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The Ethics and PublicPolicyCenter
Presents: “Diplomacy in an Age of Faith”
A Lecture by Dr. Thomas F. Farr
KEITH PAVLISCHEK: The topic we're going to talk about today has actually received some attention, other than that that you're going to hear about today from Tom. And I just wanted to highlight two articles that are saying something similar to what Tom has said in his most recent piece in Foreign Affairs. The two individuals that I'm going to refer to don't necessarily agree on policy issues, and I'm not sure they agree with Tom or with each other, but I think you'll notice a theme that runs through their comments. The first one is from Angelo Codevilla, who teaches at BostonUniversity, International Relations. He's on the Board of Governors at the ArmyWarCollege. And he wrote this in an article called “American Statecraft and the Iraq War” in the ClaremontReview. The Foreign Policy Establishment in the US is, “value free, and politically neutral logic is part of a mentality that also misunderstands religion, democracy, and conflict. Because the US Foreign Policy Establishment is religiously illiterate, because none
of its members can imagine serious people taking God seriously, it cannot understand a world that is overwhelmingly religious. Having concluded that mankind has outgrown religion, our experts react to religion's presence in the Islamic world -- and in America -- by inventing the distinction between moderate religion, acceptable because not taken seriously, and fundamentalism, that is actually believing in God and His commandments, the immoderate first of which reads in part: Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. For those who see the world through this lens, no religion is better or worse than any other, and certainly no truer, and the distinction betweenorthodoxy and heresy is merely that between winners and losers. Hence, US establishmentarians, who regard all religion as hokum, cannot fathom the differences
between the Sunni and Shia variants of Islam, which means so much to Muslims. Our establishment thinks that because religion is the mother of strife, the enemy of modernity, it must be humored and subdued in the short term, then marginalized and eventually eliminated. This mindset prevents intelligent judgment about why we might prefer some religious expressions to others, and ensures the enmity of all who believe in God. And,” he continues, “what follows from the foreign policy establishment’s apolitical division of mankind into moderates and extremists is an art of politics -- if that's the right term -- that prevents considering what anyone is or should be moderate or extreme about. It abstracts from right and wrong, honor and shame. It leads to moderation in pursuit of America's interest.”
The second individual I want to cite is Reuel Marc Gerecht from the American Enterprise Institute, in an article called “Mirror-Imaging the Mullahs: Our Islamic Interlocutors.” Now, Gerecht himself is a former CIA analyst and I believe a case officer for a while. And here's what he has to say on this issue. “God may be kaput in most of the West, but he has hardly been reduced to the status of personal philosophy in Islamic lands. Andyet, our God-diminishing, mirror-imaging impulse keeps blinding us to Islam's place at the center of the political realm. The tendency to view Muslims through secular eyes, or to recast them and their faith into a version of Christianity –(‘Islam is a religion of peace’) is perhaps the greatest impediment to rational American policy. Whether it be clerical Iran's nuclear program, Pakistan on the brink, the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, Saudi Arabia and itsWahhabis, or Egypt's ice-cold relations with Israel, religion offers the one indispensable prism through which to peer into the region. For if we cannot see the Middle East first and foremost on its own terms, which means, among other things, never forgetting that Muslim states define themselves as exactly that, then we will surely find ourselves caught in binds worse than Iraq.”
He goes on to say, “In the nine years, 1985 to 1994, that I spent in the Central Intelligence Agencyworking on Middle Eastern issues, especially on the Iranian target, I cannot recall a single seriousconversation about Islam as a faith, and about why a glimpse of the divine inspired an entire generation of young Iranian men to draw closer to God through war and death. The CIA, like the State Department, is a secular institution where officers typically do not discuss their faith, or more to the point, lack thereof, or the faith of others. Friends at Langley tell me that even today there remains little sustained attention to the question of how believing Muslims, country-by-country, view the outside world, or how Saudi-supported militant Salafi teachings have
gobbled up mosques and religious schools throughout the once virulently anti-Wahhabi lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. More broadly, Westerners tend to assume, that, like themselves, well-educated Middle Eastern Muslims possess too much common sense for religion to
determine their political behavior. People naturally associate with their own kind. Secularists attract secularists. Westerners usually don't seek out devout Muslims, at least not for long. The effect of all of this on our image of the Muslim Middle East has been substantial. Finally, it is preposterous to suggest, as some do it in the West do, that only Taliban-like Muslims oppose what we label as basic human or universal rights. Hard-core fundamentalists
aren't the only Muslims who understand that the Koranic injunction commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, probably the defining ethical commandment in the Muslim Holy Book, is inherently incompatible with modern Western sentiment and law. Members of the USforeign policy bureaucracy tend to see these members of the ruling Iranian elite as bearded versions of themselves, men who do not believe that morality and other abstract ideas have much of a role in foreign affairs. They have the hardest time seeing the obvious. When Khamenei, a man of principle and integrity, calls the United States‘the enemy of God,’ he means it.”
