Several Asian visitors to Honolulu trooped down to a local cinema the other day to see the controversial film produced by Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11. They came out astonished, not by the film's vehement criticism of President Bush but by the US freedom the film reflected.
Said an Indian: "I am amazed that you have the freedom to make such a film. In my country, which is a democracy, we could never have shown such a film."
A Vietnamese, whose country is not a democracy, said: "I thought the movie was very unfair to your president but Michael Moore is still walking around free."
Similarly, visiting South Korean editors were taken to a laboratory where the repatriated remains of Americans who died in the Korean and Vietnam wars are painstakingly identified.
"I was really surprised," said one editor, "that you care so much that you go to all that trouble to find out who each one was. I think that shows American values."
In another instance, a Russian in a social gathering for Asians hosted by Americans, observed: "Look at the Americans, they just blend in like everyone else. If this had been held by other people, you can be sure everyone would know who was putting it on."
All this raises an intriguing -- and troubling -- question: If the Americans are such free, caring and unassuming people, why is their image so bad across the Muslim world and among friends and allies in Europe and East Asia? Put another way, why can't the US get its message across to other people when it has an elaborate communications apparatus in its press, radio and television, the world's most persuasive advertising industry and legions of public relations experts?
Part of the reason may be that the Bush Administration doesn't know how or doesn't care. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was asked in Chicago earlier this month what could be done about the vicious anti-American propaganda emanating from al-Jazeera, the Muslim news agency based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, and other Muslim sources.
Rumsfeld said that al-Jazeera and others "have persuaded a pile of people that what's happening [in Iraq] is a terrible thing." He asked rhetorically: "Will we survive it? Yes. Is there anything we can do about it? No."
Faint signs this week suggested that the Bush administration has become aware of the issue. The president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice said in a speech: "We are obviously not very well organized for the side of public diplomacy." She said: "The victory of freedom in the Cold War was won only when the West remembered that values and security cannot be separated."
An expert on the Middle East who serves on a White House advisory group, however, was scathing. Shibley Telhami was quoted in the Washington Post: "Three years after September 11, you can say there wasn't even much of an attempt, and today Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the US and the degree of distrust in the US are far worse than they were three years ago ... bin Laden is winning by default."
One of Rumsfeld's predecessors, James Schlesinger, secretary of defense in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, was equally critical. Writing in The National Interest, Schlesinger says: "We have failed to convey to the Iraqis what our intentions are-or have conveyed them belatedly. Consequently, all too many excellent and well-intentioned actions on our part have not gotten through to the Iraqi public."
"It is almost as important that such plans or such actions be understood, as that they be executed," he says. The US-funded TV station in Iraq, al-Iraqiya, he writes, "has not been well designed to attract an audience and has thus been peripheral for Iraqi viewers," an assessment supported by US surveys in Iraq.
The 9/11 Commission Report widened the argument with a plea that the US engage in the struggle of ideas. Pointing to the plummeting image of the US, it said: "The US government must define what the message is, what it stands for. We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors."
"If the US does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world," the commission concluded, "the extremists will gladly do the job for us."
Richard Halloran is a freelance writer based in Honolulu.
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