Yesterday, round about the time Andy and Derb raised this, I was giving a talk to the Hudson Institute gang and Monica Crowley asked me a question about the presidential candidates and radical Islam. I replied that I had no doubt that John McCain was fully committed to the military campaign – if only for personal reasons and tribal loyalty, he’s not going to let this generation of American warriors get stuck with a losing hand from Washington. But I added I was unsure the Senator grasped the scale of the broader ideological struggle. His words yesterday confirmed as much:
McCain said the United States’ goal in fighting Islamic extremists should be “to win the hearts and minds of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who do not want their future controlled by a minority of violent extremists.
“In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.”
Really? Even as a theoretical proposition, trusting the average American college education (even if one does not draw Sami el-Arian or Ward Churchill as one’s mentor) to woo young Muslims to the virtues of the Great Satan would be something of a long shot. But it isn’t even theoretical anymore.
There’s plenty of evidence out there that the most extreme “extremists” are those who’ve been most exposed to the west – and western education: from Osama bin Laden (summer school at Oxford, punting on the Thames) and Mohammed Atta (Hamburg University urban planning student) to the London School of Economics graduate responsible for the beheading of Daniel Pearl. The idea that handing out college scholarships to young Saudi males and getting them hooked on Starbucks and car-chase movies will make this stuff go away is ridiculous – and unworthy of a serious presidential candidate.