A... historical soap opera based on the life of... Suleiman the Magnificent, it’s just one of more than 100 shows produced last year by Turkey’s booming TV-drama industry. The programs are becoming a wildly popular cultural phenomenon across the Middle East, bringing in their wake a renaissance in Turkey’s soft power and ushering in a low-key social revolution among the housewives of the Arab world.

In this sense, overcoming 9/11 revisionism is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing American public diplomacy in the coming decade: So long as such conspiracy theories persist, Arabs will continue to view American policies aimed at preventing “another 9/11” as thoroughly illegitimate since, as they see it, 9/11 is just a big American lie.

For years, the United Nations has taken pains to present itself to the world as an impartial, international institution... but...no matter how hard the UN tries to be neutral, many, especially in the Muslim world, see it as a proxy of Western powers.

America's real strength, more than its military and economic power, is its "soft power," its moral authority. And this, too, was weakened: As the U.S. violated basic human rights like habeas corpus and the right not to be tortured...

The U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan... all demonstrates...that the United States is bent on dominating the Muslim world. A decade of public diplomacy has not dented this view, and polls of Muslim populaces indicate that they continue to have a poor opinion of the United States.

Those who follow attitudes toward the West on the Arab street need to make room these days for nuance. As the daily televised drama of revolt in Libya and Syria makes plain, the desperate internal struggles, unleashed during the Arab Spring, still command center stage.

Those who follow attitudes toward the West on the Arab street need to make room these days for nuance. As the daily televised drama of revolt in Libya and Syria makes plain, the desperate internal struggles, unleashed during the Arab Spring, still command center stage. As long as they continue, the United States, in particular, is likely to be viewed through the prism of these upheavals.

And how precisely is that?