Muslim outreach

Joshua Muravckik makes poor use of statistics in his op-ed in the WSJ today ("Is Obama's Muslim outreach working?" December 29, 2010).  He demonstrates how numbers need context, something he fails to provide.

His claim is speculative, but straightforward:
The data are too slender to sustain the claim that Mr. Bush's policies succeeded in turning much of the Muslim world against terrorism. But they are substantial enough to inform our understanding that Mr. Obama's approach has achieved little in this regard.

And the data that he supplies, from the recent Pew Research Center's Global Awareness Project, does suggest that support for terrorism declined substantially more during the administration of President Bush that under President Obama:
The sharpest decrease in terror support in Indonesia, Turkey and Lebanon came between 2003 and 2005; in Jordan, between 2005 and 2006; and in Nigeria and Egypt between 2006 and 2007.

What Mr. Muravchik does not explain, however, the intensity of the support.  It is facile to think that support follows some rational mode of thinking.  There will be true-blood believers and there will be those with a willingness to follow an idea until faced with what that idea looks like enacted.  Those with less intensity of belief would be the first and a relatively easy group to convince against the use of terrorism.   Faced with the life-blood consequences of what terrorism does to populations and societies, this kind of intellectual, abstract support quickly fades out.  Hard-core supporters would not be much stirred to change their mind.  Nothing much that a foreign-policy built on war and confrontation could to do stifle that passion, but nor could engagement as a policy.

(If we look at Pew, another interpretation of the numbers is always possible.  For example, the bottom for support of terrorism occurred in 2008, at the very end of Bush's term and the beginning of Obama's.  Perhaps Obama's failure to actual end the wars he campaigned to end might contribute to why there is a slight return of support for the idea that suicide bombing is "sometimes justified"? This take corresponds with another Pew study that show a growing disappoint with the President in these same Muslim countries)

Without a more involved analysis on what kind of support terrorism had in the Muslim countries in the first place, through richly layered and extensive ethnographic work and fine-grained research into the state of the population and their beliefs, such claims like Muravchik's take a simplistic account of the data.  Whatever his ulterior aims, this essay is a shoddy piece of academic propaganda, not the respectable work of a "fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies."  That title gives academics a bad name.