran, Syria, Bahrain. A key component of “smart power” is outsourcing the messy stuff to others.

Make no mistake: Mitt Romney is worse. A Romney-Ryan administration would be a step backward to the policies of the early Bush years. President Romney would increase military spending, restart a cold war with Russia, possibly undertake a hot war against Iran, deep-six as many multilateral agreements as he could, and generally resurrect the Ugly American policies of the recent past.

But President Romney wouldn’t fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy. After all, President Obama has largely preserved the post-9/11 fundamentals laid down by George W. Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.

Obama has mentioned, sotto voce, that Mr. Softy might resurface if the incumbent is reelected. Off mic, as he mentioned in an aside to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting in Seoul last spring, he has promised to show more “flexibility” in his second term. This might translate into more arms agreements with Russia, more diplomatic overtures like the effort with Burma, and more spending of political capital to address global warming, non-proliferation, global poverty, and health pandemics.

But don’t count on it. The smart money is not with Obama’s smart power. Mr. Softy has largely been an electoral ploy. If he’s re-elected, Obama will undoubtedly continue to act as Mr. Stick. Brace yourself for four more years of dumb power — or, if he loses, even dumber power.

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is an Open Society Fellow for 2012-13 focusing on Eastern Europe. He is the author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books). His writings can be found on his website johnfeffer.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power — hard, soft, smart, and dumb — click here or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2012 John Feffer

Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

By John Feffer

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It [...]]]> Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?

Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

By John Feffer

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.

It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.

Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao.  He will be the man expected to preside over the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.

But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk, or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang now has to deliver somehow on that promise — at a time of food shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty. This dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous opportunities for key Pacific powers.

WWashington, which has focused for years on North Korea’s small but developing nuclear arsenal, has barely been paying attention to the larger developments in Asia. Nor will Asia’s looming transformation be a hot topic in our own presidential election next year. We’ll be arguing about jobs, health care, and whether the president is a socialist or his Republican challenger a nutcase. Aside from some ritual China-bashing, Asia will merit little mention.

President Obama, anxious about giving ammunition to his opponent, will be loath to fiddle with Asia policy, which is already on autopilot. So while others scramble to remake East Asia, the United States will be suffering from its own peculiar form of continental drift.

Pyongyang Turns on the Charm

On April 15, 1912, in an obscure spot in the Japanese empire, a baby was born to a Christian family proud of its Korean heritage. The 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and dynastic leader, is coming up next year. Ordinarily, such an event would be of little importance to anyone other than 24 million North Koreans and a scattering of Koreans elsewhere. But this centennial also marks the date by which the North Korean regime has promised to finally turn things around.

Despite its pretensions to self-reliance, Pyongyang has amply proven that it can only get by with a lot of help from its friends. Until recently, however, North Korea was not exactly playing well with others.

It responded in a particularly hardline fashion, for instance, to the more hawkish policies adopted by new South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, when he took office in February 2008. The shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Kumgang resort that July, the sinking of the South Korean naval ship the Cheonan in March 2010 (Pyongyang still claims it was not the culprit), and the shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island later that year all accelerated a tailspin in north-south relations. During this period, the North tested a second nuclear device, prompting even its closest ally, China, to react in disgust and support a U.N. declaration of condemnation. Pyongyang also managed to further alienate Washington by revealing in 2010 that it was indeed pursuing a program to produce highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, something it had long denied.

These actions had painful economic consequences. South Korea cancelled almost all forms of cooperation. The North’s second nuclear test scotched any incipient economic rapprochement with the United States.  (The Bush administration had removed North Korea from its terrorism list, and there had been hints that other longstanding sanctions might sooner or later be dropped as part of a warming in relations.)

Only the North’s relationship with China was unaffected, largely because Beijing is gobbling up significant quantities of valuable minerals and securing access to ports in exchange for just enough food and energy to keep the country on life support and the regime afloat. Between 2006 and 2009, an already anemic North Korean economy contracted, and chronic food shortages again became acute.

To these economic travails must be added political ones. The country’s leadership is long past retirement, with 70-year-old leader Kim Jong Il younger than most of the rest of the ruling elite. He has designated his youngest son, Kim Jeong Eun, as his successor, but the only thing that this mystery boy seems to have going for him is his resemblance to his grandfather, Kim Il Sung.

