One does not have to be a pollster or a political scientist to recognize that the current public impression of the United States in the Muslim world is dismal and unlikely to improve substantially without a drastic change in the Middle Eastern political climate. The United States’ image suffers from ongoing violence in Iraq, allegations of torture in Guantanamo Bay, US backing of autocratic rulers in the Arab world, and support for perceived Israeli offenses in the Holy Land, as well as the decades-old perception of the United States as a corrupt imperialist power. Recent surveys, moreover, demonstrate that positive Muslim opinion of the United States has plummeted since 9/11, and particularly since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The decline in image, however, is only partially due to US policies in the Middle East. An essential component of all foreign policy strategies is public diplomacy—the manner in which governments communicate to citizens in other societies. The United States can cultivate a more positive impression abroad by courting foreign publics through media, educational, and cultural venues. Unfortunately, such a plan is only now beginning to materialize.

The United States developed a public relations strategy for the Cold War in an attempt to counter negative impressions of the West during that monumental ideological struggle. Yet five years after 9/11, and plunged into what is, as administration officials repeatedly describe it, another “a war of ideas,” the government has yet to develop a comprehensive plan for diplomacy in the Muslim world. Now the Bush administration, in an attempt to make up for lost time, is moving to aggressively overhaul a defunct public relations and communication bureaucracy and reinvigorate a once-dynamic public diplomacy machine. The change is vital to US foreign policy in the Middle East as an often-overlooked facet of the US campaign for democracy in the Muslim world. Its effectiveness will depend, however, upon the nature and commitment of the diplomacy effort. Can the Bush administration tread the delicate line between sincere promotion of ideals and blatant propaganda? The United States must attempt, within a comprehensive public diplomacy framework, to reframe or reshape its policies toward greater compatibility with its foreign audience. An eager US marketing campaign coupled with a contradictory foreign policy would further alienate Muslims from goodwill toward the United States and more severely hinder collaboration between the two cultures.

An Obsolete Legacy

The current quandary over the state of public diplomacy, and correspondingly, US image marketing, derives in part from the communication vacuum created after the fall of the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War, the United States operated a robust network of communication and propaganda campaigns, all attempting to displace Communist-implanted anti-Americanism and install a pro-Western worldview. The United States Information Agency (USIA) functioned as the nexus of this operation, funding US cultural centers and libraries across the world, awarding Fulbright scholarships for study abroad, broadcasting the Voice of America and Radio Freedom Europe, and creating hundreds of propaganda films. Indeed, the term public diplomacy is largely associated with the USIA—and also with the term “propaganda.”

However controversial, the USIA was an effective organization for its time. But as the Soviet Union collapsed and the need for such a concerted pro-US communication effort dissipated, funding for USIA programs quickly disappeared as well. The money squeeze led to the closure of libraries, the reduction of cultural exchange programs, and an end to numerous US foreign broadcasting initiatives. In 1999, conservative pressure forced the Clinton administration to dismantle the USIA entirely, cut staffing by nearly 40 percent, and shunt its various agencies into poorly organized bureaucratic structures within the State Department and other organs. The United States was left with no central organization running the nation’s public diplomacy outfits.

It was therefore not until after 9/11 that the foolhardiness of the United States’ communication void was realized. The shocking attacks of that day opened eyes not only to how much the United States was vilified by some, but also to how powerless the United States was to prevent it. Many Muslims originally refused to believe that it was Arabs who were behind the hijackings; additionally, footage of some Palestinians celebrating the fall of the towers appeared to some to be anecdotal evidence of widespread Arab support for the attacks. The United States suddenly found itself scrambling to find outlets to the Muslim world: how would it denounce the acts and lay the blame on Islamic terrorism, demand justice, and yet avoid accusations of racism or cultural bias against Arabs?

Playing Catch Up

Initial steps toward public diplomacy were constituted largely of information campaigns designed to combat the misinformation rife throughout the Muslim world. The Bush administration set up Coalition Information Centers in Washington, London, and Islamabad, which churned out US-approved news to counter the sensationalism of the Muslim media. US military information specialists airdropped millions of leaflets over Middle Eastern states, and broadcast from radio and TV stations. In the State Department, successful marketing executive Charlotte Beers was brought in to lead an abortive communication campaign. She managed just one successful publication—a video highlighting the prosperity of US Muslims—before resigning prior to the Iraq invasion of 2003.

Subsequently, however, the Bush administration began to get serious about efforts to create a public diplomacy strategy. Two high-level investigative committees were formed to discuss the possibilities of, for example, discrediting the propaganda of Al Qaeda, but the groups foundered when none of these proposals were ever put into operation. Another disastrous attempt at a State Department strategy failed when Charlotte Beers’ replacement, Margaret Tutwiler, left office after six months. Perhaps the sole success of the first two years of post-9/11 public diplomacy was the creation of Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language network that combined American pop music and government-sanctioned news. It was followed by its television equivalent, Al-Hurra, in 2004.

Thus, it was not until the release of the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism in 2003 that concrete steps were made toward the implementation of a long-term strategy. A key portion of the publicly available, unclassified report pledges to use “effective, timely public diplomacy and government supported media to promote the free flow of information and ideas to kindle the hopes and aspiration for freedom of those in societies ruled by the sponsors of global terrorism.” A key extension of this report has been the development of a new, semi-classified program known as Muslim World Outreach that will reach out to and support organizations and institutions that are in line with the administration’s policies on moderation, tolerance, and democratization. Funds will support the development of moderate Islamic media, educational curricula, think tanks, and even schools and mosques. Here, interestingly, the administration’s strategy appears to diverge from that of traditional public diplomacy practice, which would seem to dictate that a state attempts to convince a foreign public that its policies are in agreement with the public’s values. Muslim World Outreach exemplifies an approach wherein a state attempts to convince a foreign public that the public’s policies should be in line with the state’s values.