AND POLITICS

This series features a broad range of ik 'deall f ig,* i tXthe;rcole and function of commu-nication in the realm o f politics, broadly defined g e n e r a l academic books,monographs, and texts for use in graduate and achiiO4,iiiidirgraduate courses, the serieswill encompass humanistic, critical, historical, and enatiiiidaratudies in political commu-nication in the United States. Primary subject areas include cainpaigns and elections, me-dia, and political institutions. Communication, Media, and Politics books wi l l be of inter-est to students, teachers, and scholars o f political communication from the disciplines ofcommunication, rhetorical studies, political science, journalism, and political sociology.

Titles in the SeriesThe Millennium Election: Communication in the 2000 Campaign

Edited by Lynda Lee Kind, John C. Tedesco, Dianne G. Bystrom, and Mitchell McKinneyStrategic Political Communication; Rethinking Social Influence, Persuasion, and Propaganda

Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary A. CopelandCampaign 2000: A Functional Analysis of Presidential Campaign Discourse

William L. Benoit, John P. McHale, Glenn I. Hansen, P. M. Pier, andJohn P. McGuire

Inventing a Voice; The Rhetoric of American First Ladies of the Twentieth CenturyEdited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer

Communicating for Change: Strategies of Social and Political AdvocatesJohn 13.•

kAlitfrafoiiiiiiiighi•ebiiiiiiiinkatiori: Principles and Practices, Fifth EditionJudith S Trent and* h a r t V. Friedenberg

Rhetoric K e n n e t h Burke's Redemption Drama and Martin LutherDiiaM" Speech

Reelpohtikll PoliticalIdeologies in '50s and '60s Filmsapoye14*Is*on Kelley

Frontiers C o m m u n i c a t i o n TheoryEdited by S e m a t i

ktitteetiihiiiikolitics: New Political Television and Civic CultureJones

:...tieeXidehtial Candidate ImagesEdited by Kenneth L. Hacker

Leading Ladies of the White House: Communication Strategies of Notable TwentiethCentury First Ladies

Edited by Molly Meijer WertheimerBring 'Em On

Edited by Lee Arts and Yahya R. Kamalipour

Bring 'Em OnMedia and Politics

in the Iraq War

Edited by Lee Artz andYahya R. Kamatipour

R O W M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N CLanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Oxford

50 E l i s i a L. Cohen

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Harries, R. (2002, August 4). This war would not be a just war: The U.S. must persist

with the option for U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq. Argues Richard Har-ries, Bishop of Oxford: The use of force to remove Saddam Hussein is not a moraloption. Observer, 25.

Hill, K. A., & Hughes, J. E. (1998). Cyberpolitics: Citizen activism in the age of theInternet. Lanham, MD; Rowman & Littlefield,

Johnson, C. (2000). Blowback: The costs and consequences of American empire. NewYork: Henry Holt.

Lanham, R. A. (1991). A handlist of rhetorical terms, 2nd ed, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Milne, S. (2002, September 27). We are sleepwalking into a reckless war of 'aggres-sion. Guardian (London), 27.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. (2002, September).Washington, DC: White House.

0 ' Clery, C. (2002, September 21). Bush sets out aggressive national security strategy.Irish Times, 1.

Papaeharissi, Z. (2002), The virtual sphere: the Internet as a public sphere. New Me-dia & Society 4, no, I, 9-27.

Rowley, A. (2002, September 25). More to Iraq war than just Saddam? U.S. has widerstrategic aims, says an international conference, Business Times Singapore, mix

Tucker, R. W. (1960), The just war: A study in contemporary American doctrine. Bal-timore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zelizer, B., & Allen, S. (Eds.). (2002). Journalism after September L o n d o n : Rout-ledge.

