Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

The distinguished career of the neocons, whose creed has been to have America take on the rest of the world mano a mano, unilaterally imposing Washington’s will on it, suffered a blow when the Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, was submitted to the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations Oct. 1.

In effect, the 79-page report reminded legislators of the collapse of support for the United States not only in the Muslim world, including the Arab Middle East, but globally, where polls now show that the number of people holding a favorable view of the US has fallen to single digits in nations ranging from Indonesia to Egypt, and from Greece to Spain.

It is particularly bad news for Washington that the damage is worst in the Middle East, where American “public diplomacy” — a phrase repeated in the report to the point of litany — is allegedly geared to promote democracy, free markets, economic development, political freedom, women’s rights, free elections and, well, regime change, the two buzz words that sums it all up.

“At a critical time in our nation’s history,” the report states, “the apparatus of public diplomacy has proven inadequate, especially in the Arab and Muslim world.”

Then the magic bullet: “We call for a dramatic transformation in public diplomacy — in the way the US communicates its values and policies to enhance our national security.”

And how do you do that? “The transformation requires an immediate end to the absurd underfunding of public diplomacy in a time of peril,” legislators were told, “when our enemies have succeeded in spreading viciously inaccurate claims about our intentions and our actions.”

These folks don’t get it, do they?

America’s low point in international relations has more to do with the direction, or the hijacking, by the neocons of its policies — unilateralism, pre-emption, spurning of allies and international treaties, blind support for Israel, contempt for the United Nations, insistence on monopolizing power in Iraq, where there is a Governing Council working under rather than with Washington’s representative there, and an administration that has as much as told the world that it has no interest in either its support or its views — and little to do with “viciously inaccurate” sentiments diffused by anti-American folks in Europe, the Middle East and the Muslim world.

The devil, I say, with nebulous projects aimed at reaching out to Arabs when Palestine, the one issue that has defined their habits of political and cultural reference this last century, continues to have its nose rubbed in the vomit of a foreign military occupation that Washington has lent its support to over the last 36 years. Consider, as a case in point, the administration’s response to Israel’s attack against the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, where as of last weekend eight Palestinians were killed and, according to Peter Hansen, director of the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, the homes of 1,000 to 2,000 residents were destroyed: “We call on Israel to exercise restraint.”

It is one thing for a big power to intimidate the world, particularly that Arab corner of it, by favoring the “imposition of democracy” over the “transition to democracy,” diplomatically vetoing through the UN, economically pauperizing through sanctions, and militarily challenging through invasion, its member states; it is quite another to gratuitously irritate it by calling for “well-funded public diplomacy” whose end result is to sugarcoat the Bush doctrine, an extremist expression of the missionary zeal in American political culture.

The fall to low digits in the number of people holding a favorable view of the US attests to the fact that the rest of the world sees it all differently.

This is what it boils down to: Sponsors of well-funded US public diplomacy may look at their initiative as a magic bullet to further America’s interests in our region, but so long as Washington continues with its double standard in Palestine, the historical, emotional and cultural homeland of all Arabs, we will consider the initiative a poison dart.

— Arab News Opinion 16 October 2003