Official: American image is bigger than U.S. policy.

Becca Rothschild of the Detroit Free Press could have had no idea of her good timing when she stepped forward last fall to arrange NCEW's two-day briefing at the State Department May 17-18.

As the long-planned event neared, daily headlines were screaming about alleged abuses at the hands of U.S. military personnel and American contractors at the Abu Ghraib prison. Nicholas Berg of Pennsylvania had been beheaded earlier in the month. The national elections in Afghanistan had been pushed back from June to September as two thousand additional Marines were scouring the badlands along the Pakistan border for insurgents and Taliban sympathizers. Bush administration officials were engaged in serious damage control with Old and New European allies in an attempt to shore up support for whatever was going to happen in Iraq come June 30.

And those were just the headlines related to the war in Iraq and on terrorism. Deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage admitted to the twenty-nine visiting NCEW members the irony in his department's release of a human rights review amid ongoing reports about prisoner abuse at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Imagine what those reports were doing to U.S. coalition partners in Iraq who were already taking heat from a substantial part of the global community for participating in the operations.

"People who know us know this is not our society, not our values," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said during day two of the briefing. He admitted that shoring up foreign relations was made more "difficult but not impossible" by the abuse story.

Diplomacy is a delicate dance in the best of times, but the footwork for today's State Department officials has become increasingly intricate--and that was before the news from Abu Ghraib.

Secretary of State Colin Powell defined the goal of today's foreign policy as "to avoid the crisis of fifteen to twenty years from now."

Prognostication is a tough business in a world in which terrorist groups operate across the borders of established nations. Witness September 11, 2001.

That watershed day in U.S. history marked what Armitage called the "shortsightedness of government--that a failed state could reach out and do what it did to us."

Much of the State Department's efforts are focused on making sure that nations teetering toward failed-state status halt the process before poverty, instability, decaying health standards, and a lack of education and economic opportunity make them fertile soil for terrorists.

While Powell repeatedly said that "we have to deal with the world as we find it," lots of dollars are being spent to not leave the world that way.

The fiscal 2005 budget request for international affairs is $31.5 billion. That's a hefty chunk of influence, but it is directly tied to America's image around the world.

"The American image is bigger than U.S. policy--and the image is still pretty good," Boucher said. Some of that can be credited to the direct, life-changing benefits that U.S. taxpayers provide through aid programs run by the State Department.

But image is heavily tangled up in perception, and Powell and Armitage both touched on the challenge that diplomats face in light of the reality that they represent the world's last remaining superpower.

"U.S. power is both respected and resented," said Powell, who was scheduled to talk with editorial writers for twenty minutes but gave them forty-five--and left the impression that he would have talked longer had Mitchell Reiss, director of policy and planning, not been standing by for his turn in the hot seat.

"If we desire to go it alone, we can," said Armitage. "And that concerns some--the ability of the United States to be unilateral is what bothers people."

To mitigate those concerns, the State Department, working through its own USAID department and other non-governmental humanitarian organizations, maintains its efforts to provide food crops, livestock, schools, roads, medicine, and potable water to struggling nations. That focus translates into good will toward the American people, if not U.S. foreign policy, said Boucher.

The State Department officials who met with NCEW members expressed confidence that the United States would weather the Abu Ghraib controversy by openly investigating and then bringing to justice those involved in the abuse.

Powell indicated he does not view the situation as something that will swamp the U.S. mission to nurture democracy, stability, and opportunity throughout the world. "We are a nation that is able to hold a mirror in front of our face and see the flaws and then go fix the flaws," he said.

If the Founding Fathers could see how the United States has responded to the Abu Ghraib revelations--with investigations, due process, and punishment for those found responsible--they would say our democracy "works just the way we designed it," Powell said.

"Democracy is a life raft, not an ocean liner. Your feet are always wet, and the tides and winds that more you are the will of the people."

J.R. Labbe is senior editorial writer at the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth and secretary of NCEW. E-mail: star-telegram.com