Foreign Policy, Public Diplomacy, andPublic Relations: Selling America to the World

51

Sue Curry Jansen

Benedict Anderson (1981) conceives of nation-states as "imagined commu-nities." They are, in a sense, fictions, which are naturalized and reified intoreality through legitimating narratives: origin stories, histories, constitutions,laws, maps, border markers, anthems, patriotism, propaganda, and news.Many nations establish formal bureaucratic structures to ensure the resonanceof their narratives, for example ministries of culture and state-controlled me-dia systems.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to provideformative and formidable barriers against this kind of centralized informationcontrol. In practice, oftourse, the U.S. government dedicates considerable re-sources to cultivating positive perceptions of its policies and practices, both athome and abroad. In 2003, for example, the U.S. government spent $600 mil-lion on public diplomacy programs intended to enhance its image abroad: itspent an additional $100 million directly targeting the Middle East through theMiddle East Partnership Initiative; and it spent $540 million on internationalbroadcasting, Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Worldnet, Radio Earth, and Radio Sawa (Ad-visory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World 2003, 25).These figures do not include funding for U.S. military and intelligence net-works' resources dedicated to information warfare including psychological op-erations and "counterinsurgency" campaigns.

The U.S. Department of State formally distinguishes between public diplo-macy and public affairs. Public diplomacy refers to "govemment-s onsoredprograms intended to inform or influence public opinion in other countries; itscliTeT in m e n t s u r - p n b I i c t i n c u l t u r e)arTel-arigeTTaffro

52

aryketgouoll, (U.S. Department of State 1987, 85). Public af_la_j_t_E_a_lc_Qns"the provision of information to the public, press anEnther institutions con-cerning the goals, policies and activities of the U.S. Government" to "fosterunderstanding of these goals through dialogue with individual citizens andother groups and institutions, and domestic and international media" (PlanningGroup for Integration of USIA 1997, 2). The distinction is more than seman-tic because the Smith-Mundt Bill (1948) prohibits the government from prop-agandizing the American public.

Public diplomacy programs have seldom been popular in the United States.Many critics across a range of political perspectives regard public diplomacy asa thinly disguised euphemism for propaganda (USIA Alumni Association2002). Critics on the left tend to see public diplomacy initiatives as part and par-cel of U.S. global hegemony (Chomsky 1991; Snow 2002). To critics on theright, public diplomacy has historically been viewed as a wasteful undertaking,which provides employment and subsidies to bureaucrats, artists, performers,scholars, and intellectuals with unreliable, internationalist political loyalties;however, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, influentialconservative forces have reversed themselves and now endorse reinvigoratingand expanding public diplomacy efforts (Heritage Foundation 2004).

Ex • • i • t i - s • 1 t - st o o f citizens o f other so erei •nnations--to "move the needle" of public opinion (Advisory Group on Public

omacy cuts against the grain of Americanpluralistic ideals, which valorize au'visible" and dialogic models of e e expression (Sennett 1980, 189-190;Dewey 1927; Habermas 1971; Ackerman 1980). LzObility and visibility,public accountability, and dialo ic and partici s ator models of democraticdiscourse have, of course, alwapractice (Peters 1999; Jansen 1988, 2002).

In wartime and other national emergencies, all nations, whether democra-cies or dictatorships, tighten their chains of command, practice censorship,and deploy propaganda. Until the mid-twentieth century, however, the UnitedStates only invoked systemic government control of information as a tempo-rary measure, to be repealed when the crisis passed, for example, the Com-mittee for Public Information during World War I and the Office of War In-formation during World War H.

The seismic shifts that realigned global power relations in the immediateaftermath of World War H dramatically changed the U.S. approach to infor-mation resources and policies. The United States ended World War II withsizeable overseas assets and information resources: a global radio networkand local offices of the U.S. Information Services (USN) in more than twentycountries. Moreover, the U.S. military had gained control over global infor-mation networks, which it was intent on preserving, especially in parts of the

Sue Carty Jansen

s been more nchl articulated in th -

Selling America to the World

world where the weakened British and French colonial nations were losinginfluence (Dizard 2001), The Cold War, which would lock the United Statesand the Soviet Union into a global struggle for world dominance for the nextforty years, provided both strategic and ideological rationales for maintainingand expanding U.S. control over international information resources.

