WhirledView

U.S.-Sri Lanka Relations: Demons and Demonizing

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 The U.S. ambassador called on the Sri Lankan foreign minister last week.  It seems that Sri Lanka has a new friend, and badmouthing the U.S. is taking place at very high levels.  To understand some of the psychology here, it might be worthwhile to start with the mythic history of this island nation.

The Story of Ram and Ravana

In the Ramayana, the famous Indian national epic, the villain is the demon Ravana, who kidnaps Ram’s wife Sita and sets off a great war.  Let me add a complication here.  In North India Ravana is indubitably the villain.  In South India the story has a different twist:  Ravana is the hero and Ram is not.  And what is the name of Ravana’s domain?  Lanka—which is why Ceylon was renamed after independence from Britain. 

Today the ruler of Sri Lanka is President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who feels that he is being demonized by the West even as his Singalese followers worship him as the hero who delivered the island from a demonic insurgency.  Thus Rajapaksa becomes Ram, and Tiger leader Prabakaran is the Ravana who had to be (and was) slain.

But wait!  There’s another possible demon in the piece.  China.  In this case,  Sri Lanka becomes Sita the lovely bride who is stolen from the West by the dragon from the East in the current war of nerves between the U.S. and China.

Now Ravana, in the mythical epic, is a slippery character with nine heads, not easy to deal with, not easy to kill, and Mahinda Rajapaksa’s character is no less elusive.  On the one hand, he is utterly ruthless.  On the other, he may have preserved the unity of Lanka.  He speaks of democracy, but he is also a nasty electoral opponent.  These many faces were in play last week as his government skirmished with the American ambassador.  

The Strings on the Money Bag

Acording to the Congressional Research Service, US officials cited “human rights concerns” to slash U.S. assistance to Sri Lanka beginning in 2007.  The government in Colombo had decided to wage all out war against the remnants of the Tamil Tigers.  The process was not pretty, which is why good journalists found themselves vulnerable to reprisals, including assassination, another black mark against the Rajapaksa regime. 

USAID in 2005 had been $20.6 million.  By 2007 it had been reduced by half and even that sum was scheduled to be whittled to a mere $6 million by 2009.  That’s a drop in the bucket, a loss hardly worth crying over, monetarily.  Taken as a snub, however, it’s considerable.

Other long standing international donors joined the U.S. in suspending aid or withholding new commitments.  It didn’t seem to matter that the Tigers had been nil respecters of human rights themselves.  Nor should it have. Brutality is brutality, and governments are rightly held to a higher standard.  

The CRS report continues: 

President Rajapaksa has responded with defiance, saying that his country is not dependent on foreign aid and can go it alone, if necessary.  Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother, has decried the “international bullying” on human rights.

Needless to say, President Rajapaksa and his belligerent brother (the demon Ravana had brothers as allies, too) also resent the unsuccessful but energetic efforts by the U.S. and others to have the U.N. Security council censure Sri Lanka for its refusal to heed calls for a cease fire in the waning days of the war.  Those wily Tigers!  They were using thousands of Tamil refugees as human shields to keep their cadres from being slaughtered or driven into the sea.  Conditions in the post-war refugees camps were also severely criticized on humanitarian grounds.  More grist for the resentment mill.

China to the Rescue

However, it is hardly true that Sri Lanka under a re-elected Rajapaksa is going it alone and has forsworn dependence on foreign aid.  It has simply switched benefactors.  What Sri Lanka is getting out of China is probably worth far more to the nation’s prospects for long term prosperity than any lost aid from the West.  

Selling Cars, Colas and Countries

Posted by Patricia Lee Sharpe

Many of you who read my recent piece on Winning Hearts and Minds may have missed this one. Each asks us to think more closely about commonly used phrases which, on reflection, turn out to be not so useful in the pursuit of effective public diplomacy. This one was written during the Bush administration. Leave out a few names, however, and it's a fresh as tomorrows sunrise, which in some ways is very discouraging, although the danger of misappropriation today is more likely to come from military psyops, say, than than from purely commercial advertising. 

People in the White House and Pentagon are baffled. According to The New York Times on December 13, American policy makers can’t understand why a country able to market cars and colas to people deeply hostile to the U.S. can’t also “sell its democratic ideals” to them. Madison Avenue is infamous for its ability to persuade people to buy things they don’t need and can’t afford, and yet, our leaders observe, the U.S. falls short in persuading most Arabs (or even most Europeans) that the Iraq invasion was a good idea.

