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John Brown aggregates all the most recent public diplomacy related news, including current issues in U.S. foreign policy, international broadcasting and media, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, educational exchanges, anti-Americanism, and the reception of American popular culture abroad.

MAY 18, 2004
by John Brown

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY PRESS REVIEW, MAY 18 QUOTATIONS FOR THE DAY “AMERICAN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IS A DISASTER.” —Mark Helmke, key aide to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind; cited in “America’s Public Relations Disaster,” James K. Glassman (Capitol Hill Blue, VA) [see below item 1] **** “DID THE LAST FOUR YEARS EVEN HAPPEN?” —Filmmaker Michael Moore; cited in “Moore Lets Bush Be Star of ‘Fahrenheit,’” Associated Press (New York Times) LINK **** “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SPONTANEOUS PUBLIC OPINION.” —Beatrice Webb, British leftist; cited in “For Conservatives, Mission Accomplished,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York Times) LINK CONTENTS A) PUBLIC DIPLOMACY 1. AMERICA’S PUBLIC RELATIONS DISASTER - JAMES K. GLASSMAN (CAPITOL HILL BLUE, VA): Just as the president declared war on terror, he needs to declare a mobilization of public diplomacy to support that war—to eviscerate our enemies in the battle of ideas and images; he should begin by naming a Cabinet-level counselor in the White House to set and monitor an overall public diplomacy strategy for State, Defense, broadcasting and the rest of government. LINK 2. GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE COURTS-MARTIAL: THE ABUSE TRIALS OF US SOLDIERS IN BAGHDAD STARTING WEDNESDAY WILL PROVIDE AN EXAMPLE OF JUSTICE, BUT WILL CARRY THEIR OWN RISKS - HOWARD LAFRANCHI (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR): Judy Milestone, an Atlanta media consultant who serves on the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World says her experience on the public diplomacy commission tells her that the US government does not have anyone thinking through how different decisions and events influence global opinion of the US. LINK 3. REMARKS BY THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE (VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY SENIOR CLASS DAY, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE): “I hope that some of you will consider working…in public diplomacy.” LINK B) RELATED ITEMS 4. U.S. ISSUES REPORT ON HUMAN RIGHTS:  OFFICIALS CONCEDE THAT THE PRISON SCANDAL RAISED QUESTIONS OF AUTHORITY, BUT THE DOCUMENT LAUDS EFFORTS IN IRAQ AND MENTIONS NO VIOLATIONS - PAUL RICHTER (LOS ANGELES TIMES): Lorne Craner, assistant secretary of State overseeing human rights, maintains that U.S. efforts to promote rights have not been hurt by the U.S. shutdown of an anti-American news outlet in Iraq, or by U.S. pressure against Al Jazeera, the Arab-language satellite TV channel. LINK 5. INFORMED COMMENT [MAY 18] - JUAN COLE: For many Iraqi Shiites, the United States has become Yazid; and that is not something a colonial power can easily recover from; it will get worse [Yazid was The Umayyad Caliph who sent military forces against Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet, and had him and his family and his party slaughtered. The story of Yazid killing Husain is the central theological and ritual basis of Shiite Islam]. LINK 6. SET A DATE TO PULL OUT: THE DANGER IS NOT THAT WE WILL CUT AND RUN BUT THAT THE IRAQIS WILL INSIST THAT WE GET OUT - JAMES STEINBERG AND MICHAEL O’HANLON (WASHINGTON POST): The lesson of our history is that our best partners are those who freely choose to be; we must give the Iraqis the opportunity to seize that possibility for themselves. LINK 7. WISHING WON’T MAKE TERRORISM GO AWAY - BY GEORGE MELLOAN (WALL STREET JOURNAL): Mr. Bush’s critics claim that the misdeeds of American prison guards at Abu Ghraib have caused the world to “hate” America; a better description of overseas attitudes toward the U.S. would be “fear”—that Mr. Bush will succumb to his critics and pull out of Iraq. LINK 8. EUROPE’S RISKY WAITING GAME - THOMAS OLIPHANT (BOSTON GLOBE): Europe’s rejection of Bush’s self-defeating know-it-all-ism is wide and deep; an increasingly election-obsessed President Bush may be more likely to listen to the rest of the world over the next, crucial six weeks. LINK 9. STAYING THE COURSE—OR PERHAPS NOT—IN IRAQ - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (LOS ANGELES TIMES) LINK 10. PREVAILING PRINCIPLES - THE WHITE HOUSE AND 10 DOWNING STREET MUST STAY THE COURSE. FREEDOM DEPENDS ON IT: MICHAEL RUBIN (NATIONAL REVIEW): Across the Middle East, people look to the West to match its rhetoric with action. LINK 11. A PARTITIONED IRAQ? - BRUCE FEIN (WASHINGTON TIMES): To ignore the probability of partition invites ill-conceived responses