Founded upon an Orwellian metaphor, the Cold War blurred the distinctionbetween war and peace. The fragile "peace" was to be secured by developinga permanent war economy. Both the United States and the Soviet Unionwould maintain large standing armies, create vast intelligence networks, en-gage in intense ideological warfare, and launch periodic hot, subnuclear warsin disputed territories. When the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in 1949,the Cold War "logic" of mutually assured destruction solidified, launching anarms race that would prove enormously costly to both nations and ultimatelybankrupt the Soviet Union. This logic was premised upon the assumption thatsince each nation had nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy the other sev-eral times over, neither side would dare to launch a first strike. Nuclear pre-paredness plus nuclear fear would, it was argued, produce a rational responseon both sides: nuclear deterrence cum "peace." The national security appara-tus that provided the infrastructure for the stalemate rendered concepts likelegibility and visibility largely irrelevant.

In 1953, President Eisenhower created the U.S. Information Agency(USIA) as a Cold War propaganda initiative. Respected journalist Edward R.Murrow was later appointed director of the USIA, and was charged with in-forming, educating, and promoting international understanding as a means ofcountering Soviet disinformation and supporting U.S. national interests •abroad. The agency continued to operate until 1999 when, in response to leg-islation sponsored by archconservative Senator Jesse Helms, it was disman-tled; its remaining operations were folded into the State Department. At itsend, the USIA had 190 posts in 141 countries, Throughout the Cold War era,traditional diplpinacy—that is, state-to-state diplomacy—continued to play adominant role in world affairs; USIA public diplomacy programs functionedin an ancillary role, supporting traditional diplomacy. It should also be notedthat the CIA and the U.S. military undertook their own ambitious informationinitiatives and covert operations, which involved psychological operationsand disinformation campaigns, In some instances, the USIA, with its globalnetwork of outposts, became fronts for these initiatives.

PAST AS PROLOGUE AND PARABLE

53

U.S. government attempts to directly influence public opinion in the MiddleEast began at least as early as 1945, when President Roosevelt called for an

54 S u e Curry Jansen S e l l i n g America to the World 5 5

expanded U.S. cultural presence in the region. Eleanor Roosevelt suggestedusing American-produced motion pictures as means o f reaching the stilllargely illiterate populations of the Middle East (Murray 1945).

Major propaganda initiatives were subsequently launched by the Trumanand Eisenhower administrations to reaffirm Western dominance in the regionby filling the void left by the diminished powers of British and French colo-nialism after World War II. These initiatives were also charged with counter-ing the growing hostility to the United States, which was generated by thecreation of Israel (Battles 2002). This anti-Americanism would be signifi-cantly exacerbated by successive U.S. administrations, which would greatlyescalate U.S. financial and political support for Israel. The early Cold War ef-forts were intended to preserve Western access to Middle Eastern oil re-sources, and to ensure that the region was incorporated in Western alliance inthe struggles against the Soviet Union (Battles 2002).

Most of the propaganda efforts were under the auspices of intelligenceagencies, including the then newly created CIA; however, the State Depart-ment also played a role in developing "psychological" campaigns. These ini-tiatives, which we now know drew upon the expertise of early communica-tion researchers and other social scientists (Simpson 1994), targeted twodistinct audiences: the mass audience, which was poor and predominately ru-ral and illiterate; and political and economic elites, professors, teachers, pro-fessionals, and mullahs—what Katz and Lazarsfeld's (1955) "two-step flow"model of communication refers to as "opinion leaders."

Documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act andavailable through the National Security Archive (20()2) offers a rare look in-side the normally closed world of information management in the MiddleEast (see www.gwthedut–nsarchivi and the excellent accompanying interpre-tive essay by Battles 120021). Review of these documents indicates that in thepast fifty years little has changed in the way that those responsible for U.S.public diplomacy approach the Middle East, despite the fact that the entireglobal media and information structure has been radically transformed. AsEleanor Roosevelt had suggested, the early propaganda efforts did use Hol-lywood and informational films, albeit with mixed results; they also usedpamphlets, posters, news manipulation, magazines, radio broadcasts, books,libraries, music, cartoons, educational activities, person-to-person exchanges,religion, and foreign aid to finance programs with "psychological" objectives(Battles 2002). For example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson maintained in1950 that U.S. propaganda efforts should assert control over news agendas inthe region by diverting Arab news organizations away from the Palestine con-flict and refocusing their attention on internal social and political problems;by labeling opposition to the United States as "fanaticism"; and by placing

"corrective" articles in newspapers and magazines in response to criticalnews (Acheson 1950, 1).

State Department documents indicate that the United States was very ac-tive in Iraq during this period. Although Iraq became an independent nationin 1932, the British retained a strong and troubled neocolonial presence inIraqi culture and politics well into the 1950s when, for example, in 1955, Iraq,Pakistan, and Turkey signed the Baghdad Pact, which provided these coun-tries with a British-supported mutual defense. This fateful alliance triggereda strong negative reaction among Iraqi factions opposed to the Baghdad Pactand other Iraqi ties to the West; i t galvanized anti-Western sentiment andlaunched the Pan-Arab movement. In 1958 a coup led by army officers over-threw the monarchy, killing King Faisal and Prince Abdul Ilah and declaringIraq a republic.

It is within this complex and conflict-ridden context that the U.S. andIraqi governments collaborated in creating and disseminating propagandaduring the 1950s. Despite their divergent political and economic interests,the Iraqi government allowed the USIS to target the population at large withanti-Soviet propaganda. The United States provided Iraq with anticommu-nist materials for dissemination, and the two nations cooperated in creatingand distributing newsreels and musical broadcasts directed at the Kurdishminority (Crocker 1950). The United States also asserted its influence bydirectly subsidizing newspapers, by producing programming for RadioBaghdad, by supporting anticommunist editors, and by using the Fulbrightprogram to introduce pro-American values into the educational system(Berry 1954a, 1954b).

The United States considered Islam an asset to Middle Eastern propagandaefforts during the early Cold War period. As President Eisenhower put it,"The religious approach offers a direct path to Arab interest" (Eisenhower1958, I). The three monotheistic world religions were seen as deeply unifiedin their fight against "godless communism" and its officially sanctioned athe-ism. Persecutions of Muslims in Soviet satellite states further reinforced Is-lamic anticommunism,

In reality, however, there were serious tensions in this ecumenical union.From the Iraqi perspective, one of the most effective ways of combating com-munist influence among its population was to link Zionism and commu-nism—a link that appears to have been sanctioned in some instances by theUnited States despite its alliance with Israel. Evidence also suggests that theUSIS underestimated the differences between Islamic and Western values.USIS propaganda programs assumed that audiences in the Middle East wouldbe impressed by U.S. popular culture and displays of American material suc-cess. But Middle Eastern audiences actually responded much more positively

56 S u e Curry Jansen

to films and other media that were connected to their own lives and cultures.Rural populations in particular tended to be frightened by foreign propagandaand to dislike films that depicted life in foreign cultures, whether American,British, or Russian (Wells 1953). Even the responses of more cosmopolitanaudiences in Baghdad often confounded American expectations. SometimesUSIS propaganda efforts backfired as Iraqi audiences interpreted the rampantmaterialism, godlessness, and perceived immorality of American popular cul-ture to be insults to Islamic values (Lacy 1952).

The Hollywood film Ninotchka exemplified the backfire effect. It was fre-quently cited by members of the American embassy in Baghdad as a caution-ary tale for Cold Warriors (Battles, 2002). The Iraqi government had tried touse Ninotchka as part of its anticommunist efforts. In the beginning of thefilm, the character played by Greta Garbo is a stern Soviet. As the plot de-veloped, however, she is transformed into a glamorous figure by her adven-tures in Paris. Iraqi audiences found the austere Soviet life of Ninotchka farmore admirable than her carefree and, from their perspective, immoral life inParis. After several showings, the Iraqi government withdrew the film (Ire-land 1952). It is, however, not clear whether U.S. public diplomacy plannershave ever fully internalized this important cautionary tale.

