I found this on the opinion pages of the Arizona Star.
Telling America's story
For followers of the daily news it is no great revelation that America's image has deteriorated in much of the world. But official estimates of the extent of that deterioration still are shocking.
The problem is so severe that it will take "many years of hard focused work to get out of it," Margaret Tutwiler, the State Department official in charge of telling America's story abroad, told a congressional subcommittee on Wednesday.
If that weren't sufficiently troubling, Tutwiler was followed by Edward P. Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria who led an independent analysis of America's image. "The bottom has indeed fallen out of support for the United States," Djerejian told the House appropriations subcommittee.
There is an irony in the failure of the country with perhaps the freest communications in the world to do a good job of telling its own story. But it is an irony with obvious causes, as a report issued by Djerejian's committee in October makes clear.
The report says the latest statistics, for instance, reveal only 54 State Department employees have tested as being bilingual in Arabic, and of these, some were tested years ago and may no longer be fluent. Though television has become critically important throughout the world, of those 54 Arabic speakers, the report says, "only a handful can hold their own on television."
And that in a part of the world where hatred of the United States is said to be wide-spread.
The Djerejian report calls for "a dramatic transformation in public diplomacy - in the way the U.S. communicates its values and policies to enhance our national security." It cautions, however, that the transformation "requires an immediate end to the absurd and dangerous underfunding of public diplomacy in a time of peril, when our enemies have succeeded in spreading viciously inaccurate claims about our intentions and our actions."
In underscoring the problem, Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Southern Arizona, cited polls that show only 7 percent of Saudis and only 15 percent of Indonesians and Turks have a favorable image of the United States.
The report from Djerejian's committee characterizes America as having engaged in "a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade."
It says that disarmament "has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety."
The report calls for a "dramatic increase in funding" for telling America's story. That will be difficult to achieve in these times of huge deficits. Even so, there are few expenditures more important to the long-term security of Americans.
The report, "Changing Minds, Winning Peace" is available on the Internet at www.state.gov/documents/organization/24882.pdf |
