WhirledView

Diplomacy Lesson from the Past - Kathryn Wasserman Davis

By Patricia H Kushlis

Kathryn Wasserman Davis died at 106 on April 23, 2013. No cause for her demise was reported although it was reported that she was a strong supporter of environmental causes.

Kathryn Davis came from a line of women’s rights activists and internationalists. Among her earliest memories were those of her suffragette mother demonstrating in downtown Philadelphia for the women’s right to vote. True, I read that in her Wikipedia biography but Mrs. Davis also told me the story herself and if my memory serves, she proudly showed me a black and white photo of her mother’s political activism in action.

Had Mrs. Davis been of my generation, I have to wonder if she would have retained her Republican identification: her viewpoint and that of today’s Republican Party seem so antithetical.

Swiss interlude

From 1969-1975 Katheryn Davis’ husband Shelby Cullom Davis was US Ambassador to Switzerland, a country where the couple had first met as university students. He made his fortune in the financial insurance business on Wall Street turning a considerable sum of money from his wife’s family into considerably more. Presumably he bought the Ambassadorship through donations to the Nixon for President Campaign. That’s how those positions happen. The Davis’s knew the right people and well, money would have likely quietly changed hands moving from their considerable assets to the campaign’s seemingly effortlessly.

I never had the impression, however, that Ambassador Davis was simply after the title or that he wanted to run things at Jubeläiumstrasse 93. More likely both he and his wife had a long standing love affair with the country, wanted access to the people who mattered and simply liked the upper class Swiss life style. He had a strong career deputy named Richard Vine who later returned as Ambassador. Davis left the running of the embassy to Vine as well as dealing with the Swiss on substantive issues (the main one being banking secrecy – my how things don’t change).

From one Canton to the next

So the Ambassador and Mrs. Davis traveled the country – from one canton to another – showing the stars and stripes as the Viet Nam War wound down and meeting and greeting local officials, members of the general citizenry as well as patting the heads of the farmers’ well kept cows.

When in Bern, the Davises were gracious and generous hosts and kind to Embassy staff.

I wonder had Mrs. Davis been born just two or three decades later whether she would have pursued her own career – either as a career diplomat (she had the background – including a stint at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a PhD in international relations from the University of Geneva - and the intelligence to do so) or in the private sector - not just as helpmate to and source of investment capital for her husband. At least, she would have had the choice.

No Frames No Boundaries Revisited

By John Charles Dyer, UK Correspondent 

I have vivid memories of the night of 13 December 1984.  On 13 December 1984 Beyond War and the USSR State Committee for Television and Radio jointly presented “Spacebridge."  

I was there.   

Spacebridge

A crisp clear night embraced San Francisco's Masonic Auditorium.  Inside, excitement built among the more than 3,000 attending.  Television would soon link us with Muscovites. We would see each other as we talked -Skype before Skype but on a mass scale.    

The occasion was the first annual “Beyond War Award,” presented that night to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.  Bernard Lown, MD and his Soviet counterpart, Evguenni Chazov, MD accepted on behalf of the organization.   

I belonged to Beyond War -- a movement birthed by Creative Initiative Foundation of Palo Alto (to which I also belonged). I had already volunteered over 20 hours per week for over a year by this time.  Less than 500 couples launched Beyond War at Stanford Chapel.  By 13 December 1984 the movement exceeded 20,000 committed participants.  

No Frames No Boundaries was Beyond War's video statement of faith. Rusty Schweickart's experiences in space, narrated by the former astronaut, play a pivotal role in the development of the video's theme.  

Beyond War as an organization may have differed somewhat from what you might expect. Many at the centre of the movement were Republican leaning businessmen and professionals.  The influence of Stanford University was omnipresent.  This was not a poor people’s movement. It was not a worker's movement. It was a Silicon Valley/ Bay Area movement.  