The Bush administration has been fixated from day one on the “marketing” and “sales” models for influencing foreign publics. Soon after the inaugural a successful ad woman was appointed to head up the Public Diplomacy section of the State Department. To the surprise only of those who recruited her, the lady failed to generate a love fest for America in the Middle East.

So she’s gone; wanted to spend more time with the family or something like that, the usual pretext for the departure of a high level political appointee. Why am I not surprised or baffled?

Let’s look at the U.S. auto industry. Back when Ralph Nader was more widely admired (or feared), he showed us that the American auto industry was foisting “lemons” on the American public. Despite their sexy tail fins, American cars weren’t well made. Their designs were out of touch with evolving life styles. They were more expensive than the emerging competition. They were “unsafe at any speed.”

Soon Americans were buying foreign automobiles, and Japanese automakers were manufacturing Japanese cars in the U.S. Despite the best (or worst) efforts of Madison Avenue, American automakers were losing market share. Result: the good old days of American dominance in the auto industry are gone.

During the 22 years I was working abroad I saw fewer and fewer new American cars on the streets. People with middle class budgets bought Japanese cars. The rich bought German cars. Haven’t our policy makers noticed how the world has changed? Is this sputtering sales model going to help the U.S. make friends and attract allies in an era of terrorism? For that matter, is the United States of America no more important than a hunk of steel and engineering?

This brings us to the cola model. American colas are indeed bottled and drunk everywhere, and cola marketing is big business. Why? Because cola is fancy sugar water, with mildly addictive additives like caffeine. It takes major hype to create, sustain, increase the cola market. In my days as a young advertising copywriter I, too, learned how to make an run-of-the-mill product sound exciting, unique, indispensable.

However, when I, a non-smoker, was asked to provide a testimonial, with photo, for a quit-smoking product, I quit the job instead. Exaggeration I could deal with. Falsification I couldn’t. Yet big time stars get big bucks to provide testimonials that are, to put it bluntly, lies: these sorry role models don’t really live and die by the products they push. Are these the techniques we need to make American policy credible abroad? Is America no better than “lemons” or sugar water? Influential people in the Pentagon seem to think so.

They think so little of the appeal of the American system, values and way of life that they want to create false documents and disseminate lies that amount to character assassination. It’s a tit for tat operation justified,they say, by the practice of American-bashing in some mosques and madrasas. Reading this, my heart sank.

When I was a press officer working for the U.S. Information Agency, I spent a good deal of my time refuting Soviet disinformation–and taking pride in the fact that we in USIA had a mandate the tell the whole American story, warts and all. Warts or no, we didn’t have to lie to look good. But in those days we didn’t have to explain away the shockingly cruel and illegal treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, at Abu Graib, in Afghanistan.

Who in the world can look at scenes of torture and associate America with “democratic ideals”? And once a campaign of disinformation is underway, nothing the U.S. government says will be trusted by anyone with good sense for a long time to come.

Only a few years ago, nuclear stockpiles notwithstanding, America’s greatest strength was the soft power of a universally respected political and legal system. The U.S. could in reasonably good faith call upon other nations to improve in the area of human rights. We practically invented freedom of expression and association.

Sure, people came to the U.S. to get rich, but they also came because even an immigrant, a nobody, could become a somebody. They also came to enjoy the personal security made possible by the rule of law and all those other freedoms the Patriot Act is now curtailing. And the U.S. prevailed through leadership, not intimidation, more often than not. Soft power is what American used to have in spades.

Soft power doesn’t need propaganda or a hard sell. And the America I used to love never needed a hard sell either.

Education USA-Style - finally a few green shoots?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

A recent CNN poll reported that seven in ten Americans think Iran already has nuclear weapons. This lack of even a basic grasp of the facts by 70 percent of Americans on a controversial topic that has been at the top of the news here for nearly a decade is, I’m afraid, all too symptomatic of the poor quality of this country’s educational system, the undue influence of its entertainment and sensationalist right-wing media exacerbated by the pervasiveness of niche television as a result of the cable revolution, combined with an unwillingness – or inability - of too many Americans to read – or even listen - beyond the often blaring but misleading headlines.

When I taught undergraduate classes in international and comparative politics at the University of New Mexico several years ago, I was appalled at the weak educational backgrounds exhibited by far too many of the students I encountered in my lower division classes. Too many lacked basic writing skills, not to mention the ability to engage in analysis and critical thought.

Sadly, the least qualified of them were too often education majors: one sure way to perpetuate the problem from one generation to the next. One semester, my international politics class followed a class by a professor who taught remedial reading. Remedial reading? At the state’s largest and most prestigious university?

