WASHINGTON, 2 October 2003 — The United States must radically overhaul its public diplomacy if it wants to reverse its sinking popularity in the Arab and Muslim world, a panel of government appointed experts said yesterday.
The panel’s findings — the latest in a series of increasingly dire commentaries about America’s negative image among Muslims and Arabs — indicated that renewed outreach efforts have done nothing to assuage anger and resentment at the US.
“Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels,” the panel said in its report which reviewed Washington’s post-Sept. 11, 2001 public diplomacy campaign in the Arab and Muslim world.
“The bottom has indeed fallen out of support for the United States,” the panel report said. “What is required is not merely tactical adaptation but strategic, and radical, transformation.” The report recommended the creation of a new cabinet-level position to oversee public diplomacy, and a massive increase in spending in that area.
However, the panel, which was mandated by lawmakers, acknowledged that a prime reason for Arab and Muslim discontent was US policy in Middle East — something it stressed was outside its mandate. “Spin and manipulative public relations and propaganda are not the answer,” it said. “Foreign policy counts.”
Presenting the study entitled “Changing Minds, Winning Peace” to reporters at the State Department, panel chairman Edward Djerejian faced a barrage of questions about how unpopular US policies could be sold to frustrated and disenchanted Arabs and Muslims.
The report made no recommendations on this point, although Djerejian insisted that a major part of the problem was a failure to adequately communicate the substance of policy, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq. “At a critical time in our nation’s history, the apparatus of public diplomacy has proven inadequate,” he said.
“Sugar-coating and fast-talking are no solutions, nor is absenting ourselves,” the entire 13-member panel echoed in its report. “Often, we are simply not present for the debate.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks in the US, Washington embarked on a major campaign to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Muslim world, including a new Arabic-language radio station, a glossy new youth-oriented Arabic language magazine, television spots and internet web sites.
But, according to international polling data released earlier this year, the campaign has had only a negligible impact in some nations and has met negative reaction in most.
That alarming data, from the respected Pew Research Center for The People and The Press, found that the percentage of people in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan with a favorable view of the United States has fallen and, in many cases, free-fell, over the past three years.
Those findings were cited most recently in a Sept. 4 report from Congress’ General Accounting Office (GAO) which said that among the problems were a paucity of language-qualified diplomats, a lack of coherent method to assess what improvements the campaign might need, and a failure to integrate and coordinate various programs. The Djerejian panel found the same problems, and repeated many of the GAO recommendations for improvement, particularly the need to measure the public response to the campaign.
Yesterday’s report, which said that despite the new campaign the US was spending only $25 million per year for outreach in Arab and Muslim nations, called for a “dramatic increase in funding.” Transforming public diplomacy “requires an immediate end to the absurd and dangerous under funding of public diplomacy in a time of peril,” the report stated.
