By PLS
You're going to be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a job whose importance and difficulty most people seriously underestimate.
In the past you've spent most of your time burnishing the image of George W. Bush. By all accounts, you've done a bang up job at that. But this job is bigger, much bigger. It has to do with the reputation of the United States of America, and I'm hoping you're smart enough know the difference. Meanwhile, there's a book you should read before you walk into your new office.
The tale is in the Title: Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.
Author and democracy expert Larry Diamond admits he’s a Democrat who opposed the invasion of Iraq. But he’s a friend and ex-Stanford colleague of Condoleeza Rice. She asked him, late in 2003, to go to Iraq to help draft and implement the proto constitution known as the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). Under its provisions Iraqis were to elect a transitional government whose most urgent task would be to write a permanent constitution, get it ratified and hold elections for the first post-Saddam, truly sovereign government (except for certain military occupiers).
With deep foreboding, yet determined to do his best by his old friend, Larry Diamond went to Iraq early in 2004. His experience was so discouraging that, friendship notwithstanding, he has written a book that’s a must read for public diplomacy practitioners.
To save you time, Karen, I abstract some of Diamond’s implied dos and don’ts. It would serve you well to internalize them before you start trying to inject American values into non-American bodies politic:
1. Wishful thinking, um, sucks. Saddam Hussein was a vicious ruler, but he was “their bastard,” so the roses didn’t materialize. Chaos did. Although the administration embedded journalists among the troops advancing on Baghdad, there was no public diplomacy program ready for the contingencies many experts had accurately foreseen—experts in the State Department or Army War College, for example, as Diamond points out. The world got cheery sound bites from military public affairs officers. The Iraqi public got death, power cuts and hearty promises that American values would be exported to Iraq, as if Muslims don’t have a pretty good set of values to realize, given half a chance institutionalize them—and I don’t mean unreconstructed, divisive versions of Sharia.
2. One size fits no one. This is going to be a hard one, Karen. The parrot method of staying on message won’t produce sound bites that work equally well in all countries. One style or vocabulary won’t even satisfy all publics in any one country. This is not hypocrisy. Modulating and contextualizing the message shows respect and intelligence. This is what good PD people are trained to do.
3. You can’t make friends without meeting people. Diamond was constantly stymied by the lack of equipment, staff and transportation. “The inadequacy of force and of resources meant that we could not secure the roads....Nor could we feel confident that our military could preempt the insurgent threats to our democratization program....The civilian side of the mission was likewise undersourced. We never had enough civilian employees or enough armored cars, body armor, helicopters and other forms of secure transportation to move the staff members safely around. And even if we had gotten more armored cars, we would still have needed more personal security details to guard the CPA officials in them.” Some travel was possible. Some meetings were held. But only in super safe venues, according to Diamond, and not often enough to allay concerns about the drafting and resulting provisions of the TAL. Bottom line: if you can’t meet with people on their own turf because you’re always hunkering down, you can’t do good public diplomacy.
4. Expertise isn’t a dirty word. To promote something as important as democracy, you need the right people to do it. Here, too, Diamond was hindered. “We never had enough translators and interpreters, nor did we do even half of what we might have done to protect the lives of those brave, talented Iraqis who volunteered for this role. We never had sufficient expertise on the ground–people who know the country, its culture, and its history and who could speak its language reasonably well. Only a tiny percentage of CPA employees met all four of the requirements for an ‘A team’ in post conflict reconstruction: area (including language) expertise, functional expertise, current responsibility at the level of previous experience and willingness to deploy for at least a year.”
5. Older can be better, believe it or not. The CPA assigned Twenty Somethings to deal with senior Iraqis in reorganizing the Baghdad stock exchange, negotiating constitutional provisions and training the staff of a refurbished National Assembly, according to Diamond. “However talented and patriotic, these young people lacked the experience and often also the judgement for such awesome tasks. In a society that is conscious of age and status, youthful American brashness could not help but offend even our Iraqi friends and partners.” In most societies, people well into their forties are still considered too young for major responsibility and decision-making. For that matter, do adults anywhere take kindly to sassy kids?
6. Remove the ear plugs. “We never listened carefully to the Iraqi people, or to the figures in the country they respected,” reports Diamond, so “we never won their trust and confidence.” The CPA lost valuable time when it failed, for months, to take the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani seriously. Above all, “against the advice of most people who knew Iraq well (including the politicians in exile with whom we had been working), and flying in the face of a proud and defiant national history that we barely studied, we established ourselves as an occupying power in every respect and so ensured that we would face a dedicated, violent resistance—without enough troops to cope.”
7. Hug a critic every day. Again and again, Diamond writes things like this: “Someone needed to speak about the drift in the American posture [and] the lack of a clear plan to establish the minimum security necessary for a transition to any kind of decent political order,” but he says, “I knew that the Bush administration would not welcome open criticism.” Nor was anyone at the top of the CPA of a mind to respond to Iraqis. “Many Iraqis [also] felt that the TAL could do little to achieve the rule of law if security was not improved. All of this information was precious feedback, but the CPA lacked the mechanisms–or the will–to adjust its actions and politics in response.”
8. Nasty contradictions will be noticed. “What Iraqis observed,” writes Diamond of his tenure in Iraq, “was an interim constitution drafted and adopted without national debate, a postponement of elections, another round of appointed government and a perpetuation of control by the forces on the Governing Council....In the quest to create a democratic, tolerant and participatory culture, we had only halfheartedly broken the ice.” There’s worse. Again and again, Diamond reports, “the United States was finding itself on what appeared to be the less democratic side of an argument with the Iraqis over transitional procedures. Sistani had called for an elected constitution-making body. Bremer said an appointed body would do. Iraqis... wanted to conduct direct elections for local governments. Bremer and the top governance officials...proposed an opaque, convoluted process for choosing a transitional government.” Eventually, “the CPA and the Governing Council was [sic] saying to Iraqis...Here is your wonderful interim constitution, and a great many Iraqis were responding, Don’t we have a voice in shaping the rules that will govern us for the next eighteen months and will guide the making of our permanent constitution?” The fact that he could make no coherent response at the time still haunts Diamond.
9. Slick is nice, but timing is of the essence. The CPA envisioned an elaborate, Western style advertising campaign to promote the TAL once it was finalized. There would be a major TV presence, a series of pamphlets appearing weekly to explain all any Iraqi needed to know about democracy in general and the TAL in particular, town meetings to neutralize critics and satisfy the participatory urge of the population. But approval and production took too long. “Well before we could distribute our beautifully produced leaflets...and weeks before the radio and television ads were set to roll out, a detailed critique of the TAL—crudely produced, but devastatingly effective—began shaping the terms of public debate.” At town meetings Diamond and his colleagues spent most of their time answering questions engendered by the flyers.
Maybe an Iraqi constitution will be drafted by August 15. Maybe it will be ratified and followed by an election that makes Iraq a democracy. Although no one can predict precisely what will happen once that government is chosen and Iraq is no longer occupied by the US, an intelligently conceived and well timed program of public diplomacy will be necessary. Squandered Victory reveals that PD was either neglected or badly bungled during the invasion and post-invasion phases in Iraq. We’ll need to explain ourselves much, much better from now on.