By PLS
I’ve been quite mystified by the Bush administration’s approach to Public Diplomacy: lots of blather about PD’s importance, near invisibility for the practice itself.
For instance, there was this bizarre scenario:
Karen Hughes, the newly appointed (and confirmed) Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, had submitted to the relevant Senate committee a statement outlining the critical importance of PD, then concluded the nomination process by drawling (in effect), “Thanks for the honor, guys. Ah will get mah ass to Washington, eventually, but ah’d really rather spend the summer with mah kids.”
Shortly after Hughes finally showed up at Foggy Bottom, she took off on what was billed as a modest fact-finding trip that turned into a disastrous demonstration of what happens when a neophyte who should be all ears turns into a spokesperson who can’t hear.
The tour proved that the conventional wisdom about the Hughes appointment had been all wrong. Most pundits had assumed that Bush was signaling his belief in the importance of public diplomacy by appointing his communications Wonder Woman to the post. Her performance proved the opposite. (See several WorldView articles under Public Diplomacy, esp. those with "Hughes" in the title .)
So this is the way I see it: at some point during a commercial break in “Desperate Housewives” Hughes (who'd resigned from her White House duties for family reasons) whipped out her cell phone, called Washington and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Dubya, ah love mah kiddies, but ah’m jes’ plumb bored out of mah tree.” What was Bush to do? He couldn’t ignore an old colleague’s distress. Fortunately, the PD post was vacant, again, so he turned to Rove and said, “Whadaya think?” and Rove shrugged, “Whatever.”
As it turned out, the Hughes appointment served brilliantly to divert attention from the Bush administration's actual public information strategy, even as the calls for a more effective conventional public diplomacy program had been multiplying.
For instance, there have been at least 18 high level reports on Public Diplomacy since 9/11. Generated under public and private auspices from all points on the ideological spectrum, they have telling titles like this:
• Public Diplomacy for the 21st Century
• Reclaiming America’s Voice Overseas
• Building Public Diplomacy through a Reformed Structure and Additional Resources
• The Rise of Netpolitik: How the Internet is Changing International Politics and Diplomacy
• The New Diplomacy: Utilizing Innovative Communication Concepts that Recognize Resource Constraints
Another, the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication, issued in September 2004, provided some useful figures on funding and staffing for Public Diplomacy:
The [State] Department’s current funding for public diplomacy (approximately $600 million), is substantially less in real terms than public diplomacy budgets during the Cold War. [That’s for information programs, educational and cultural exchanges, embassy activities and opinion research.] When combined with the BBG’s [VOA, Radio Sawa, etc.] international broadcasting budget (also approximately $600 million) the public diplomacy budget totals $1.2 billion.This report (a Pentagon document, no less) recommended that the Public Diplomacy budget be increased by some 30 percent, which would (it appears to my inexpert calculations) restore the Cold War appropriation level and indicate that the Bush II administration takes Public Diplomacy seriously as a tool in the foreign affairs portfolio.The 9/11 Commission, senior political leaders in both parties, and the findings of recent public diplomacy studies are in agreement on two fundamental assumptions. America is engaged in a “struggle of ideas.” Existing levels of investment in public diplomacy are not commensurate with current threats and opportunities. Funds allocated for strategic communications [abroad] are anemic in contrast to what is spent by corporations and political campaigns. Public diplomacy resources (staff and funding) have eroded by more than 30 percent since 1989. More than 60 percent of the Department’s overseas missions today have only one public diplomacy officer.
For all the wealth of good ideas and the universal belief that funding must increase drastically, there is no evidence of serious administration commitment to making PD viable again, which seemed extremely odd to me. Lady Liberty’s looking like Medusa, but PD is badly short changed.
Meanwhile, we've learned this week that the President, in order to prosecute his “War against Terror,” has instructed the National Security Agency to use its incredible technologies to spy (illegally, assert many Senators) on the electronic conversations of American citizens and has done so without obtaining prior warrants. The administration has not even deigned to secure the retroactive warrants permitted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This clause allows for speedy reaction to an apparent threat without totally subverting civil liberties in the name of expedience.