They were a high powered lot. Creative Initiative's revered founder had been a Stanford Law School professor. One member was a physician engaged in the joint US-USSR space medicine programme. Another was the "R" in ROLM Corporation. A third had been a White House fellow, an entrepreneur who retired in his early 30's.  A fourth had been counsel to the US Defense Department under President Ford. 

The event did not disappoint.   

Mel Swope, a well known Beyond War member, was Spacebridge's creative consultant. Dan Dippery, another member, directed audio visial.  Dippery had been Vice-President of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne.   

Bill Burch of “Fame” fame directed the music. Etta James performed an original song, “Beyond War,” she composed for the occasion. William Goldstein contributed an original musical score. Goldstein had previously composed the “Celebration Overture” for the National Symphony Orchestra’s US Bicentennial celebration at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Paul Winter and Paul Halley performed Winter’s beloved hymn, “The Blue-Green Hills of Earth,” from his famed “Missa Gaia/Earth Mass.”  The Gosteleradio Childrens Chorus of Moscow joined them, along with the San Francisco’s Boys Chorus.     

But the most moving bit had to be the Spacebridge itself.  

Persuasion and Power: The Art of Strategic Communication Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

James Farwell’s soon to be published book Persuasion and Power:  The Art of Strategic Communication (Georgetown University Press) is a “how to” book for professionals and wannabe professionals as well as an interesting read for those who simply want to learn more about how governments and politicians (elected and non-elected) have informed and influenced publics about their policies and candidates. 

Farwell is a long-time political campaign and US military strategic communications consultant. He wrote this book as a way of explaining in lay terms the thinking behind campaigns of influence – or in less pejorative terms – ways of “winning hearts and minds.”  In essence, Farwell suggests that there are certain common elements between what the US military calls strategic communication, governments call public affairs and public diplomacy, businesses see as advertising and political advisors view as campaigning.  He eschews or questions incomprehensible jargon and quantitative studies and instead uses numerous real world examples told through narrative to illustrate his points.

Paramount importance of truth telling

Farwell’s basic argument is that the overriding goal of any information campaign is not only to inform but also to influence the people who matter.   He suggests that this is the case for authoritarian regimes and dictators seeking to keep their populations in line as well as for democracies, militaries, foreign offices and elected politicians.  And, he argues that whatever the message – the facts and the story need to be accurate.  They must be judged as credible by the intended recipients because the long term veracity of the messenger is crucial to his or her obtaining and maintaining popular support. 

I also think the medium is not the message; the message is the message; but the messenger must choose the most effective medium or media for its delivery whether for good or ill.  Witness - as Farwell tragically points out - the efficacy of hate radio campaigns in the 1996 Rwandan genocide and, I would add, also 1990s Former Yugoslavia.   

Truth be told, you will see my name in several different chapters of this book because I was involved in its initial editing.   I donated my time – and expertise on public diplomacy – because I thought the book had the potential to go beyond the tiny readership of communications specialists cloistered – for the most part – on military bases and in university communications departments.

And although I have been subjected to various social science quantitative theories over the years in graduate school and beyond and found some useful in practice, I also know that people remember concepts told through stories far better than when presented through hard, cold data or entangled in specialist jargon.  Farwell uses his gift for story telling – he after all, lives in Faulkner country – to excellent advantage in this readable and instructive volume.

“The Last Three Feet: Case Studies in Public Diplomacy” Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Update December 13, 2012:  My condensed version of this book review appears in the December 2012 Foreign Service Journal entitled "The Longest Yard."  

As editor William P. Kiehl points out in the introduction to The Last Three Feet, despite the vast number of reports and books written about American public diplomacy since the demise of the US Information Agency in 1999 and in the aftermath of 9/11 not a single study has focused on what public diplomacy officers actually do in the field.

This despite an image of the US that plummeted with its invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and continued to scrape the bottom of the barrel until Obama was elected in 2008 rising abruptly thereafter in Europe and several other countries but not throughout most of the Middle East or much of the Islamic world besides Indonesia – and as very recent polling shows - Libya.