With Gerecht taking aim at the intelligence community and Codevilla to the entire Foreign Policy Establishment, including the Defense Department, it's now Tom's turn to take aim at theState Department. Thomas Farr is a visiting professor of Religion and International Affairs at GeorgetownUniversity’sSchool of Foreign Service and the author of the forthcoming World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security (Oxford University Press). He was the first director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom. And we are now celebrating its 10th year. Please welcome Tom Farr.
TOM FARR: Thank you, Keith. I appreciate that introduction. Thanks to Ethics for holding this
meeting and all of you for coming. It's a particular honor to be here with Senator Santorum. Thank you, Senator, for your commitment to the continued well-being and security of the American people. You know, there's nothing like a discussion of religion during lunch to get the appetite going; sometimes it gives you indigestion. And I have to admit that one of my goals today is to give you a little bit of indigestion when it comes to American foreign policy and the subject of religion, if you don't already have a little bit after what Keith has just said to you. I'd like to make a national security argument, an argument about American interests. It has two parts. The first part is that, despite the palpable resurgence of religion around the world, very public forms of religion, in virtually every part of the planet, implicating most of the transnational trends that are cited by scholars all the time, the American diplomatic establishment, defined as the scholars and the practitioners of American foreign policy,isfailing to connect the dots. They have what one might call a religion-deficit disorder. They simply set religion aside as a category of analysis. Sometimes this is the result of animus toward religion. Sometimes it's just habits of thought that have developed over time. The point is that this has affected and will continue to affect our national interests unless it is remedied.
The second part of my argument is that a number of things can be done to remedy this problem. In particular I think that we can recast the existing U.S.policy of promoting religious freedom, which, as Keith said, we've now had since 1998. After a decade, it seems to me, an analysis of what we've done concludes that some very good things have occurred and some tracks have been laid. But the policy has been construed so narrowly that it hasn't been integrated at all into our national security strategy. And that's a shame. We should change that. I'll have something to say about that in just a few minutes.
First, part one. Let's talk about the religion avoidance syndrome, or the religion-deficit disorder of American public diplomacy, private diplomacy, and diplomacy across the board. I don't think I need to convince most members of this audience that religion is playing a major role in the international order. If you look at virtually every country with which America has some kind of national security relationship, Russia, India, China, all of the countries of the Greater Middle East,from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Pakistan and Afghanistan, religion plays some major role in what society and politics. The transnational forces of globalization, of weapons of mass destruction, economic growth, HIV/AIDS, Islamist terrorism, all have something to do with or are influenced in some way by religious actors, religious ideas, and religious movements. And yet American diplomacy does not seem to understand the need to incorporate religion into its analyses of these problems, let alone its strategies for engaging the world as a whole, despite its increasingly religious nature.
Last year the Center forStrategic International Studies, CSIS, did a year-long study on this problem. And it concluded in a piece -- which I highly recommend you take a look at if you're interested in this -- called “Mixed Blessings.” You can get it at the CSIS website. It concluded that this was a serious problem for American national security. It mused a bit about why this was true. It talked about how people thought that religion was a sensitive matter. The most frightening part of their explanation, however, was the notion that somehow it's unconstitutional for the United States to be engaged with religious communities around the world, that the establishment clause prevents us from doing what we need to do to engage those communities in order to protect our own interest. I'm not sure who tothank for that piece of pernicious codswallop, but I suspect it has something to do with Justice Hugo Black. It's as if religion belongs in the Washington Post Style Section, but not in the news section. (The Post probably agrees with that.)
