There is a growing appreciation of several facts about the war we are in. First, we are most immediately up against an ideology — Islamofascism describes it well — that has unmistakable totalitarian political characteristics and ambitions. It is in the service of the goal of global domination of this theo-ideology that adherents employ terrorism. Terror is a means to an end, not a goal in its own right, let alone an enemy.
Second, to wage successfully a counter-ideological war requires means other than military ones. Taken together, these instruments have come to be called "soft power" (as opposed to the traditional kind of "hard power" represented by armies, navies, air forces and nuclear weapons).
Third, given that the stakes in this war are nothing less than the survival of the Free World, every effort must be made to strengthen the effectiveness and impact of those instruments of soft power particularly relevant to challenging, undermining and, with luck, defeating a virulent totalitarian ideology. This is quintessentially true of those relevant to the dissemination of information that serves such purposes.
Given these insights, it is peculiar, not to say confounding, that the United States has failed so miserably over the past five years of this War for the Free World to value properly the role of government-sponsored international broadcasting in its outcome. In fact, the history of this period is one in which America's leaders have allowed the systematic dismantling of much of its capacity for waging the war of ideas via such broadcasts and woefully misapplied much of what remains.
Consider just the latest rounds of cuts being proposed in the Fiscal Year 2008 budget for the Voice of America (VOA, the United States' official information network) and the "freedom radios" — government-underwritten international broadcasters intended to operate as though they were truly independent, reliable sources of information in countries where that is not otherwise assured, namely Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia (RFA).