This small, readable volume seeks to redress the void.  The Last Three Feet is not about Washington operations – structure, function, or history.  It is not about how or what academics think public diplomacy is as they construct mind-castles in the air filled with jargon no self-respecting practitioner would take the time to wade through.  It is very simply how several of today’s experienced State Department officers have dealt with real world public diplomacy situations. These experiences have varied widely from country to country although certain commonalities – challenges and opportunities – can be seen through their writings to have recurred across the globe.

This book is built around case studies presented by several US public diplomacy specialists themselves followed by a series of interviews with others involved in helping improve America’s image abroad.  

Several of these case studies are controversial – or at least represent unique occurrences in atypical situations.   How often, for instance, is a US Consulate or Embassy situated in a city where a World Expo is about to take place and the Consul General finds him or, in the case of Shanghai, herself faced with an intransigent Washington bureaucracy and politicians unable to think out of an outdated Congressionally-limited funding box constructed thirty years before?  Or how often does an Embassy place at the top of its agenda a small youth exchange program that will need to last for years on end to prove effectiveness?

Or how many times does an Embassy transition from a public affairs strategy run by the US military in a country where US occupation forces have just left – namely Iraq - to a peacetime one administered by civilian State Department officers where a civil war is still in progress.  In all three cases, the answer is not very often.

The commonalities

In contrast, most, if not all, of these case studies discuss how Embassy public diplomacy officers have used, or attempted to use, the social media and how they have reached, or attempted to reach, beyond fortress embassy walls to communicate with local publics especially youth despite the high walls and loss of American Centers in the countries of their assignment.  

Truth be told, I find the closure of many American Centers in the 1990s to have been a “penny-wise-pound-foolish” approach to public diplomacy especially to communicating with and servicing the needs of youth – and their replacement by American Corners, or small installations (without Americans) of books, periodicals and presumably Internet access ensconced in someone else’s library a less than satisfactory solution.

Do understand, the American Corners idea is not new. As Cultural Affairs Officer in Manila I had to evaluate a raft of them in the Philippines in the 1990s just as our budget was starting to collapse and there were fewer resources available to devote to them.  Yet the “ultimate solution” – after I left – was to close the respected American Cultural Center located in the heart of Manila’s commercial districtv- used by myriads of Filipinos from students to legislators and professors - and give away its 30,000 volume collection to a private university in a suburb. The by then truncated staff was moved inside the fortified Embassy. 

The Ambassador Stevens Journal: Perspectives on Disclosures

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A reader wants to know what the Whirledview ex-diplomats would have done or said in the recent Case of the Benghazi Journal Revelations.  I won/lost the coin toss, so here goes.  But first, you need to know that the matter isn’t all that simple.

The short answer to the initial question is that, if I were still an official spokesperson, I’d probably have come up with something similar to the official Washington response to CNN’s use of deceased Ambassador Christopher Stevens’s notes.  But my public affairs version would also have been quite different. My remarks would have been terser, less emotional and less preachy.  I would not have been so hard on CNN. 

Why Was the Thing Just Lying Around?

What’s more, I’d have been thinking exactly what I’m thinking now, “Why the hell did American officialdom not search those premises (or get them searched by a trusted agent) long before a CNN reporter arrived to find the diary?  Why weren’t the premises cordoned off so reporters and others couldn’t forage around?”  In sum, why would I have be dealing with a tricky situation that shouldn’t have existed?

The State Department Angle

Consider what would have happened if the scorched premises had been searched the next morning by someone representing the U.S. mission in Libya.  The journal would have been in official hands, and it would have been mum’s the word until the pages had been read to see if anything Stevens had written had the potential (1) to actually damage U.S. national security, (2) to ease relations with Libya or (3) to embarrass the State Department. Such things could have been quietly noted, for present or future action,  after which the pages could have been passed along, with suitable sincere condolences, to the family (with further suitable provisos about suppression of the sensitive passages, assuming they weren’t first removed).