Battles (2002, 16) identifies three dominant themes in U.S. propagandaduring the early Cold War era: "The image [of the United. States] to be pro-jected was of a society that valued and supported freedom, that was econom-ically and militarily strong, and that supported peace and a role for interna-tional institutions in governing intra-state affairs." American propagandaefforts were, however, undermined by the fact that the U.S. government andU.S. economic interests were frequently aligned with the most repressiveregimes in the regions; by U.S. support of Israel; and by America's close tieswith England and France, the colonial powers that had dominated the region.Anti-American sentiment periodically flared, and, as early as 1952, anti-regime protesters attacked the USIS office in Baghdad.

As the Cold War progressed and the world became even more clearly po-larized, some leaders in the Middle East became adept at playing the nuclearchess game by using the competition between the United States and the So-viet Union to their advantage. For example, during the climax of the Iranhostage crisis in 1976, young Islamic revolutionaries exploited the newglobal power of American television to cultivate support for Islamic funda-mentalism among Muslims throughout the world and to humiliate the Carteradministration. More routinely, however, Middle Eastern nations were pawnsin Cold War struggles; in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; in Turkey, Lebanon,and Syria; and perhaps most lethally in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, whichmay have claimed a million or more lives.

Selling America to thi World

PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC POLICY ANDPUBLIC DIPLOMACY: VICTORY CULTURE

A widespread complacency—both in and out of government—threatens the in-stitutions of democracy by encouraging Americans to assume their common her-itage is eternal, requires no vigilance, and can withstand any abuse. In turn, thishas produced a dedication to globalism that borders on religious belief. We maydefine globalism as the spread of neoliberal economic principles around theworld: deregulation the wholesale privatization of public institutions, and anunshakeable faith in the primacy of unfettered markets. But let us understand theterm as it is actually meant. As even its most convinced advocates acknowledge,globalization amounts to Americanization. W e have attached a certain final-ity to this proposition: history has ended; the Hegelian process has run itscourse, and its end result is the U.S. model. A m e r i c a n s today suffer a kindof narcissism, a failure of vision. As we did after WW II, we have chosen not tosee others as they are, or to see ourselves as we are o r finally to see ourselvesamong others. This is the true meaning of U.S. triumphalism. wherever we look,w r s i e d , . 9 1 0 1 . _ - s e l v m . (42-43)

57

Under Western liberalism, democracy and capitalism have always coex-isted in creative tension. The privatizing revolutions of the Thatcher and Rea-gan eras resolved this tension by conflating laissez-faire "free market" eco-nomics and democracy, equating economic freedom with political freedom.By definition, this neo- or postliberal resolution favors the wealthiest nations,corporations, and social strata; and it halts, and in many cases reverses, thelong, slow, but steady global trend toward greater social equality that beganin the eighteenth century. It consolidates the shift from the primacy of public(state) power to private (corporate) power that began early in the twentiethcentury.

This new configuration of power was in ascent when the Cold War came toan end, so much so that one prominent neoliberal theorist claimed that theWest had realized the telos of historical evolution, thereby bringing an "end"to history (Fukuyama 1989). It was from within the euphoria of this "victoryculture" that America launched its post–Cold War policy of globalization.Patrick Smith (1999) describes the dangerous narcissism of this triumphalism:

American triumphalism played a role in the demise of U.S. public diplo-macy programs, including the USIA. Indeed, even USIA functionaries whoseprofessional futures were at stake acknowledged that the increased globalpower and penetration of private media conglomerates, advanced communi-cation technologies, digital convergence, and the Internet, and the emergenceof the twenty-four-hour news cycle after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, rendered

58 S u e Curry Jansen

their own efforts largely obsolete (USIAAlumni Association 1997). CNN andMTV had, in effect, become America's de facto public diplomats. The ersatzpublic diplomacy efforts of the George W. Bush administration do not, how-ever, appear to have assimilated this crucial insight of USIA experts.

