By PHK
Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch has it right. Pick your issue. Joshua Muravchik’s “Operation Comeback: Memorandum: to My Fellow Neoconservatives” in the November/December 2006 Foreign Policy Magazine is so outrageous that it’s hard to decide where to start.
Why FP decided to publish this Dear Abby-type presumably unsolicited advice column – but in reality last ditch effort to shore up the neocons in the public eye and just before the elections - is beyond me. Or maybe FP’s decision to do so is doing us a service – showing – above all - exactly why the neocons should be relegated to the ash-can of history.
I’m not going to touch Muravchik’s final recommendation that the US should bomb Iran. CKR has explained the reasons why not numerous times – and we at WV continue to believe this is a really dumb idea.
Instead, I will focus on Muravchik’s ridiculous argument that the neocons – because they understand the battle of ideas better than the rest of us poor peons – are the perfect people to fix the public diplomacy mess. I guess the only point Muravchik and I agree upon is that U.S. public diplomacy is a mess. But it is the height of absurdity and hubris to suggest that the very people who have done the most to get us in that fix are remotely qualified to get us out.
CLeaning Up America’s Public Diplomacy Mess
U.S. Public diplomacy remains a mess for two reasons: 1) the highly unpopular and counterproductive foreign policies initiated and implemented by the Bush administration based on neocon grandiose visions; and 2) the continuing mismanagement of the process and institutions of public diplomacy which were torn asunder at the end of the Cold War when Bush senior promised Americans “a peace dividend” and Francis Fukuyama falsely proclaimed “The End of History.” This was followed by the downsizing of the career U.S. diplomatic establishment and institutions under Clinton. The downsizing went into overdrive when isolationist Jesse Helms became head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1996. This ended with the final denouement and dismembering of the single coherent public diplomacy institution, the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, with the blessings of both the administration and Senator Helms.
Since then and particularly since 9/11 the administration could have rejuvenated the public diplomacy process in a variety of ways – even while not instituting sane foreign policies. Instead, W’s minions have royally botched not only our foreign policy but also the process of “talking to strangers” abroad every step of the way.
The relentless politicization of the career services has worsened over the past six years as has the administration’s politicized stranglehold on the ongoing debate over U.S. foreign policy. The increasing politicization of both the Foreign Service and the Civil Service had been on a steady incline well before W, but it has deepened under his watch.
Campaign Central: no model for public diplomacy
If you think this administration’s spin is bad in the U.S. MSM, just imagine what one-sided tales the US is telling overseas. The administration has a complete stranglehold over the reigns of public diplomacy and as it's been said before, W and company seem to think that conducting a successful public diplomacy campaign abroad is like running an elections campaign in the U.S. Why else would Karen Hughes have been named public diplomacy Czarina at State. Tell one side of the story and ban “the opposition” from the airwaves.
But successful public diplomacy doesn’t work that way because credibility, context and personal relationships are the name of the game. This also means including – not shutting out - reputable voices from those opposed to a certain policy or even an administration.
When Charles Z. Wick was USIA Director under Reagan during the 1980s, he learned that lesson the hard way. Wind of a speakers black list swirled around the U.S. media. That was enough to deep six that bad idea. Under W and Karen the term “black list” has not appeared, but it might as well have. As Jonathan Landay recently pointed out in a well researched article on the State Department’s overseas speakers program for the McClatchy Washington Bureau, only people who toe the administration party line are now fit to be sent to abroad to speak on America’s behalf - despite clear agency guidelines to the contrary.
In days gone by, this would have meant that Muravchik himself would have been disqualified. Yet during the Clinton administration – as under Bush senior – we made sure that the speakers we sent abroad to talk on foreign policy issues were not all cut from the same cloth because we thought it crucial for foreigners to hear from some of the best American policy analysts willing to travel for the US government. We also knew that people abroad needed to understand that ours is a pluralistic society with a variety of views on the content and conduct of U.S. foreign and other policies.
Of course, we used our raft of pro-administration policy speakers including political appointees and career State Department officials. But we also sent Georgetown University professor Madeleine Albright to Central Europe under the Republicans and Lawrence Korb and Muravchik abroad under Clinton. Likewise, we called upon now Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, then a researcher at RAND, as a resource on Afghanistan to explain the Taliban’s rise to power and its implications to at least one group of journalists in the Middle East.
What’s happened to the content and quality of State Department publications designed for overseas readers is as pathetic. But that’s another story for another day.
Dream On McDuff . . . er Muravchik
If the neocons even dream that they can fix the present disjointed, under-funded and misunderstood effort to improve America’s standing abroad, they need to think again. These are precisely the same people who got us the single digit ratings in the first place.
Competency, resolve, de-politicization, political will and money is what’s required: this is not one for the “big” ideas people. Plato and Aristotle will not be the guide. There have been 30 plus published studies from the General Accountability Office to Foreign Affairs Magazine as to what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. But they seem to be gathering dust in the State Department’s historical archivist's archive.
Meanwhile what have our tax dollars paid for?
• Karen Hughes in an oversized brown burqa that looked large enough to swallow her at a recent Eid dinner in Fairfax, Virginia (until someone at State removed the video clip not long after it appeared on the State webpage so I’m afraid you’ll have to miss this one.)
• Condi Rice and Karen Hughes' insistance on assigning the unqualified Diane Zeleny (aka Mrs. Neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht) to a newly created fast-reaction media way-station in Brussels, Belgium and breaking all the rules to do so when public affairs positions are being closed in places like Moscow, Paris, London and Berlin and qualified officers forced to the side.
• Karen Hughes making a widely publicized media spectacle of herself in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
• Karen Hughes “standing up” for Alfredo Fernandez after he was forced to apologize publicly for speaking two words of truth in an Al Jezeera interview. Yet it was OK for Condi to admit to much the same thing earlier.
Fixing the process and institutions of public diplomacy is for the rehab people – the nuts and bolts men and women who know – or knew - how to make the system work. These are the professionals who serve - or served - regardless of party in power. But clearly the administration isn’t talking to them. Or maybe it is but hasn’t listened or learned – because, of course, its minions – like Muravchik and his neocon pals who have the administration’s ear and some of its positions - know better than practiced practitioners.
To base our public diplomacy relationships overseas on the people who secretly e-mail Muravchik “I love America" notes "but my next door neighbor doesn’t” – as Muravchik suggests - is just loony. Sure when I worked in Moscow during the Cold War, I talked with various Soviets who privately told me precisely the same thing. I'll bet many of them now live in the U.S. But I also had to make sure that the nuts and bolts were in place at the various educational institutions so that the Soviet-American educational exchange program - my chief responsibility - ran as smoothly and effectively as possible.
This had nothing to do with “love America” letters in cyberspace; it had everything to do with knowing which buttons to push and levers to pull in which ministry, university or institute to make those exchange program work for the benefit of U.S. and Soviet scholars, teachers and students. I learned what to do, how to do it and why through the advice of pragmatic experienced advisors and colleagues as well as on the job "trial and error." Nothing more and nothing less.
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