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American in Paris |
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BLAH BLAH BLAH? |
 "You want me to ask Muslim women if they want free hairstyling so they can look like Laura Bush?" |
Problems with Muslims
just p.r. problem for U.S.?
By KENNETH DREYFACK
of TheColumnists.com
Assigned to figure out why Muslims are so down on the US these days, a Bush administration panel has come up with the answer. In the just-issued “Changing Minds, Winning Peace” report, the commission, headed by former White House spokesman Edward Djerejian, suggests it’s mainly a public relations problem.
They’ll love us, according to the U.S. Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, if we can just come up with a good ad campaign. Spread the good word about America, the panel recommends, by building U.S. libraries and information centers, translating more Western books into Arabic and handing out a few scholarships.
The problem is not that Muslins, and millions of non-Muslims, do not understand what the U.S. is up to. The problem is that they DO understand it. As Yenni Zannuba Wahid, the daughter of a former Indonesian president, told the panel a few days before the report was issued, the basic problem is policy, not “communications blah, blah, blah.”
The misunderstanding that
the commission says explains Anti-Americanism sentiment is hardly
limited to the Islamic world, even if U.S. backing for Israel
sits particularly badly with Muslims. Take Buddhist Vietnam,
for example. Ralph A. Cossa, an American expert recently dispatched
to Vietnam to lecture on U.S. foreign policy, was dismayed to
learn that the burning question in the back of many Vietnamese
minds is whether they’ll be next on the list after the U.S.
invades North Korea.
After surveying thousands of people in 44 nations before and
after the Iraq invasion, the non-partisan Pew Research Center
for the People and the Press uncovered global consternation over
U.S. policy. Favorable views of the U.S. dropped from 60 percent
in France and Germany before the Iraq war, for example, to 45
and 43 percent respectively. In Russia, the percentage of people
favorable to the U.S. declined by nearly half, from 61 to 36
percent, following the invasion.
People from Hanover to Hanoi simply don’t buy the idea that
the Bush administration should enjoy a free hand to preemptively
attack any and every country that some U.S. officials contend
might represent a security threat. What else should be expected,
when it turns out that those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
and Al Qaeda ties were, at best, little more than a figment in
the Administration's imagination, or worse, handy fabrications
to manipulate public opinion? What all the surveys show is that
people around the world are neither as mindless nor as gullible
as the administration would like.
It should come as no surprise
that the White House believes it’s all a public relations
problem. Not from an administration that believes a stage-managed
landing on an aircraft carrier by a flight-suited President is
all it takes to convince people that the Iraq problem has been
resolved. Or that the factory floor Labor Day naming of a job
czar will miraculously recreate the 2.7 million jobs lost since
George W. Bush came to office.
If the Bush administration really wants to understand why so
much of the world is so upset about U.S. policy, rather than
set up U.S. libraries and information centers in Muslim countries,
it needs a few libraries and information centers of its own,
to begin understanding what the rest of the world is all about.
Of course, maybe they don’t really care all that much and
the whole study is just more smoke and mirrors.
©2003 by Kenneth Dreyfack. The illustration is from IMSI's
Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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