Still, North Korea seems no closer to full-scale collapse today than during previous crises — like the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. A thoroughly repressive state and zero civil society seem to insure that no color revolution or “Pyongyang Spring” is in the offing. Waiting for the North Korean regime to go gently into the night is like waiting for Godot.

But that doesn’t mean change isn’t in the air.  To jumpstart its bedraggled economy and provide a political boost for the next leader in the year of kangsong taeguk, North Korea is suddenly in a let’s-make-a-deal mode.

Kim Jong Il’s recent visit to Siberia to meet Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, for instance, raised a few knowledgeable eyebrows. Conferring at a Russian military base near Lake Baikal, for the first time in a long while the North Korean leader even raised the possibility of a moratorium on nuclear weapons production and testing. More substantially, he concluded a preliminary agreement on a natural gas pipeline that could in itself begin to transform the politics of the region. It would transfer gas from the energy-rich Russian Far East through North Korea to economically booming but energy-hungry South Korea. The deal could net Pyongyang as much as $100 million a year.

The North’s new charm offensive wouldn’t have a hope in hell of succeeding if a similar change of heart weren’t also underway in the South.

The Bulldozer’s Miscalculation

On taking office, the conservative South Korean president Lee Myung Bak, known as “the Bulldozer” when he headed up Hyundai’s engineering division, promised to put Korean relations on a new footing. Ten years of “engagement policy” with the North had, according to Lee, produced an asymmetrical relationship. The South, he insisted, was providing all the cash, and the North was doing very little in exchange. Lee promised a relationship based only on quid pro quos.

What he got instead was tit for tat: harsher rhetoric and military action. Ultimately, although the North made no friends below the 38th parallel that way, the new era of hostility didn’t help the Lee administration either. South Koreans generally watched in horror as a relatively peaceful relationship veered dangerously close to military conflict.

Lee’s ruling party suffered a loss in last April’s by-elections, and in August, he replaced his hardline “unification” minister with a more conciliatory fellow. Still insisting on an apology for the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong shelling, the ruling party is nevertheless looking for ways to restore commercial ties and again provide humanitarian assistance to the North. Since the summer, representatives from North and South have met twice to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Although the two sides haven’t made substantial progress, the stage is set for the resumption of the Six Party Talks between the two Koreas, Russia, Japan, China, and the United States that broke off in 2007.

Even if the opposition party doesn’t sweep the conservatives out of power in the 2012 elections, South Korea will likely abandon Lee’s tough-guy approach. In September, his likely successor as the ruling party candidate in 2012, Park Geun-Hye, openly criticized Lee’s approach in an article in Foreign Affairs that called instead for “trustpolitik.”

One project Park singled out for mention is an inter-Korean railroad line that would “perhaps transform the Korean Peninsula into a conduit for regional trade.” That’s an understatement. Restoring the line and hooking it up to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad would connect the Korean peninsula to Europe, reduce the shipment time of goods from one end of Eurasia to the other by about two weeks, and save South Korea up to $34 to $50 per ton in shipping costs. Meanwhile, the natural gas pipeline, which South Korea approved at the end of September, could reduce its gas costs by as much as 30%. For the world’s second largest natural gas importer, this would be a major savings.

Serious economic steps toward Korean reunification are not just a dream, in other words, but good business, too. Even in the worst moments of the recent period of disengagement, it’s notable that the two countries managed to preserve the Kaesong industrial complex located just north of the Demilitarized Zone. Run by South Korean managers and employing more than 45,000 North Koreans, the business zone is a boon to both sides. It helps South Korean enterprises facing competition from China, even as it provides hard currency and well-paying jobs to the North. The railroad and the pipeline would offer similar mutual benefits.

According to conventional wisdom, North Korea has a single bargaining chip, its small nuclear arsenal, which it will never give up. But a real estate agent would look at the situation differently. What North Korea really has is “location, location, location,” and it finally seems ready to cash in on its critical position at the heart of the world’s most vital economic region.

The train line would bind the world’s two biggest economic regions into a huge Eurasian market. And the pipeline, coupled with green energy projects in China, South Korea, and Japan, might begin to wean East Asia from its dependency on Middle Eastern oil and thus on the U.S. military to secure access and protect shipping routes.

Thought of another way, these projects and others like them lurking in the Eurasian future are significant not just for what they connect, but what they leave out: the United States.