The brief 1991 Gulf War had another significant information outcome. In-formation and information technologies assumed new significance withinwarfare theory (Arquilla & Ronfeldt 1997). While resources devoted to bothtraditional and public diplomacy were declining, assets devoted to informa-tion warfare, including psychological warfare, were significantly expanding.Moreover, military personnel were increasingly functioning in roles that hadtraditionally been played by diplomats (Priest 2003). h e net effect was thatthe face America was presenting to the world was the face that PresidentEisenhower had warned against in his farewell address in 1959: the aggres-sive face of the military-industrial complex, with rivate media and telecom-munication companies serving as its nerve center.

..NARCISSISTIC FAILURE OF VISION

,This was the infrastructure that was in place on September 11, 2001, when theterrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., shattered America'scomplacency. Ordinary Americans, long insulated against world opinion by acommercial news culture that had grown rich harvesting the easy profits ofscandal, celebrity, and infotainment, were genuinely shocked to discover thatAmerica had enemies. "Why do they hate us?" people asked in plaintive tonesthat seemed to express sincere bewilderment during the period of nationalmourning that followed the attacks.

The Bush administration's response to this question was, predictably, tolook to the private sector to repair America's image abroad (Holtzman 2003).It reinvented public diplomacy within the template of neoliberalism. Reason-ing that U.S. consumer and popular culture had been contributing factors inthe demise of the Soviet Union, the administration believed that its job wasto "sell" America to the world, especially to the Middle East with its youth-ful demographics. Still viewing the world through the distorted lens of thevictory culture, it looked to Madison Avenue to transform America's imageabroad. Appointing Charlotte Beers, who had served as chief executive of theJ. Walter Thompson advertising agency, to the newly created post of under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, the Bush administration conceived ofAmerica as a commodity, a brand, to be marketed just as Beers had so suc-cessfully marketed Uncle Ben's Rice. In announcing her appointment, ColinPowell said, " I wanted one of the world's greatest advertising experts, be-,

Selling America to the World 5 9

came what are we doing? We're selling. We're_selling_a_producif (Lemard2092, 1). While Powell'alescrip_tipnpf U.S. national irlemity„ as a Fommod.z.ity b p jarring—tOstiticsit is yvhdisspilsistent with the ashumptlimat.....the territorial branding moveinent_that-is--now-well-ostablished-withia-Mter-national advertisipl and marketing. _

Beers's appEselt to selling "Brand_Amerlea:Lwas_to attem,_AsrtgageMiddle Eastern audiences emotionally rather than discursively. One o fBeers's first initiatives was to rename the Voice of America's Arabic service,Radio Sawa (which means Radio Together in Arabic), and to reprogram theservice to target a youthful audience, with fast-paced musical offerings fea-turing Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and popular Arab-language per-formers, interspersed with U.S. news bulletins that were designed to counterhostile local news reports. Beers also did some of the early groundwork forthe creation of the U.S. satellite television network (Middle East TelevisionNetwork), which was launched in February 2004 to try to compete with Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya.

Beers's other major projects include the production of "Shared Values"people-to-people video profiles for airing in the region, which featured thelives of Muslim Americans, for example teachers, firemen, and basketballplayers; and Hi magazine, a glossy lifestyle magazine aimed at young people.Both of these initiatives appear to have misfired. The intent of the profileswas to send the message that America is an open society that practices reli-gions tolerance, but "Shared Values" lacked credibility in light of the Guan-tanamo detentions, FBI interrogations of Arab Americans, U.S. deportations,and new visa restrictions. The content of Hi was pitched too low for its targetaudience. It assumed a level of ignorance of America and American valuesthat does not exist among young people in most of the region; consequently,many young Arabs found it boring or overtly propagandistic.