Upper division a different story

By the time UNM students reached the upper division, however, wheat and chaff had separated. Almost all of the students I had in my upper division Islam and Politics courses were of a much higher quality. Included were some of the better students I had taught previously. A few were graduate students. Even a few sophomores were in the course too. They were usually political science or history majors – although there were a few religion and literature majors tossed in and even a few in the hard sciences. The overall comprehension and skills gaps between the lower and upper division classes were elephantine.

How Is Water Like Booze? Part II

By John C. Dyer, Guest Contributor

(This is the second in a two part series on WhirledView by John C. Dyer. The first is found here.  For anyone tuning in late, Mr. Dyer served as Chief Counsel to the California Department of Food and Agriculture from April, 2004 through August, 2007, serving in a general counsel slot.  Prior to that he was a counsel for the department from July, 1996.  On August 31, 2007 he retired after 34 years in public service.  This series is in response to the January 21, 2010 Economist article entitled: "California's Central Valley: The Appalachia of the West.")  

How did this come to be? 

Climate change may be a factor, but the biggest factor is obvious -- poorly restrained and managed growth in both water intensive agriculture and Southern California’s massive population centers. Setting aside the population growth in Southern California, these circumstances came to be in the Valley through systematic, extensive and intensive demands on nature to underwrite the production of more and more, something Mr Phillimore’s operations exemplify in their efficiency and productivity.   Photo right: Aerial photo of California Central Valley by David Klein,  Free Large Photos.

Poorly restrained and managed growth

 It also came to be through the expansions to 100,000 cow ranches. It came to be as demand escalated for the resources needed to produce thousands of tons of product grown and harvested year after year with greater and greater efficiency but also greater and greater demand on nature’s capacity to sustain.

The Economist article did not mention how gross agricultural product has grown even in the past 15 years. California’s Valley has long been one of this nation’s most productive agricultural preserves. Today, it produces staggering numbers from farm and ranching operations. These operations are frequently water intensive, especially so-called “production crops” like cotton. These are thirsty enterprises.

But a public policy should not be simply assumed into being as the reversal of exigent circumstances. I have no question that the existing levels of production require more water than they are receiving. But the most important public policy consideration is a little different than the one into which the Article would back the reader. 

Assume the bond issue passes - but what happens down the road?

Winning Hearts and Minds: from Fallacy to Near Impossibilty

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Is there ever a discussion of American public diplomacy that fails to endorse the idea of “winning hearts and minds.” Winning hearts and minds: it produces such a heartwarming feeling.  And who could want otherwise?  Wanting and getting, however, are not the same.  I am suggesting here that “winning hearts and minds,” as such, was always a delusive goal.  That being the case, given our present national condition, winning either is close to inconceivable.

It Was So Easy

During the cold war, public diplomacy was simple.  We told people around the world that we had a better system, which we did, in most every way.  It was more productive, which made us richer. Its political and judicial processes were creating ever greater equality for blacks, women, the handicapped.  Our educational system was a magnet for the talented and ambitious. A stubborn remnant notwithstanding, the problem of poverty appeared to be solved.  Refugees from corrupt, poor and repressed countries flocked to America for freedom and opportunity.

And oh! how proud of ourselves we were then! We used every conceivable medium to convey our triumphal national story, and people believed us, not only because we were clever at communications, but because the story we told was, in the main, true.

Being a practitioner of public diplomacy back then was easy in other ways as well.  Very little moral compromise was required of those who signed up for it.  There was virtually no need to lie or equivocate, internally or externally, to get the job done.  We actually believed in ourselves as representatives of something like the good.

Practices that Worked

Thus, willy nilly and almost by chance, the U.S. invented what now goes by the name of public diplomacy: an accretion of practices that worked.  Not that the fancy new name came with an impressive, all-encompassing theory.  Public diplomacy, for all its effectiveness, operated in the presence of a theoretical vacuum that cried for remedy, although, as I argue below, the crucial vacuum  lies at the heart of a very different America.   Nevertheless, the jockeying to fill that theoretical vacuum is under way, with practitioners, academics and the departments of State and Defense contending to define public diplomacy’s goals, tools, methods and appropriate place on the federal organizational chart.  Is public diplomacy properly an arm of traditional diplomacy?  Should it be an adjunct to military might?  Or is it sui generis and deserving of its own niche in the foreign policy apparatus?  For that matter, is it a profession or merely something any patriotic citizen can do?

But always: how best to win hearts and minds?   To which the short answer is: not head on.

