John Brown’s latest Press and Blog Review has the following anonymous commentary on the neutering of public diplomacy by Karen Hughes:

"Something missing from the commentary on Karen Hughes in the State Department is the effect her propagandizing has had on the department’s overseas web sites, particularly the broad-base of American views in USINFO; before Hurricane Karen it was known as a solid, if stodgy source of all aspects of American foreign policy; since her arrival in the State Dept. she has had to deal with the fact that Bush’s foreign policy statements hurt Public Diplomacy efforts, so they must be discontinued.

In its place is fluff like ‘Partnerships for a Better Life’ or the most recent ‘Innovative Programs.’ The Muslim outreach efforts she has spearheaded are seen in the Ramadan series, which while a seemingly noble effort, comes off as patronizing and abandons any even-handed look at religion in America.

What a shame she killed the ‘Hi’ online magazine, which, in Arabic and English, offered some of the best material for Arab youth. When Karen needed funds for her Rapid reaction unit, she shut down the magazine and took the $1.5 million. It was reaching more than 40,000 Arab youth every month, and the growth was fantastic. But it had been first created during the time of Charlotte Beers, and it had no support within the dept or administration.

Overall, USINFO’s usefulness has diminished since late in 2006. Previously, transcripts of USG officials from a variety of agencies was published, giving credibility to the site as a central place to learn about all aspects of the US govt. Serious gaps are in the areas of security policy, such as Iran (for which there is no central point for readers to learn what is happening with the US and Iran — it is just ignored.) Three articles on Iran policy have been published in the past three months on the US and Iran. Three. As an honest but of course biased information source, it has started down the slippery slope toward propaganda. One would doubt if Hughes sees anything wrong with this."

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.

If you’re not going to Italy, or even if you are, go to DC at the end of September. I may be at this seminar pending other scheduling issues.

In cooperation with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources (OUSD-P), The Center for Technology and National Security Policy is delighted to announce our upcoming seminar on Transforming National Security: The Battle of Ideas: Messages, Mediums and Methods. The seminar will be held September 25-26, 2007 in Eisenhower Hall, Room 101, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC.

New technologies and practices are transforming every facet of this new battlespace. Transforming National Security: The Battle of Ideas: Messages, Mediums and Methods will examine the impact that this new kind of war is having on the overall war on terror. The reaction to the formal Executive Branch report to the Congress on the military and political progress as a result of the “surge” will certainly help to focus our discussions. Confirmed presenters include Marc Lynch, author of Voices of the New Arab Public, John Robb, author of Brave New War, TX Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone, Todd Helmus and Christopher Paul, coauthors of Enlisting Madison Avenue, and Kyle Teamey, coauthor of the US Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

The conference is free and members of the public are encouraged to attend. To register, please send an email to CTNSP-NCO@ndu.edu, making sure to give your name, affiliation, and what dates/hours you’ll be attending. Registration will close on Friday, September 21, 2007. Everything at this conference is not for attribution. There is no charge to attend this seminar.

Directions to Ft McNair can be found here.

When Ambassador Allen took over the [United States Information Agency] in 1957 he told his staff: “We can work our hearts out for years building up goodwill for the United States in a given country when suddenly one little policy action is taken which does more to destroy our position than the USIA can rebuild in a very long time.”

From John W. Henderson’s The United States Information Agency (1969, p84).

The Diego Cazzin Center for the Study of Intelligence and Security of the University of Rome, Italy, is sponsoring an international conference titled “The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Soft Power in the Struggle against Global Jihadism” in Rome 28th-30th of November 2007. The location is the Matteo Ricci conference center of the Pontifical Gregorian University (Piazza della Pilotta, 4 ,Rome, Italy). The current description of the conference is a it sparse and they are still developing their website (which I’ll post when they send me the link).

Conference speakers will include experts on the subject of terrorism, radical Islamism and strategic intelligence, from Europe,the United States, Russia, the Middle East and the Vatican. There is no entrance fee.

Of course you’ll want to go. If you do, let me know how it was. I’m told by the organizers presentations will be in English and Italian.

To register, contact Mr. Francesco D’Arrigo. A website is forthcoming.

Quickly, read Foreign Policy’s recent article on the latest Crusader Castle, the new US embassy in Baghdad. I’ll post more on this later.  

Saturday is reportedly the State Department’s self-imposed deadline for completion of construction on the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The facility has been plagued with controversy, including unproven allegations that the Kuwait-based contractor in charge of  construction imported Filipino workers against their will. But more profound questions about this new compound remain. Is it even correct to call something this large, this expensive, and this disconnected from the realities of Iraq an “embassy”? And what does it tell us about America’s thinking on Iraq?

In the September/October issue of FP, architectural historian Jane Loeffler–who knows more about U.S. embassy design than just about anybody–gives readers a taste (sub req’d) of just what kind of embassy $1 billion buys these days:

Located in Baghdad’s 4-square-mile Green Zone, the embassy will occupy 104 acres. It will be six times larger than the U.N. complex in New York and more than 10 times the size of the new U.S. Embassy being built in Beijing…. The Baghdad compound will be entirely self-sufficient, with no need to rely on the Iraqis for services of any kind. The embassy has its own electricity plant, fresh water and sewage treatment facilities, storage warehouses, and maintenance shops. The embassy is composed of more than 20 buildings, including six apartment complexes with 619 one-bedroom units. Two office blocks will accommodate about 1,000 employees…. Once inside the compound, Americans will have almost no reason to leave. It will have a shopping market, food court, movie theater, beauty salon, gymnasium, swimming pool, tennis courts, a school, and an American Club for social gatherings.”

But what, Loeffler asks, does an embassy this large and this costly say about the nation that built it?

If architecture reflects the society that creates it, the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad makes a devastating comment about America’s global outlook. Although the U.S. government regularly proclaims confidence in Iraq’s democratic future, the United States has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the United States has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence.”

Forty years ago, after the 1967 Six Day War, America was forced to flee a newly constructed embassy in Baghdad just five years after it opened. It’s unlikely we’d abandon this new compound–whatever the circumstances. Instead, this time around, the question is whether something so isolated can really be used to conduct diplomacy and spread democracy. To get Loeffler’s full argument, check out her essay: Fortress America.