Now, there are many examples that I could give you, but I've chosen what I think is perhaps the most important national security issue that faces the United States, and that is the issue of democracy promotion, which I know is controversial among conservatives, let alone liberals who associate it with the Bush Doctrine. We've been in the business of democracy promotion arguably for a century or more, but certainly as a formal part of our policy since the creation of the National Endowment for Democracyin 1982 under President Reagan, who gave a speech arguing that the spread of democracy was vital to the national security of the United States. The National Endowment for Democracy, as you may know, is a grant- making organization. It gives grants to other grant-making organizations, one run by the Republicans, one run by the Democrats. Over the last26 years it has been responsible for the worldwide growth of a cottage industry of NGOs, human rights groups, and others, whose job is to implant the institutions and habits of democracy. But it is striking that, until very recently, this has been almost a religion-free zone. These agencies have taught how to do village elections, how to have political parties, draft constitutions and statutes, and all the procedures of democracy. They have also encouraged the development of civil society, the intermediate institutions such as professional associations, women's movements, trade unions, journalist schools – all vital to the success of democracy, because they limit the reach and corruptibility of government. But what they have failed to do until recently is pay attention to the drivers of culture in much of the world, and that is religious communities and religious traditions. It's as if religion and democracy don't have anything to do with each other. It's as if we, as Americans, had no reason to believe that the two were connected.
For the most part this religion avoidance didn't change under President Clinton during the 1990s or under President Bush. With the Bush doctrine democracy promotion became associated with the use of force, which is a separateissue, but it remained largely secular. When we went into Iraq, we thought we were going to build a secular democracy with people like Ahmed Chalabi in charge. But the Iraqi people weren’t as secular as we expected. When the first American Administrator arrived in Iraq, General Jay Garner, whose job it was to begin reconstruction and to begin thinking about how to move forward on the democracy promotion effort in that country, he had been briefed by everybody in Washington – the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA. After all those briefings he did not know who Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was. When told that he needed to meet this guy, he said, who is he? Now, this isn't a criticism of Garner. It's a criticism of a diplomatic establishment who does not understand religion. This has gotten better, I think, but not as much as it should have.
The worst indictment ofthe excessive secularity of U.S.democracy promotion policy, however, is that we have proceeded as if it had nothing to do with religious freedom. If you think about it, our International Religious Freedom Policy and the Bush Doctrine have been implemented roughly at the same time, but they have had nothing to do with each other, like two ships passing in the night. I can tell you, from having been on the inside that the Office of International Religious Freedom has had nothing to do with the development of our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or anywhere else. And the reason is that “advancing religious freedom” in the State Department has not really had much to do with religious freedom at all. It has had a lot to do with opposing religious persecution and getting people out of jail. Perfectly legitimate things to do. Very important things to do. But opposing persecution, and even trying to resist it and reduce it, is not the same thing as promoting religious freedom. It's half a loaf at best. And I would argue that we have not been terribly successful in reducing persecution in the last ten years. It seems to me hard to argue, if you look at the world, that much has changed in terms of religious persecution. Although I should pause here to give credit to both Ambassadors-at-Large for religious freedom who have done some very important things, certainly have relieved some human suffering. But when you can get 100 people out of jail and there are still hundreds of thousands or millions in jail, it seems to me we ought to take a look at what we're doing.
But back to democracy promotion, there's been no acknowledgment that, in highly religious societies, religious freedom ought to havesomething to do with the way we engage with those societies. The two efforts have had nothing to do with each other. Why is this true? How do you explain this? Well, you know, you heard a little bit of explanation from Mark Gerecht and Anthony Codevilla. I think probably garden-variety secularism has something to do with this. There's certainly some animus toward religion in the State Department. But, frankly, I'm not satisfied with that explanation. I know many very religious people in the State Department. And they seem to be subject to thesame religion-deficit disorder as their colleagues are.
I think you can get an inkling of what theproblem is by looking at the three major schools of foreign policy that have been operative in the last three administrations. Realism under Bush I. Liberal internationalism under Clinton. Andneo-conservatism under Bush II, after 9-11 at least. All three of them set religion aside as a matter of analyzing the problem before us, but for very different reasons. Realists want to deal at the level of nation states having intercourse with each other. They're not very interested in the internal policies of states. They look at religion, if at all, only as a drive to power. It can be a drive to power but that's by no means the whole story. Realists don't tend to be interested in issues like religious freedom, which is why you don't see them writing about it. I'm putting a symposium together at Georgetown and have found a neo-conservative, Josh Muravchik of AEI and a liberal internationalist, Phil Gordon from the Brookings Institute. I'm having a heck of a time getting a realist. I want them to look at why the foreign affairs profession has ignored religion. I acknowledge that it's kind of like asking when did you stop beating your wife. In other words, you can expect that people would be a little hesitant to come on a panel and explain this. But I'll find a realist, and I want them to engage with this problem.