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RAND report: Cold War experience can strengthen moderate Muslims

By drawing from the Cold War experience of uniting democratic people against Soviet communism, the world can help moderate Muslims unite against Islamist extremists. That's the thesis of a new RAND Corporation report titled Building Moderate Muslim Networks.

“The struggle in much of the Muslim world today is a war of ideas,” said the report's lead author, Angel Rabasa, a RAND senior policy analyst. “This is not a war of civilizations; it’s not Islam versus the West. It’s a struggle within Islam to define the character of Islam.”

“We cannot come in as outsiders, as a non-Muslim country, and discredit the radicals’ ideology,” Rabasa said. “Muslims have to do that themselves. What we can do is level the playing field by empowering the moderates.” This empowerment should come not as an afterthought, but as a basic element of US strategy.  Click here to order or download the report.

CIA covertly funded Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago

As part of the Eisenhower Administration's campaign to subvert the Soviet Union from within, the CIA covertly arranged for Boris Pasternak's famed novel Doctor Zhivago to be published in Russian. The operation helped the dissident writer win the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe broadcaster Ivan Tolstoy tells the story in a forthcoming book. "Pasternak's novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson," Tolstoy tells the Washington Post.

The operation is considered a jewel in US cultural warfare against the USSR. Unpublished copies of Doctor Zhivago circulated underground in the Soviet Union. A recently revealed document from the Soviet archives shows then-Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov telling the Communist Party Central Committee in a memo that "Boris Pasternak's novel is a malicious libel of the USSR." A KGB memo said, "a typical feature of [Pasternak's] work is estrangement from Soviet life and a celebration of individualism."

The CIA is not commenting. The Post reports, "The agency's files on its cultural underwriting in Europe remain closed, historians said."