Out in the Cold

The Bush administration anticipated Lee Myung Bak’s approach to North Korea by chucking the carrot and waving the stick. By 2006, however, Washington had made a U-turn and was beginning to engage Pyongyang seriously. The Obama administration took another tack, eventually adopting a policy of “strategic patience,” a euphemism for ignoring North Korea and hoping it wouldn’t throw a tantrum.

It hasn’t worked. North Korea has plunged full speed ahead with its nuclear program.  The U.S./NATO air campaign against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who had given up his nuclear program to secure better relations with the West, only reinforced Pyongyang’s belief that nukes are the ultimate guarantor of its security. The Obama administration continues to insist that the regime show its seriousness about denuclearization as a precondition for resuming talks. Even though Washington recently sent a small amount of flood relief, it refuses to offer any serious food assistance. Indeed, in June, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the agriculture bill that prohibited all food aid to the country, regardless of need.

Though the administration will likely send envoy Stephen Bosworth to North Korea later this year, no one expects major changes in policy or relations to result. With a presidential election year already looming, the Obama administration isn’t likely to spend political capital on North Korea — not when Republicans would undoubtedly label any new moves as “appeasement” of a “terrorist state.”

Obama came into office with a desire to shift U.S. policy away from its Middle Eastern focus and reassert America’s importance as a Pacific power, particularly in light of China’s growing regional influence. But the president has invested more in drones than in diplomacy, sustaining the war on terror at the expense of the sort of bolder engagement of adversaries that Obama hinted at as a candidate. In the meantime, the administration is prepared to just wait it out until the next elections are history — and by then, it might already be too late to catch up with regional developments.

After all, Washington has watched China become the top trading partner of nearly every Asian country. Similarly, the economic links between China and Taiwan have deepened considerably, a reality to which even that island’s opposition party must bow. The Obama administration’s recent decision not to upset Beijing too much by selling advanced F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, opting instead for a mere upgrade of the F-16s it bought in the 1990s, is a clear sign of relative U.S. decline in the region, suggests big-picture analyst Robert Kaplan.

Then there’s the sheer cost of the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, which looks like a juicy target to budget cutters in Washington. Key members of Congress like Senators John McCain and Carl Levin have already signaled their anxiety about the high price tag of a planned “strategic realignment” in Asia that involves, among other things, an expansion of the U.S. military base in Guam and an upgrading of facilities in Okinawa. In response to a question about potential military cuts, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has confirmed that reducing U.S. troops and bases overseas is “on the table.”

The future of East Asia is hardly a given, nor is an economic boom and regional integration the only possible scenario. Virtually every country in the region has hiked its military spending.  Tension points abound, particularly in potentially energy-rich waters that various countries claim as their own. China’s staggering economic growth is not likely to be sustainable in the long term. And North Korea could ultimately decide to make do as an economically destitute but adequately strong military power.

Still, the trend lines for 2012 and after point to greater engagement on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and between Asia and Europe. Right now, the United States, for all of its military clout, is not really part of this emerging picture. Isn’t it time for America to gracefully acknowledge that its years as the Pacific superpower are over and think creatively about how to be a pacific partner instead?

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 John Feffer

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com

The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, [...]]]> The Lies of Islamophobia
The Three Unfinished Wars of the West against the Rest
By John Feffer

The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut down the finest soldiers in Charlemagne’s command, including his brave nephew Roland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy, Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.

The Song of Roland, an eleventh century rendering in verse of an eighth century battle, is a staple of Western Civilization classes at colleges around the country. A “masterpiece of epic drama,” in the words of its renowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for students before they delve into readings on the Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.

The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood. The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all. In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basques furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emerged from a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. Only later, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the First Crusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of an emerging cross-against-crescent holy war.

Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal “clash of civilizations” between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammed. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has, in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with as enemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in southern France.

Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washington performed a similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled “godless communists” for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an attempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran into epic struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces of evil. In recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again by portraying Arab nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalists when we invaded Iraq and prepared to topple the regime in Syria.

Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A clearly Christian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant number of Americans. The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closet fundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become an extremist “mosque at Ground Zero” in the TV appearances, political speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing activists.

This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself — as if Ann Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity — comes at a somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic rhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001, had been on the wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current American president had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the controversial acronym GWOT, or “Global War on Terror.”