reminiscent of United States support for an undivided Yugoslavia ruled by Slobodan Milosevic against the independence aspirations of Slovenia and Croatia. LINK 12. A WINNABLE WAR - CLIFFORD D. MAY (WASHINGTON TIMES): This is the time for Americans, Iraqis and other friends of freedom to work together to win what we should now understand is a real war against the most ruthless of enemies; U.S. achievements in Iraq include “the renovation of thousands of Iraqi schools, and that Iraqi children now study math and science—not Ba’athist propaganda.” LINK 13. THE MORAL CASE AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR - PAUL SAVOY (NATION): Judging from the poll numbers after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the seven or eight out of ten Americans who backed the war were prepared to build the edifice of freedom and democracy on the broken bodies not of one, but of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi children killed or maimed or burned in the conflict; the evil of this President, once acclaimed for his “moral clarity,” is the evil of police violence on a global scale—the evil of the law-enforcement officer who regards himself as above the law and thereby undermines the very foundation of law and morality. LINK 14. MORAL CONSCIENCE AND THE WAR IN IRAQ: THE VIRTUE OF ACTION - PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE): “Dozens of psychological studies that my colleagues and I have conducted reveal that the majority of decent, ordinary people can be easily seduced into crossing the line into perpetrating evil, for the line between good and evil is not an abstract design in cyberspace but lies in the cauldron of the human heart” ]Philip G. Zimbardo is emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University. Information about the Stanford Prison Experiment can be found online at LINK LINK 15. MORAL CONSCIENCE AND THE WAR IN IRAQ: A DUTY TO DISOBEY - ROBERT S. RIVKIN (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE): We must insist that the military train its soldiers not only to obey orders, but also, under certain circumstances, to disobey them. LINK 16. LESSONS OF ABU GHRAIB - MARK BOWDEN (ATLANTIC MONTHLY):  The U.S. intervention in Iraq is troubled, to say the least, and now our own forces have handed our enemies a propaganda coup that trumps their best efforts; the photos from Abu Ghraib prison portray Americans as exactly the sexually obsessed, crude, arrogant, godless occupiers that our enemies say we are. LINK 17. THE AGE OF COMPARATIVE ATROCITY: AMERICAN SHAME; ISLAMIST SNUFF MOVIES - CHARLES PAUL FREUND (REASON): The whole point of atrocity images and stories—both true and false, from Trajan’s Column in Rome to the notorious false stories spread during World War I to the phony anti-Iraq baby-incubator testimony of the first Gulf War—is to dehumanize the foe; Zarqawi’s videotaped butchery of Nicholas Berg is something different: an act of lunacy, a gift to his enemies, and, one hopes, an unwitting suicide note. LINK 18. THIS WAR IS OUT OF CONTROL: THE LAST MOMENTS IN THE LIFE OF NICK BERG - BY VICTOR KATTAN (COUNTERPUNCH): The war is not over, and propaganda is part and parcel of this war, as in all wars throughout history, and Berg’s captors were only too well aware of that. LINK 19. CREATING A NEW PICTURE OF WAR, PIXEL BY PIXEL - ROBERT WRIGHT (LOS ANGELES TIMES): Even if we avoid future prisoner abuse scandals, wars will bring more bad publicity than they used to, as smaller, cheaper and ever-more-pervasive cameras and camcorders create images that are manna for grass-roots propagandists. LINK 20. NEW DVDS : ‘WALT DISNEY TREASURES: ON THE FRONT LINES’ - DAVE KEHR (NEW YORK TIMES): Walt Disney’s Donald Duck confronted the Nazis in the brilliantly effective 1943 propaganda cartoon “Der Führer’s Face”; it’s one of 32 shorts that Disney produced in connection with the war effort collected on the “Walt Disney Treasures” box set, “On the Front Lines”; these are very rare films, which, for various reasons (the major problem being the racist images common to wartime propaganda) have never been officially rereleased, though pirated versions have circulated among collectors for years. LINK C) ADDITIONAL QUOTATIONS FOR THE DAY WHEN DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL OUR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS OR LET THEM BE KILLED? —The question posed more than fifty years ago by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, looking back on two world wars that had slaughtered more than 70 million people; cited in “The Moral Case Against The Iraq War,” Paul Savoy (Nation) [see above item 13] **** “SPOTLIGHT STARVATION” —A compulsion, characterized by “a hankering for attention,” from which ex-president Bill Clinton apparently suffers; cited in “Yakety Facts: The Word on Clinton in Vanity Fair,” Peter Carlson (Washington Post) LINK
 
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