After reading assorted news articles and analysis all week, one conclusion I’ve reached is that the United States has an abysmal “public relations” appearance in the middle east. Putting aside the political roots of the issue, it seems a lot of folks in the middle east view the United States as an untrustworthy giant who’s only out to plunder the local supplies of cheap oil. Similarly, part of the reason Osama bin Laden has been able to get a lot of local support is that he’s been much better at selling himself as a defender of Islam.
So … given that one of the long-term goals of the United States is to improve its image in the middle east, and given the sheer advertising power of American ad agencies and their numerous clients, how should the USA pitch itself to the Arab world? What message can we deliver to show that we’re all just a bunch of Nice Guys who just want to get along? How should we pitch that message? And what technological, logistical, and strategic hurdles must be overcome in order to do so?
Send food for the refugees. Send some American Moslems along with it to be sure that dietary laws are followed handling it. The Middle East guys can meet American Moslems and will figure out that we are the good guys.
Well, the biggest technical hurdle would be the simple fact that most of the Arab world doesn’t have access to the equivalent of America’s mass media–the free TV, the free radio, the (extremely cheap) newspapers, the (slightly more expensive) magazines, and the Internet. If people just don’t have the TV sets or the satellite dishes or the bookstores, how they gonna get Madison Avenue’s message?
And then there’s the problem of the fact that a lot of the Arab world (BTW, are you meaning “ethnic Arab”, or are you really meaning “Moslem”? Are you just talking about the Mideast?) has media censorship in place, so even if Madison Avenue did do a full-page spread in Time on “Uncle Sam Is Your Friend”, some folks might never even see it, if Time is not allowed to be sold in their country.
Start schools in the Middle East which teach a more balanced view of the U.S. The illiteracy problem is epidemic, and the schools would be a good way to make sure humanitarian aid gets to people that need it. The schools which do exist in the Middle East often teach a virulent anti-U.S. sentiment which is hard for anyone in the West to believe. The schools for the poor in Pakistan (I forget the name) are a breeding ground for terrorists, suicide bombers, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
Is this practical or possible? I don’t know. Might it cause a blowback from Islamic extremists? Probably, they burn our food drops. Will leaflet drops do the job? Hardly.
Second, start several 1 zillion watt FM/AM radio stations in the Middle East and drop or hand out radios. Like RFE but for the Middle East, and not just on shortwave like the stunted radio broadcasts we do now.
Will that work? Couldn’t hurt, given the twisted news the people over there get now.
Econimic aid alone won’t do it unless people know about it, which they largely don’t.
We should be dropping millions of wind-up radios all over the middle east. They should be free, available to anyone who wants one. And we should have offshore radio broadcasts all over the world. Wouldn’t have to neccesarily be US government copy. We could broadcast NPR, the BBC, some sort of version of radio CNN.
Another thing we could do is drop thousands of cell phones/two-way radios. And cheap digital cameras. We need to give the local people the tools to document abuses of power by local governments, and the means to communicate among themselves bypassing local government censors.