All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on an ugly chapter in our history. Yet it’s as if we remain fixed in the eleventh century in a perpetual battle of “us” against “them.” Like the undead rising from their coffins, our previous “crusades” never go away.  Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of the millennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over and the third has been rhetorically reduced to “overseas contingency operations.” The Crusades, which finally petered out in the seventeenth century, continue to shape our global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements of the anti-communism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist adversary. And the Global War on Terror, which President Obama quietly renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into the wars that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim that they are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. However, what really keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-looking Islamic fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and global influence of modern, mainstream Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grappling with modernity abound, from Turkey’s new foreign policy and Indonesia’s economic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of providing reassurance, however, these trends only incite Islamophobes to intensify their battles to “save” Western civilization.

As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness — and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan — Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life. Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.

The Crusades Continue

With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of both harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases, an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos of spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. What makes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency to lump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then to exaggerate how threatening they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible for at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.

Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslim fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasists about a “global caliphate” continue to plot attacks on perceived enemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan’s Taliban and Somalia’s al-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. But Islamophobes confuse these small parts with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.

Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Our irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened in the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of the Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherently violent, Muslims want to take over the world, and Muslims can’t be trusted.

The myth of Islam as a “religion of the sword” was a staple of Crusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim leaders and armies — and there were some — rarely rivaled the slaughters of the Crusaders, who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable bloodbath. “The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors,” writes Christopher Tyerman in God’s War. “Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred.” Jerusalem’s Jews suffered a similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph ‘Umar put no one to the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged “no compulsion in religion.”

This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam “teaches violence,” televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed in 2005. “The Koran teaches violence and most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in violence,” was the way Major General Jerry Curry (U.S. Army, ret.), who served in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, put it.

The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did indeed imagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House of Islam). By the time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of desires when it came to extending the Pope’s authority to every corner of the globe. Even that early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam through conversion.

Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in lower Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab: “This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” writes right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who made the “Ground Zero Mosque” into a media obsession. “Islam is a religion with a very political agenda,” warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. “The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule the world.”

These two myths — of inherent violence and global ambitions — led to the firm conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a twelfth century translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophet Mohammad this way: “Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradict yourself.” The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on any Christian who took up the possibility of coexistence with Islam. Pope Gregory, for instance, believed that the thirteenth century Crusader Frederick II was the Anti-Christ himself because he developed close relationships with Muslims.

For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. As for Muslims at home, “American Muslims must face their either/or,” writes the novelist Edward Cline, “to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet, sanctioning fifth column.” Even American Muslims in high places, like Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said, “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”

These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almost a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O’Reilly was neatly channeling this Crusader mindset when he asserted recently that “the Muslim threat to the world is not isolated. It’s huge!”  When Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered “What I’m here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God’s kingdom,” he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.

But O’Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and expansionist mind-set of today’s Western crusaders, were also invoking a more recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.

The Totalitarian Myth

In 1951, the CIA and the emerging anti-communist elite, including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for Freedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe. The language of this “crusade” was intentionally religious. It reached out to “peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization,” living under the “crushing weight of a godless dictatorship.” In its call for the liberation of the communist world, it echoed the nearly thousand-year-old crusader rhetoric of “recovering” Jerusalem and other outposts of Christianity.

In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel. However unconsciously, the old crusader myths about Islam translated remarkably easily into governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets and their allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted with their rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization, and fought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr themselves for the greater ideological good.

Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed with fighting this new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islam as a weapon. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil’s Game, the U.S. funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan was only one part of the anti-communist crusade in the Islamic world. To undermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might align themselves with the Soviet Union, the United States (and Israel) worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, that era’s mind-set — and so many of the Cold Warriors sporting it — never went with it. The prevailing mythology was simply transferred back to the Islamic world.  In anti-communist theology, for example, the worst curse word was “totalitarianism,” said to describe the essence of the all-encompassing Soviet state and system. According to the gloss that early neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in her book Dictatorships and Double Standards, the West had every reason to support right-wing authoritarian dictatorships because they would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships, which, unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable of internal reform.

According to the new “Islamo-fascism” school — and its acolytes like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly, Pamela Geller — the fundamentalists are simply the “new totalitarians,” as hidebound, fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a more sophisticated treatment of the Islamo-fascist argument, check out Paul Berman, a rightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to demonstrate that “moderate Muslims” are fundamentalists in reformist clothing.

