LUDIC LOG

Now that the shooting war in Iraq is over, we are told, comes the long and tedious business of winning hearts and minds.

As with most official and quasi-official pronouncements, this one starts out at nonsense, takes a right and travels seven or eight miles down bullcrap, and finally pulls into the garage at horseshit. The shooting war in Iraq may be over, but the blowing up, ambushing, sabotaging and setting on fire war is just getting started; the hawks who were so quick to shout "What quagmire?" when we scored an unsurprisingly easy victory are curiously silent these days. The reason Viet Nam comparisons are inappropriate isn't because we don't have a quagmire; it's because we have an entirely different kind, one borne of victory rather than of defeat. America has finally learned the difficulty of being an imperial conquerer: military victory means getting stuck with a country you can neither fully manage nor entirely abandon, full of people who don't want you there. The business of winning hearts and minds isn't so much a long and tedious one as it is a virtually impossible one; and one can't help but notice that the 'winning hearts and minds' line always comes after a long period of destroying brains and limbs. Perhaps if less of the latter was done, less of the former would be necessary.

At any rate, one of the primary weapons in the hearts-and-minds arsenal made its debut this week: Hi magazine, an Arabic-language periodical produced by the U.S. State Department with the aim of gaining the favor of that mythical entity, the "Arab street". Or, at least, part of it -- the part consisting of 18- to 35-year olds, which are being referred to, with the clueless cultural arrogance that markes the whole venture, in the magazine's publicity materials as the "Arabic Generation X", just as if Arab society was exactly the same as our own. The magazine, a slick and glossy presentation being jointly assembled by Colin Powell's staff and a bunch of ex-Conde Nast pros, is said to feature articles on "music, sports, education, technology, careers and health, as well as feature stories and profiles of celebrities". The lead article in the debut issue is a puff piece on Norah Jones, who, as a multiplatinum-selling pop-jazz singer and the daughter of a Hindu folk musician and an American hippie, should really go over like gangbusters with Arab twentysomethings.

That this entire project was a disaster from word one was so obvious that I knew I had to see it immediately. Well, now I've seen it, and...I was right. But don't take my word for it; after all, I am a cynical America-hating creep, and what's more, I am merely half-Arab, and almost out of the target demographic. My opinion means nothing. Hearing me voice objections to this woebegotten insult wouldn't count for anything. That's why it was so gratifying to hear NPR's All Things Considered go straight to the source -- and to hear them make exactly the same objections.

Interviewing a number of men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 35, in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, NPR was, to put it mildly, unable to find a tidal wave of support for Hi. It wasn't entirely what I expected, I admit. For example, one of my concerns -- that the people who give Americans the most trouble in the mideast, fundamentalist Muslims, are the ones most likely to be offended by Hi's graphics-heavy format and breezy, secular tone -- went unmentioned. And the magazine wasn't met with anything like hostility; the reception was more like indifference (at best) and confusion (at worst).

The first, and most obvious, objection was voiced nicely by a Jordanian man. He noted that the very existence of Hi illustrated a profound misunderstanding that is at the heart, perhaps, of the entire American foreign policy approach to Arab countries. Hi, he noted, is predicated on the belief that Arabs simply do not understand American culture. They are ignorant of it, and if they only knew more about it -- a job that the magazine hopes to perform -- they would learn to love it, not hate it. This, the Jordanian correctly noted, is nonsense, and what's worse, completely unneccesary nonsense. No one in the middle east is ignorant of American culture; one wonders if anyone on Earth is ignorant of American culture. American culture is the world's biggest export, even more so than the oil that makes us create magazines like Hi. A magazine teaching Arabs about American culture, he said, is a complete waste of time. A far better project, he suggested -- and who can argue? -- would be a magazine that teaches Americans about Arab culture. It's hard to imagine that there are more Arabs who don't know about our society than there are Americans who don't know about theirs.

Tied to this objection is the second, and more basic, problem with Hi, one given voice by a young Egyptian woman and her friend. Noting the content-free, 'non-controversial' nature of the magazine (Hi does not carry political content, purportedly to avoid giving offense), the two women pointed out that those Arabs who hate America -- not only those who take up arms or commit acts of terror, but even the stereotypically shouting rabble-rouser of the "Arab street" -- do not hate America because of its culture. They don't hate America because of Christianity, or baseball, or Coca-Cola, or Britney Spears, or Artisan Entertainment. The more likely they are to be familiar with those things, in fact, the more likely they are to enjoy them, and even welcome them. America isn't hated on the "Arab street" for its culture or its sports or its music or its celebrities. It's hated because of the one single thing Hi does not address: its politics. Arab nations dislike the U.S. because of its foreign policy, its economic bullying, its military strong-arm tactics -- not because they make movies like S.W.A.T. So long as U.S. policy condones and supports military occupation of Iraq, an unfair favoritism in Israel, and political intervention on behalf of oil interests, who cares about Hi? Throwing out a shiny low-rent Arabic-language version of Vanity Fair, while simultaneously pursuing the same short-sighted, selfish policies that made its target audience so angry at us in the first place, is the very definition of futility.

So, hi, America! In the most charitable interpretation, your State Department's latest boondoggle is a $5 million taxpayer-funded waste of time. Those less inclined to charity might prefer to think of it as a little light reading for the young men who are strapping explosives to their bodies and preparing to throw themselves at its publishers.