The Free Press Angle

Since CNN got to the diary first, the journalists did exactly what they should have done.  They aired the parts that were salient to an evaluation of U.S. policy and revealed nothing at all that could be called personal. This is why, as a government spokesperson, I wouldn’t have excoriated CNN.  When I was representing the U.S. abroad—and today, too—the American line was to encourage a free, unfettered and enterprising press as one of the foundations of democracy.  Wouldn’t it be counterproductive to blast CNN for doing its job properly?

A Private Citizen's Angle

That being said, as a private citizen concerned about U.S. policy in the Middle East, I am also happy that CNN took its reportorial role seriously, even though its editors must surely have known that a barrage of criticism would ensue. That’s my kind of journalism.

Back to the State Department.  Did the diplomats themselves, when they received the journal from CNN’s circumspect people, hand it over immediately to the grieving family?  Of course not.  That would have been totally irresponsible.  They had to know what Ambassador Stevens had written for reasons (1), (2) and (3) above. Let it, meanwhile, be noted that nothing of a personal nature which may have existed in that journal has been revealed by the State Department either. Both State and CNN have played fair with the Stevens family.     

The Family Angle

Now to the Stevens family.  It is a terrible thing to lose someone in the line of duty, but anyone related to any foreign service officer serving in today’s turbulent Middle East knows the risks—and knows also that any FSO, from Ambassador to junior officer, takes those risks knowingly, even gladly.  Few of those families will not be aware that journals kept by their loved ones, especially those found at the scene of tragedies such as that which occurred in Benghazi, may contain information that may help to explain a death.  The information might even prevent other deaths from occuring.  Thus, so long as nothing of a purely personal nature has been made public, I can’t justify objections to the State Department’s  examining it before it was rendered to the family. It is hard for me to believe that Ambassador Stevens himself would have felt this an invasion of his privacy.

The Foreign Service Life

Sometimes it’s hard for others to remember that a foreign service officer on duty is not a private citizen and that whatever he or she does is a matter of public interest.  For the same reason, a FSO must be circumspect when blogging and tweeting while serving abroad.  If an FSO doesn’t feel comfortable with these restrictions, the solution is simple: resign.

Chris Stevens wasn’t about to resign.  He was committed to his job and, by all accounts, he was good at it.  My colleague Pat Kushlis has raised important questions about the circumstances of his death, which seems to have been highly unnecessary.  For that reason alone, it was important that his notes be scrutinized before they were rendered to his family.  And, last but not least, CNN was not irresponsible in its reporting of the journal's contents.

The Education/Immigration Conundrum

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In his column on Sunday September 9, Tom Friedman points out the chicken and egg relationship between education and employment.  The more education an American has, the more likely he – or she – will have a job.  Case in point:  Only 4.4 percent of American college graduates are currently unemployed. Conversely, 12 percent of high school dropouts are out of work.  Yet fewer Americans – especially young men – are graduating from college than before likely because of escalating costs of higher education.

The employment-education ratio is straightforward and linear: the higher one’s education, the better one’s potential for finding and holding a job.

While one can quibble that money does not buy happiness, most societies including America’s, value work.

Put it down to the Protestant work ethic – or whatever – but lazing around on the family couch or playing Angry Birds ad infinitum on a laptop or i-phone is not a socially valued attribute. Not for long anyway.

This is why Friedman – as did Bill Clinton in his brilliant Democratic National Convention speech - argues that if the US ever sets aside more economic stimulus money it needs to be invested in community colleges, Pell grants and vocational training classes.

Furthermore, Friedman argues, education in the Internet Age – or the age of Globalization and Technological Innovation - is about the continual reinvention of the self which means a never-ending race to update one’s knowledge and skills. Resting on one’s laurels after completing college or less is a recipe for failure in this knowledge-based hyper-competitive world.  

It’s the ability and willingness to learn complex tasks and the latest computer programs over and over and over again.   So far so good: keeping the brain active also helps keep it healthy. And, Friedman also points out that in this globalized age, low skilled jobs are melting away like Arctic icebergs in the Global Warming sun.  My analogy, not his, but I think you understand the meaning.