A precipitous decline in favorable attitudes toward America's image world-wide occurred during Beers's short-lived tenure as undersecretary (Pew Re-search Center 2002); she resigned in March 2003. Beers's detractors claimshe failed miserably, while her defenders argue that she was not given ade-quate resources or time to do the job. Even the Bush administration ac-knowledged that its public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East had failed;and, in response to congressional pressure, i t appointed a blue-ribbon com-mission, chaired by Edward P. Djerejian, former ambassador to Syria and Is-rael, to conduct an inquiry (Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy 2003).

The commission's report, Changing Minds, Winning Peace, concluded,"At this critical time in our nation's history, the apparatus of public diplo-macy has proven inadequate, especially in the Arab and Muslim world" (Ad-visory Group on Public Diplomacy 2003, 8). The advisory group called for

60 S u e Curry Jansen

a dramatic transformation in the way the United States communicates its val-ues and policies to the world, and for "an immediate end to the absurd anddangerous under funding of public diplomacy in a time of peril" (2003, 8).The advisory group's report has received a "lackluster" and "disappointing"reception by the administration, according to Republican U.S. CongressmanFrank Wolf of Virginia, chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee,which oversees funding for public diplomacy (Regan 2004, 1).

Beers's successor as undersecretary for public diplomacy was MargaretTutwiler, who brought a background in government public relations to thejob. Upon taking office, Tutwiler acknowledged that U.S. standing abroadhad deteriorated to such an extent that "it will take us many years of hard, fo-cused work" to restore it. Tutwiler maintained that the "problem does not lenditself to a quick fix or a single solution or a simple plan" (Regan 2004, 1).However, Tutwiler held the position for just three months (December 16,2003, to March 16, 2004); she resigned to take a position with the New YorkStock Exchange just as the first images of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuseswere becoming public. As of this writing (July 2004), the position remainsvacant.

The Bush administration has expressed high hopes for the Middle EastTelevision Network, Al Hurra (The Free One). President Bush says that AlHurra will counter the "hateful propaganda that fills the airways in the Mus-lim world" and tell "the truth about the values and policies of the UnitedStates" (Regan 2004, 2). Costing $62 million for its first year of operationwith projected annual operating expenses of $47 million thereafter, Al Hurra,which broadcasts via satellite from Springfield, Virginia, has predictably re-ceived a hostile reception by Arab media. The London-based Palestinian ex-patriate newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi has compared Al Hutra's "guided news"to Saddam's old Ba' ath Party media; it described the approach as forty to fiftyyears out of date, and used the opportunity to chastise the U,S.-created h-aqiGoverning Council for pressuring and censuring local Arab media (Al-Qudsal-Arabi 2004). Al Hurra also received a "frosty" reception in Cairo and else-where in the Middle East (Atia 2004; Craft 2004). Predictably, Al-Jazeera re-sponded with hostility, quoting academic experts who argue that Americanpolicies, not Arab ignorance, make America unpopular in the region; theseexperts point to the ample presence of Western broadcasting in the region,which is readily available through a myriad of satellite offerings, includingCNN, BBC, and others (Amayreh 2004). The Bush administration has triedto correct some of its earlier public diplomacy mistakes by staffing Al Hurrawith personnel from the region; however, it has clearly gotten off to a bumpystart. Al Hurra's singular accomplishment to date has been to heat up the airwars in the Middle East.

Selling America to the World 6 1

Significantly, Bush's Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy expressed skep-ticism about the new satellite operation, which was still in the planning stagewhen their report went to press, They challenged the wisdom of this costly in-vestment in light of the heavy pressures it will put on already scarce publicdiplomacy dollars. The Advisory Group anticipated Al-Jazeera's verdict: thatAl Hun-a is unlikely to be able to compete with the well-established presencein the region of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiyya, BBC, CNN, MTV, VH1, the Para-mount Channel, Orbit news, Sky News, and European programming (Advi-sory Group on Public Diplomacy 2003; Amayreh 2004). Indeed, the AdvisoryGroup raised serious questions about the overall effectiveness of all of the in-ternational broadcasting operations under the authority of the BroadcastingBoard of Governors (BBG), the independent, autonomous entity established in1999 by the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act (Public Law 105-277), which oversees all U.S. government sponsored non-military, interna-tional broadcasting. Citing a study by the General Accounting Office, the Ad-visory Group indicated that most public affairs officers found the BBGoperations to be of marginal to limited value in their local geographical re-gions. The Advisory Group contended that in launching the Middle EasternTelevision Network (Al Hun-a), the BBG was attempting to use twentieth-century technologies to deal with twenty-first-century challenges.