The Happiness Paradigm

Let’s look at it this way:   Happiness sought directly is like a mirage.  It recedes.  It dissolves.  It can’t be attained. Yet happiness arises quite readily as a by-product, from jobs well done, from services well rendered, from things well made, from lessons well learned, from a clear conscience. Thus, during the cold war, America opposed a bad system and offered a better system we largely exemplified. As a consequence, hearts and minds almost everywhere were well disposed towards the U.S. 

Unfortunately, we Americans let ourselves bask too long in that sunshine, imagining we had “won” those hearts and minds for all time.  We were the best and the brightest, the exceptional country in a unipolar world, the beacon of inspiration.  Every country, every society, with any sense, we thought, would want to be like us.  Exactly like us.  Above all, many of us actually believed (and still believe) that American dominance was the culmination of human history, if not the working of God’s will, notions that led directly to arrogance and complacency—and to forgetting the performance imperative.

There’s some consistency here. Even at home in recent decades Americans have worshiped at the altar of unconditional love.  It’s near heresy to demand of those who wish to be loved some effort to make themselves loveable. The correlative child-rearing mantra has been: you are special, no matter what you do or don’t do.  Well, humans are not mere tools and true love is generous, but undemandingness taken to extremes leads to egocentricity and irresponsibility.  It leads to a cocooning sense of entitlement.  Very comfy.  Very easy to nod off and not notice how the world has changed. 

Which has happened. The world has changed.  And so have we, and not necessarily for the better. Forget about unconditional love.  These days we have a difficult time generating the fig leaf of cooperation in pursuing our goals on the world stage. As for emulation, we no longer dare to expect it.

Large Broom Still Needed

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Late last month Hillary Clinton held a Town Hall Meeting at the State Department. Two issues were raised that she and the Department need to take seriously. They both relate to the way the Department handles its people.

First, the claim that Civil Service (GS) positions that should be filled competitively are being filled without the required competition among eligible candidates.

The second is that the position of ombudsman for the Civil Service (the Foreign Service has no ombudsman) has remained unfilled for years. Indeed,the Department has never even bothered to respond to a formal request sent last May from a senior Civil Service union (AFGE) representative requesting that the position be filled.  Now if the Department had a history of managing its human capital well, the ombudsman vacancy wouldn’t matter so much. But that IF is a big one and it’s pretty obvious that there’s trouble brewing from below that needs a fair hearing.

The answers to these two questions -- to which Hillary asked the Under Secretary for Management to respond -- were not satisfactory. In fact, the transcript shows that his response to one of the questions was largely inaudible.

An aside:  I also do not think an ombudsman position should be filled by the next available body. The person who is chosen needs to be qualified, competent, unbiased, approved by the rank-and-file and understand how the Minoan-like labyrinth on C Street functions.

Symptomatic of Deep-seated Problems

Now this may seem like insider baseball -- or immaterial in the higher scope of foreign policy sorts of things -- but these problems are symptomatic of deep-seated ones that are endemic in the State Department’s Bureau of Human Resources and resonate far beyond its corridor.

Furthermore, the chronic lack of serious attention to the Department’s human dimension perhaps helps explain why Foggy Bottom has come to play third fiddle in foreign policy making and implementation and perhaps even why Hillary just said that the Department needs shaking up. Yes, I know that Hillary was referring to “ditching its (State’s) 20th century habits for a culture of innovation” according to Ken Stier in Time, but treatment and development of the Department’s personnel are all part of creating an environment in which people and new thinking can flourish.

Dear Valentine: You Can Have It All

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Note:  Check out Indian Love Poems and the Kama Sutra.

There’s a reason why the guy in your life comes around with chocolates and/or flowers on Valentine’s Day. This husband/ boyfriend knows he has it good.  He’s trying to divert your attention, sweetheart.  It’s like bosses take their secretaries out for lunch once a year.  Big deal!  The assumption is that we women are stupid and haven’t noticed that the double standard is far from dead.

Sometimes, it's suggested, the bribes should be diamonds—in a heart-shaped setting, of course, and maybe diamonds are better than chocolates. They don’t make you fat.  You can pawn them, too.  But the deal is the same.  Who has the gift-giving purchasing-power, according to the ads and commercials?  It isn’t the lady.  

Sure, there are some female CEOs these days, and many universities enroll more gals than guys, but the conventional wisdom, even for female Ph.Ds, is this: you can’t have it all.  Think very very small.

I want to make this mind-numbing truth clear: the person being advised against dreams that soar is female.  The magazines and op-ed pages are full of it. Preachers preach it.  Psychologists reinforce it.
 
To Wit: a woman can’t have marriage AND children AND a career, they say, and be anything but miserably dissatisfied with her performance all round.  We can’t have it all, dear sisters, and be happy.  It’s an impossible dream, babe. 