So where does the immigration impediment come in? What’s the connection?

Here’s the issue:  the more highly skilled jobs that are made available to foreigners determined by visa quotas set by the federal government, the less investment an American company needs to put into training America’s own.  Let’s face it: importing skilled foreign workers in large quantities is a cheap yet, in my view, socially counterproductive way to conduct business in these United States.

Nevertheless, hence the continual pressure from the private sector on the US government to increase the quota of visas for skilled workers from abroad. Companies claim they can’t find them in the US. They may well be right.  But why?  What about investing more in the people who are already here rather than contributing to an ever high unemployment rate that contributes to an ever larger permanent under-class?  Better education for Americans is not necessarily a “quick fix” to the problem – but it would benefit the country and the community in the long run.

Vindication and a Happy Ending: A Rebuke to the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

U.S. public diplomacy in India was in shocking disarray, I discovered, when I visited Kolkata during the winter of 2011. In several posts I described incompetence when it came to interacting with the Indian public and callous if not downright cruel personnel policy.  You can refresh your memories by reviewing theses posts: The Big Jingle Jangle, The Maharani and her Scion and America the Imperial.

The latter is the one that concerns us here.  It described the sacking of a talented, veteran Foreign Service National—whoops! wrong term.  These people who were once regarded as professional colleagues have been demoted to mere Locally Employed Staff.  (I ask you.  Which denotes more respect and collegiality?  Which category would you prefer to fall into? )

Yes, I discovered that the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata had fired a veteran information assistant, a man with whom I had worked for two years, on a trumped up charge of electronic sabotage.  I can vouch for this person’s competence, character and creativity.  He was really fired so that a sexier candidate from the fashion world could be hired to fill a newly vacant post to which he should have been promoted.

Today, I am happy to report that my ex-colleague has landed on his feet.  In fact, he has been offered a position with far more prestige than anyone gets for doing the bidding of a foreign power.  Even as I write he will be taking up his new responsibilities as Assistant Editor of the Bengali daily that the prestigeous Times of India is launching in Kolkata.

In short, America’s loss is India’s gain—and my friend’s too. 

Given the shoddy treatment meted out to this man, does anyone imagine a principled, first rate journalist will ever again be willing to work for America in Kolkata?  But it gets worse.  It’s hard to imagine this story hasn’t made the rounds in the newspaper world throughout India.  The message is clear.  Work for America.  Get kicked in the face.

Drones—and Worms: Part One

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Until a couple of days ago I’d envisioned a hypothetical piece falling under the rubric of “what goes around comes around.”  In short, if we use drones to kill and worms (or viruses) to disrupt, the people we don’t like will be returning the favor, the sooner or later of it depending on the rate of technology transfer.  And whadyaknow!  They have them already—drones anyway. Bashar al Assad’s regime is using reconnaissance drones in what’s gradually being recognized as a very nasty civil war.  So the future is here.  This means that Americans need to do some very clear-headed thinking about drones—and about cyberwarfare, too—and when I say “we” I don’t mean a few guys in a bunker making decisions the rest of us won’t have access to for 50 years or more.

The U.S. deploys drones (pilotless aircraft) for spying and killing in many places.   When activated from a command center, the killer drones fire powerful missiles at selected targets.  The U.S. has thousands of drones in the air or ready for use. 
 
Many questions pop up when it comes to waging war with drones.  (1) Are these gizmos legal under the rules of war?  If so, what rules? (2) Legal or not, is it moral or ethical to use them? (3) Was it smart for the U.S.  to pioneer this sort of war? (4) What do American citizens have a right to know about drones or any other weapons deployed on their behalf?

The Abuse of Words

For starters, however, let’s get rid of the “surgical strike” metaphor.  The idea that bad guys and only really bad guys are taken out by the lethal drone treatment consoles too many who are otherwise squeamish about remotely controlled slaughter.  Every day surgeons make mistakes that are followed by funerals that shouldn’t have been. Drone “mistakes” fill whole cemeteries.