Arab opinion leaders, for example media commentators and intellectuals,with some exceptions, argue that the current U.S. approach is naïve. It as-sumes, as American propagandists in the early Cold War period assumed, thatArab hostility to the United States is based on ignorance of America. Like thescreeners of Garbo's Ninotchka, the new public diplomats seem to believethat to know Americans and American popular culture is to love them. Expo-sure to American culture, it is reasoned, will cultivate a desire for Americanconsumer goods and the American way of life as it did in the former SovietUnion. The Middle East is, however, very different from the Soviet Union.The West has had a powerful and largely exploitive presence in the MiddleEast for centuries. People in the region know much more about Americansthan Americans know about them. The longstanding presence of U.S. corpo-rations (like Bechtel and Halliburton). with their dual-wage standards forWestern and regional employees, has provided its own brand of "person-to-person" counterdiplomacy (Chatterjee 2004).

Above all, however, U.S. policy in the region has generated legitimate hos-tility. And that hostility has escalated dramatically since the 2001 terrorist at-tacks on the United States as a result of U.S. counterterrorism measures in-cluding domestic profiling, interrogation, and detention o f Muslims; thedetentions at Guantanamo; the continuing chaos in Afghanistan; the invasionand occupation of Iraq; the prison abuse scandals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and

62 S u e Curry Jansen

Guantanamo; and what is perceived in the region and in much of the world asU.S. support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. To dismiss critics ofU.S. policies as "fanatics" or proterrorist elements further inflames that hostil-ity. The long history of inconsistent but politically and economically expedi-ent policies in the Middle East has come back to haunt the United States. Thearming and support of Israel in its conflicts with the Palestinians as well as itsArab neighbors, the U.S.-engineered coup in Iran in 1953, the support for Sad-dam in the brutal war with Iran, the betrayal of the Kurds in the 1991 Gulf War,the sanctions imposed after the 1991 war, the long pattern of support for anti-democratic regimes in the region, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraqcannot be papered over by emotional appeals, the glamour of pop stars, or pub-lic relations campaigns. These tactics are likely to further solidify cynicismand antagonism toward the United States among Muslims. Young people in theMiddle East rioting against U.S. imperialism while wearing Levis and Nikesmay reflect the contradictions of postmodern aesthetics, but the contradictionsthese young Arabs are seeking to resolve are far more substantive, complex,and intractable than anything a quick fix of commodity fetishism can repair.

Even some former government insiders now regard U.S. unilateralism inthe Middle East and the world as the action, i f not the intention, of a "roguestate," which places itself above international agreements while insisting (byforce if necessary) that other nations honor them (Prestowitz 2003; see alsoDiplomats and Military Commanders for Change n.d.). From the beginning,the detentions at Guantanamo have provoked outrage in the world press.However, the revelation of the prisoner abuses at Abu Gliraib, at Guan-tanamo, and in Afghanistan have, as Mark Bowden puts it,

handed our enemies a propaganda coup that trumps their best efforts, The pho-tos from Abu Ghraib prison portray Americans as exactly the sexually obsessed,crude, arrogant, godless occupiers that our enemies say we are. They have evensucceeded in uniting those on both sides of the war issue at home. Everyone isoutraged and disgraced. (Bowden 2004, 37)

These photos have confirmed Eleanor Roosevelt's belief in the persuasivepower of images in the Middle East. And they have also effectively erasedany small pockets of credibility that sixty years of U.S. public diplomacy inthe region may have produced.

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