Hmmmmm. No one tells the testosterone-empowered: choose between self-fulfillment and fatherhood. No one lays guilt trips on guys who don’t score ten out of ten on every life task every day.  Perfect professional.  Perfect husband.  Perfect father.  Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  Robotic.  Like something made of plastic.

But that’s what women are supposed to be.  Ten out of ten.  24/7.  When some conscientious working woman scores a mere eight or nine in the mothering category or the husband-pleasing category, she’s encouraged to tear herself apart for having allocated a smidgen of her time/energy/creativity/ intelligence/self to her job.  Foolish selfish greedy woman! We told you so. You can’t have everything.

So here’s the cherry-brandy-creme, supper-truffle secret: the game is rigged.  The standards are radically different for men and women. 

And here’s how it works: 

Look at the families you know, the ones featuring full time wives and mothers, women who believe they can’t (or shouldn’t) have it all, the ones totally devoted (they say) to so-called traditional family values.  Are their children sublimely well-adjusted and always happy and never delinquent?  Are their husbands so divinely happy their lustful eyes never wander and divorce is never on the agenda?  Are their meals perfectly nutritious gourmet productions all the time?  Are their houses always neat and fit to be featured in Architectural Digest? 

Of course not.  So why on earth should working women be made to feel selfish, inadequate and deeply guilty and what all, when their realities don’t equate to some unattainable fantasy notion of ideal family life?

They shouldn’t.   That's my valentine to all of us.

So keep your job.  Enjoy your children.  Construct a well-rounded life.  Along with a partner (if you can find one) who understands it's okay for you to be as human and imperfect as he is.  And enjoy those delicious chocolates, in moderation, all year round.

P.S.  It’s not so bad if you’re the one who buys them.

How is Water Like Booze?

By John C. Dyer, Guest Contributor

John C. Dyer served as Chief Counsel to the California Department of Food and Agriculture from April, 2004 through August, 2007, serving in a general counsel slot. Prior to that he was a counsel for the department from July, 1996. *

(This is the first of a two part series. The second will appear on Thursday, February 18, 2010.)

How is water like booze? The big question is, when to say when.

On January 21st, 2010, The Economist ran an article entitled, “The Appalachia of the West,” subtitled, “California’s Agricultural Heartland threatens to become a wasteland.” The article quoted at length “Ike (sic) Chrisman,” a Visalia rancher/farmer, Bill Phillimore, manager of Paramount Farms near Bakersfield, and Carol Whiteside, founder of the Great Valley Center.

Mike Chrisman is also California’s Secretary of Resources and former Undersecretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Bill Phillimore, a graduate of the University of California at Davis is a talented manager who has for some years successfully managed one of this nation’s greatest farming operations. Carol Whiteside is a long time advocate for an “agricultural renaissance.” All are well regarded, personable and talented people of standing in the agricultural community, indeed throughout California.

The thrust of the Economist article, portrayed through the words of these three personable “aggies,” is one of those famous disaster “may” strike scenarios. A lack of sufficient water may lead to cutbacks in agricultural production. It may turn the nation’s leading agricultural region into Appalachia. The stated cause of the disaster scenario? Not enough water to meet the Valley’s current demand for water, much less its future demand. 

Somewhat less than even-handed treatment

Even the most ardent agricultural advocate would recognize the Economist article was somewhat less than even-handed in its treatment of this subject. As one, let me first apologize to Appalachia for their use as a negative comparison, and an exaggerated comparison at that. Not only did the Article cite only these three long time “aggies,” it failed to cite statistics and independent sources for its disaster scenario. More importantly, it failed to note the small matter of a bond measure which just happens to be pending voter authorization.

The Legislature recently enacted, and the Governor signed into law, legislation authorizing the construction of facilities to capture, store, and divert water from Northern California, which is relatively well supplied with water, to the both the relative deserts of the southern Central Valley and Southern California’s population centers. This legislation is a compromise years in the making. Its passage has generally been seen a political triumph, whether or not one regards it as a policy triumph.

  A skunk in the woodpile: money and an $11.2 billion bond issue

There is one little skunk in the woodpile. The legislation requires money to implement at a time when California’s Treasury are pockets turned inside and out and empty. The price tag is in the multi-billions of dollars. That means bonds. In California such a bond requires direct voter approval.

California voters will, therefore, soon see an $11.2 billion bond measure to authorize the funds. There is significant opposition to this measure materializing from elements within the Environmental Movement and Northern Californians who fear the facilities the bond would finance will make for an irreversible, real and present disaster in the San Joaquin Delta.