As everybody runs around re-discovering private security companies again, I thought I’d highlight an article in Foreign Policy about GOOD Magazine, Doing Well By Doing Good. It’s a good article and particular interesting is the section titled “Provocations“. Contributors to Provocations include friends Noah Shachtman and Doug Brooks (of IPOA)… and now MountainRunner in the coming issue (unless I get bumped). Subject? You’ll have to see but the category of this post is a good indicator.

Quite simply, Ms. Hughes op-ed in today’s Washington Post is very revealing. After throwing out stats of falling support of AQ, she has this one money paragraph: 

Al-Qaeda’s growing Internet propaganda activities glorify violence and seek to exploit local grievances, from political oppression to a lack of economic opportunities. In contrast, America’s public diplomacy programs are engaging young people constructively, through English-language teaching, educational exchanges, music and sports diplomacy.

Ordinarily the “money” paragraph would be where the writer nails the opposition. Here, she’s showing her cards. She doesn’t feel a need to attack AQ’s “glorification of violence” or counter the local grievances that OBL is effectively exploiting. No, she believes young people are the only answer.

As one woman in Algeria put it, “They are criminals who want to sabotage the country.” That’s a message bin Laden’s words don’t convey, but his actions do. Six years after Sept. 11, good and decent people of many faiths and cultures are increasingly rejecting his brutal methods.

Yes, six years later, people, good and descent is subjective, are rejecting AQ for a variety of reasons (including rejecting the prohibition against smoking), but what has Ms. Karen Hughes, as America’s Chief Information Officer done to assist this?

Ms. Hughes makes it crystal clear she doesn’t connect the dots between enemy propaganda and her mission. Ignoring action-reaction, the struggle for minds and wills and even hearts, she proves in this op-ed once again that she views her mission as having little potential impact in the near future and relegated to helping children. But into what kind of world will the kids grow up?

While OBL is playing the role of info magi over there, she’s playing with kids over here. No doubt kids are important, but so are the adults who are being deceived or exploited, often times with assistance from our own alienating policies. No wonder the defense side of USG is sponsoring conferences on public diplomacy and strategic communication.

(H/T to John Brown’s PDPBR for the heads up)

Patricia Kushlis has a must read, if long read, if you’re interested in US cultural and public diplomacy, especially if you buy all the lofty programs Karen Hughes’ office advertises, read PHK’s post.

On Willis Conover, if you know who this world famous American is, you obviously didn’t grow up in the United States.

We know that Rice is stuck in a Cold War mind set not based on Kennan’s original concept of containment. We also know that Karen Hughes lacks the skill, leadership, and general acumen in her public diplomacy post.

The combination of lack of insight and political strength to direct the BBG smartly or even strategically lead interagency processes is behind what Amr Hamzawi, writing in an Egyptian weekly, latches onto in his article below. The failure of Rice and Hughes to know when the current struggle is and is not like the all hands struggle of the pre-detente Cold War created a failed media outreach strategy, a lame national strategy on public diplomacy, and not surprisingly fostered conferences sponsored by groups in the Defense community filling the void left by State’s lack of leadership. This isn’t to say State doesn’t have qualified individuals. It’s filled with them, they just can’t do their job. Big thanks to Meatball One for sending this article.

In large part this failure of public diplomacy is the product of an inappropriately designed approach, based almost exclusively as it was on the concept that governed Washington’s media and propaganda campaign targeting the socialist bloc during the Cold War. Whether out of naiveté or pure ignorance, the architects of this project ignored the fundamental difference between the people of Eastern Europe, the majority of whom were fascinated by the Western way of life and who would tune into Radio Free Europe and seize whatever opportunities they could to read American and Western European publications, in spite of the considerable risks they faced in their police states, and the people of the Arab world who, when thinking about America, are concerned above all about American policies towards the Middle East and who regard these policies as hostile to Arab rights and causes and relentlessly biased in favour of Israel. Any media directed towards Arab audiences that could not address this concern, simply because it could not alter the facts, was doomed to lack credibility.

But the architects of policies that gave rise to Al-Hurra TV and Sawa Radio overlooked a more glaring difference between socialist Eastern Europe and the Arab world. In Poland and East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, people had only the choice between their own state-run media and the more enticing state-run media from the West. Arab audiences at the beginning of the 21st century are inundated with choices, not only from land-based broadcasting stations in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman, but also from satellite networks. Al-Hurra and Sawa could not even begin to compete on the open airwaves with such much more attractive and sophisticated stations as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

But there is also a technical reason for this failure. As though it was not a difficult enough task to improve the image of the US in the Arab world at a time when this superpower has forces occupying an Arab country that is undergoing horrifying tensions and upheavals, and at a time when it encouraged its Israeli ally to go on the offensive against another Arab country in the hope of altering the map of regional alliances, the American media targeting the Arab world was consistently poorly managed. Programming and the substance of programmes never went beyond the blatantly propagandistic campaign to vindicate American policies. How could it possibly succeed?

The Bush administration lost the battle to win Arab hearts and minds. It is difficult to foresee any reversal of US fortunes any time in the near future.