Excessive mortality from bombing and shelling used to be called “collateral damage,” as if dead people mattered as little as shattered windows.  Today’s equally cynical, but more sophisticated verbal coverup works by redefinition.  We’ve been told that any post-pubertal male who’s killed along with the targeted individual is presumed also to have been a terrorist. What a brilliant statistical coup!  Aim for one.  Get ten. Guilt by propinquity. Probably the dead women and girls should be counted, too.  If they didn’t divorce the guy, run away from home or disinherit a son, they probably hated America, too. Guilt by association. Ker-boom!

There have been many attempts to cover up an inconvenient truth about drones, which is: even when guided by up-to-date from-the-air-and-on-the-ground information, drone management does not yield perfect selectivity.  If a well-known bad guy is driving through a desert on a little used road with no turn-offs, those with him probably are collaborators or comrades-in-arms, and probably the missile can find the right man in the right car.  Roll back the tape and consider this: the subject may actually have been at said address, but it takes mere minutes  to say good-bye a trife early, jump in a car and be a mile away, thereby leaving unfingered people behind to take the taking out.  Ker-boom! 

Here are some other ways in which good info turns out to be useless or mistaken and a supposedly pinpointed strike requires apologies and long-winded explanations that are very bad for the American image: the target changes his schedule at the last minute and never gets to the rendezvous, he suspects a trap, his vehicle breaks down en route, the missile was delivered to the wrong address or was a few dozen feet off target, hitherto reliable informants didn’t know or mention that there was going to be some sort of traditional family conclave in the same place at the same time, etc, etc., etc. Ker-boom!

I can hear it now.  Chuckle!  Chuckle! You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Which only brings us back to the prison of inappropriate metaphors.  Give me two eggs.  I can beat them into a superb omelet—or I can take the longer view.  I’ll end up with two laying hens and dozens of eggs—or a pair of doves, for that matter. Diplomacy is getting where you need to go without breaking eggs. 

Smugness is Not a Good Idea

More ominously to the present point, given the inevitable ubiquity of drone availability and the likelihood that drone range can only increase, it might be a good idea for all of us heretofore smug and safe Americans to consider the distance between houses in our own neighborhoods.  Would our families survive if the house next door harbored targeted terrorists?  Is the kids’ school a safe distance from any conceivable target?  And so on. And what about incoming missiles that go off course?  From human error.  From mechanical or electronic malfunction.  Either way, someone dies. 

Have you made your funeral plans?  Your son’s?  Your daughter’s? Americans are pretty safe now, but that won’t be the case in the near future—and the big danger won’t come from cells of amateurs manipulated by FBI agents or from adolescents inflamed by internet propaganda.  If we end up on the receiving end of a drone delivery, you might say, given our own way of waging war, that we asked for it.

Worms That Turn

Space is running out here, and I haven’t even begun to describe what could happen if serious cyberattacks were directed at the United States rather than Iran.  I don’t mean the kind of hacking that annoys large institutions with sloppy security or even, on occasion, the Pentagon, which has also had a few embarrassing encounters with cyber intruders.  I mean a worm or virus that shuts down the whole country in this age of massive interconnection.  Evidently it was a Russian hacking genius who discovered the Flame virus and Stuxnet, too.  What if he were working for a an actively hostile Russian government?  Who’d break his code?

My purpose here isn’t to fear monger or start a panic but to suggest that there are some very powerful reasons why the international community needs to do a little updating of the conventions of war and peace now that technology has complicated our mutual vulnerabilities—and our responsibilities as human actors.  Part Two will address these urgencies by looking more directly at the four questions that introduced this discussion. Given attempts to conceal, minimize, mischaracterize and otherwise mislead the public about the use of drones, it is particularly important to determine just how much secrecy is necessary to protect Americans and to what it extent it serves only to deprive Americans of the open debate about means and ends that is necessary to democracy.  Excessive secrecy does not protect.  It infantalizes the many and empowers the few.