These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as an undifferentiated mass — in spirit, a modern Soviet Union — where Arab governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simply fail to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments have launched their own attacks on radical Islam. The sharp divides between the Iranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and the Palestinians, between Shi’ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among Kurds all disappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists generally failed to distinguish between the Communist hardliner Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are “immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world,” rather than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliers or the Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, something flawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence done in its name — a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold Warriors made about communism.

All of this, of course, represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda’s arguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during the Cold War, hardliners reinforce one another.

The persistence of Crusader myths and their transposition into a Cold War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so many misconceptions about Islam. They don’t, however, explain the recent spike in Islamophobia in the U.S. after several years of relative tolerance. To understand this, we must turn to the third unfinished war: the Global War on Terror or GWOT, launched by George W. Bush.

Fanning the Flames

President Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during his campaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously avoided mosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of Muslim identity in his past.

His opponents, of course, did just the opposite. They emphasized his middle name, Hussein, challenged his birth records, and asserted that he was too close to the Palestinian cause.  They also tried to turn liberal constituencies — particularly Jewish-American ones — against the presumptive president. Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christian fundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the Anti-Christ of the Islamophobes.

Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policies toward the Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with his plan to remove combat troops from Iraq (with some important exceptions). He has attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and to negotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind of pressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of U.S. arms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairo in June 2009, he also reached out rhetorically to the Islamic world at a time when he was also eliminating the name “Global War on Terror” from the government’s vocabulary.

For Muslims worldwide, however, GWOT itself continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan. The CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. U.S. Special Forces now operate in 75 countries, at least 15 more than during the Bush years. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition, and assassination remains an active part of Washington’s toolbox.

The civilians killed in these overseas contingency operations are predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated are mostly Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result, the rhetoric of “crusaders and imperialists” used by al-Qaeda falls on receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, the favorability rating of the United States in the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further since Obama took office — in Egypt, from 41% in 2009 to 31% percent now; in Turkey, from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan, from 13% to 8%.

The U.S. wars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have produced much of this disaffection and, as political scientist Robert Pape has consistently argued, most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops and targets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking — just as it was for Americans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M. Junaid Levesque-Alam astutely pointed out, “When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger and hatred rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblical verses?”

And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflect a rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they mean exactly that). “Numerous polls that we have conducted,” writes pollster Stephen Kull, “as well as others by the World Values Survey and Arab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for democracy, for human rights, and for an international order based on international law and a strong United Nations.”

In other words, nine years after September 11th a second spike in Islamophobia and in home-grown terrorist attacks like that of the would-be Times Square bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures: American critics of Obama’s foreign policy believe that he has backed away from the major civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim world see Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of Bush-era policies of war and occupation.

Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise of fundamentalism over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towards violence, the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the cliché that Islam has held countries back from political and economic development. “Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslim countries have developed more democratic institutions, with fairly run elections, energized and competitive political parties, greater civil liberties, or better legal protections for journalists,” writes Philip Howard in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey has emerged as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is now the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the eighteenth largest economy in the world.

Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam’s accommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story (not Islamo-fascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?

The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling in this regard. Pamela Geller, after all, was typical in the way she went after not a radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zero proposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. As journalist Stephen Salisbury writes, “The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche.” For her latest venture, Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell’s Soup because it accepts halal certification — the Islamic version of kosher certification by a rabbi — from the Islamic Society of North America, a group which, by the way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.

Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama bin-Laden or his ilk, but of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamic theologian. Ramadan is a man firmly committed to breaking down the old distinctions between “us” and “them.” Critical of the West for colonialism, racism, and other ills, he also challenges the injustices of the Islamic world. He is far from a fundamentalist.

And what country, by the way, has exercised European Islamophobes more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Taliban Afghanistan?  No, the answer is: Turkey. “The Turks are conquering Germany in the same way the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birth-rates,” argues Germany’s Islamophobe du jour, Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. The far right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out of the European Union.

Despite his many defects, George W. Bush at least knew enough to distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamic center, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal Islamic country — all firmly in the mainstream of that religion — the Islamophobes have actually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.

The victories of the tea party movement and the increased power of Republican militants in Congress, not to mention the renaissance of the far right in Europe, suggest that we will be living with this Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the West against the Rest for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let’s hope that Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a far shorter lifespan.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2011. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website.  He would like to thank Samer Araabi, Rebecca Azhdam, and Peter Certo for research assistance.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Copyright 2010 John Feffer