Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
There's more to the US image than PR by Ehsan Ahrari 
Front Page COMMENT There's more to the US image than PR By Ehsan Ahrari The United States' standing abroad, especially in the Muslim world, had deteriorated to such an extent that "it will take as many years of hard, focused work" to restore it. That was the latest testimony of Margaret Tutwiler, Under Secretary of State for public diplomacy, before a House Appropriation sub-committee. What Tutwiler said, though, has been a well-known fact for anyone tracking public opinion polls on the subject. But what should be part of high public attention is that solutions to this problem are still being sought through the wrong strategies. In an era of information revolution, information savoir-faire has become a global phenomenon. However, this reality has yet to make a lasting impression within the US government. The information specialists who reside in the bowels of foreign policy-related organizations continue to view Muslim masses as backward, inward looking, and ready to be manipulated by the current hegemon. That was one reason why the Department of State (DOS) hired Charlotte Beers back in 2001. She was the former head of Ogilvy and Mather and J Walter Thompson, two of the world's advertising behemoths. Her claim to fame was successfully marketing Uncle Ben's Rice and IBM. In the case of IBM, she was successful in recreating its previous image "as an arrogant, out of touch powerhouse". That might have been the closest she ever got in terms of her qualifications about recreating a new image for the lone superpower. As such, Beers brought to her DOS job a heavy marketing approach. In other words, then prevalent thinking in the DOS was that escalating global anti-Americanism could be tackled by developing new ways to market the US image abroad. She said in an interview: "The whole idea of building a brand is to create a relationship between the product and its user. We're going to have to communicate the intangible assets of the United States - things like our belief system and our values." She added that skills she honed during four decades in advertising had prepared her for the task. The most visible accomplishment of Beers turned out to be a series of slick commercials in which Muslim-Americans described their good life in the US. Needless to say, most Muslim countries refused to air them. Wherever they were aired, they remained the object of public scorn about the continued American contempt about the sophistication of the Muslim populace. Consequently, Washington was not satisfied with the "remaking" America's image campaign, and decided to run it from the White House. One of the predominant predilections of the American political system is that solutions to problems of major policy issues are almost invariably sought in tweaking, or, at times, even reshaping the bureaucracies that are in charge of implementing them. Both Republican and Democratic administrations suffer from this malady. It also explains what is wrong with the issue of remaking America's image in the Muslim world. In the making of major foreign policy, scant attention is paid to its global implications. For instance, when President George W Bush gave his "axis of evil" speech, he was substantially focused on the American audience in denigrating Iraq, Iran and North Korea. However, that speech, according to one source, had an "unexpectedly explosive impact on the wider international audience". But when America's image suffered in the immediate aftermath of that speech, US officials expressed dismay. Another phenomenon that drives America's dismay is a pervasive belief within this country that the US national security objectives not only serve America's interests, but also those of other countries. Problems related to the US image in the world of Islam have only intensified after September 11 because of a prolonged focus of Washington to rely on militaristic solutions at the expense of other approaches. The recent examples - in Afghanistan and Iraq - underscore that the former country is edging toward stability largely because the issue of nation-building was carried out from the get go and on a multilateral basis. Keeping the Afghanis in charge of their destiny was an eminently more preferable solution than following the Iraqi model of ruling though the Coalition Provisional Authority and using the Iraq Governing Council as merely a rubber stamp entity. It should be emphasized, however, that the US recently started developing a multi-dimensional approach to transferring sovereignty in Iraq, and in getting the United Nations involved in determining how feasible direct elections really are, as demanded by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. These developments are likely to have their positive effects on the US image in the long run, especially if terrorists don't succeed in scoring major victories in those two countries. So, no matter how hard the US strives to improve its image in the world of Islam, the real solutions reside in changes in a variety of significant policies affecting those countries. Seeking purely bureaucratic solutions or conducting slick public relations campaigns promise only one thing: a continued deterioration of the US image, in conjunction with rising spirals of anti-Americanism. Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst. (Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. 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