All in all, the version of executive power asserted by Attorney General Gonzales is so sweeping that we should probably be referring to the American chief executive as Czar, not President. Bush asserts his right to a degree of freedom of action never asserted by any of the presidents who occupied the office during a Cold War overshadowed by the nuclear threat. Add to this power-snatching the latitude envisioned by the Patriot Act (whose word-for-word renewal is, fortunately, stalled for now) and--who knows!--maybe this administration will decide that elections are much too risky so long as the essentially endless "War on Terror" endures.
“Trust me,” says Dubya. “I’m here to protect you.”
Oddly enough this doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Americans are supposed to be protected by the rule of law, not the paternalistic impulses of any president.
Here’s an example of how safe we are: the Patriot Act-enabled FBI has been terrorizing the parents of a student who wanted to read Mao’s Little Red Book as part of his research for a term paper. Clearly the kid is a candidate for some black hole CIA prison, where he can languish—no charges, no lawyers—for the rest of his life, like the hopeless victims of medieval barons in Europe. And the rest of us are hereby warned to avoid reading anything that savors of alien ideas. Patriotic Americans can read Tom Clancy, I suppose, and keep their revolutionary impulses in check by watching the cosmetic atrocities of “Extreme Makeover” on TV.
Incredible, but true. The part about the Little Red Book, anyway.
So I was going through a period of distress and bafflement, hearing that the struggle of ideas is basic to the war even as the president himself is subverting the ideas we supposedly stand for, watching the US image tarnished beyond belief, seeing the PD mission badly neglected. It didn't add up.
Finally, this month, the mystery was more or less solved, thanks to the New York Times (on 12/11) and the Los Angeles Times a few days earlier. (Articles free to subscribers only.)
It seems that the funds that should have been devoted to enhancing the State Department’s PD budget have been funneled by the Bush administration into a very different kind of information program with a very different philosophy. The program is carried out by the Pentagon, and it’s totally at odds with American democracy and with the goal of promoting democracy in Iraq or anywhere else.
The NYT piece notes that tranches of $25 and $27 million have been paid to private contractors in Iraq for the purpose of generating articles and “news” stories to be planted in the Iraqi press under the bylines of Iraqi journalists who receive up to $2000 for so perjuring themselves. Given the fact that US officials have indignantly criticized Al Jazeera for serving as a mouthpiece for militants, how can the Pentagon imagine that the output of the Lincoln and Rendon groups provides an adequate alternative model for journalism in a nascent democracy? Is this what we are teaching the Iraqi establishment—how to stay in power by subverting the press? (See PHK's WorldView post.)
We public diplomats of USIA used to wrestle with the conundrum of whether we were just crass propagandists or something a little better—purveyors of accurate information about a worthy society and its reputable policies. Whatever we were, we weren’t underhanded.
And here’s the crowning absurdity of the Pentagon's extremely expensive project: the ruse doesn’t work.
A former Lincoln employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. “Many Iraqis know it’s from Americans,” he said.Most likely the figures disclosed by the NYT reveal only the tip of the covert information iceberg, especially since the story gives no indication of what the Defense Department's in-house costs for staffing and administering the program might be. Still, whatever the totals for any and all covert information activities by the Pentagon, any such costs are peanuts for the Defense Department.
Not so for State. A transfer of those malappropriated funds to their rightful administrators would make all the difference in the world. The State Department might then be able to do the PD job that all those studies mentioned above had envisioned, had hoped for.
That leaves a final unsolved element to the mystery. Public Diplomacy is just that. It's based on the notion that you’ve got a story you can be open and honest about. Why, I wonder, does the Bush administration assume that America’s message to the world has to be insinuated? Why can’t it be asserted proudly in public?
Considering this administration's proclivity for torture and abuses of civil liberties, that's probably a stupid question, isn't it?