Losing hearts and minds

It is virtually axiomatic that the major trends of US policy in the Middle East today are directly linked to the aftermath of 11 September, 2001. The war against terrorism, the invasion of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the policies of regime change and promoting democratisation in the Arab world have shaped the political scenery of the Middle East and have led the US to become the major player in one of the world's tensest and most trouble-ridden regions. Has this superpower succeeded, in the course of the past six years, in safeguarding its interests and eliminating what it regards as its main potential threats? Otherwise put, in political-strategic terms, is Washington better off today in the Middle East than it was before September 2001?

There is no need to recapitulate the developments during this period to determine that the balance sheet of gains and losses clearly shows that the threats to American interests are much graver and more diverse than they were before 2001. Indeed, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1990s there has emerged a regional axis, lead by Iran, antagonistic towards the US and keen to defy the American enterprise for regional and international hegemony.

No less dismal a failure is the Bush administration's attempt, in the aftermath of September 2001, to reshape Arab public opinion of the US and of US policy in the Middle East through the exercise of so-called instruments of "soft power". The energetic public diplomacy programme, as epitomised by the establishment of Al-Hurra, or "Freedom TV", and Sawa Radio using native Arabic speakers, fell a long way short of winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab people. Recent opinion polls, many conducted by American research centres, reveal that these television and radio stations attracted only a smattering of Arab audiences and that from Morocco to Bahrain, Arab opinion of US policy is more negative than ever.

In large part this failure of public diplomacy is the product of an inappropriately designed approach, based almost exclusively as it was on the concept that governed Washington's media and propaganda campaign targeting the socialist bloc during the Cold War. Whether out of naiveté or pure ignorance, the architects of this project ignored the fundamental difference between the people of Eastern Europe, the majority of whom were fascinated by the Western way of life and who would tune into Radio Free Europe and seize whatever opportunities they could to read American and Western European publications, in spite of the considerable risks they faced in their police states, and the people of the Arab world who, when thinking about America, are concerned above all about American policies towards the Middle East and who regard these policies as hostile to Arab rights and causes and relentlessly biased in favour of Israel. Any media directed towards Arab audiences that could not address this concern, simply because it could not alter the facts, was doomed to lack credibility.

But the architects of policies that gave rise to Al-Hurra TV and Sawa Radio overlooked a more glaring difference between socialist Eastern Europe and the Arab world. In Poland and East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, people had only the choice between their own state-run media and the more enticing state-run media from the West. Arab audiences at the beginning of the 21st century are inundated with choices, not only from land-based broadcasting stations in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman, but also from satellite networks. Al-Hurra and Sawa could not even begin to compete on the open airwaves with such much more attractive and sophisticated stations as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

But there is also a technical reason for this failure. As though it was not a difficult enough task to improve the image of the US in the Arab world at a time when this superpower has forces occupying an Arab country that is undergoing horrifying tensions and upheavals, and at a time when it encouraged its Israeli ally to go on the offensive against another Arab country in the hope of altering the map of regional alliances, the American media targeting the Arab world was consistently poorly managed. Programming and the substance of programmes never went beyond the blatantly propagandistic campaign to vindicate American policies. How could it possibly succeed?

The Bush administration lost the battle to win Arab hearts and minds. It is difficult to foresee any reversal of US fortunes any time in the near future.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/862/sc2.htm