Toward a new foreign policy.

Culture, combined with the crisis America faced, produced the unintended consequences of U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world. The post-9/11 phase of U.S. public diplomacy was, in effect, crisis public diplomacy. Unlike traditional public diplomacy, which enjoys the luxury of time to cultivate favorable publics individually, crisis public diplomacy entails communicating simultaneously with multiple audiences--including hostile ones--in a rapidly changing, highly visible, and politically competitive communication environment.

American officials appeared to overlook the immediacy and glare of the international media that crises engender. U.S. officials tried to communicate with foreign publics as if they were separate from the American public. Such a distinction between foreign and domestic publics has become purely hypothetical. In today's global and instantaneous communication environment, a nation can no longer separate its domestic public from foreign publics. What one hears, everyone hears.

American efforts to intensify its public diplomacy may have inadvertently magnified misunderstandings and tensions between America and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Although both the domestic and foreign publics heard the same message, both interpreted it differently. When America amplified its message through stronger language and more vigorous dissemination, American domestic support grew and foreign support weakened. The more America intensified its public diplomacy efforts--using an American style--the greater the gap became between the domestic and foreign publics.

This gap may have been widened by Washington's need to gain and solidify American domestic support. During times of conflict, rallying domestic support often means identifying a foreign enemy. If the foreign public identifies with the foreign enemy, efforts to demonize the enemy only further alienate the foreign audience and widen the gap between the domestic and foreign publics.

As the U.S. embarks on a new round of public diplomacy, the challenge is how to span cultural barriers, so America's public communication positively resonates with the domestic and foreign publics. Meeting this challenge requires that U.S. officials not only coordinate their message among America's many spokespersons but also harmonize communication with America's many publics. The two must go hand in hand.

If there was a success in the first round of U.S. public diplomacy, achieving coordination was it. America's initial public diplomacy efforts highlighted the need for coordination. Disputes within the administration were producing conflicting messages. However, by the time the U.S. entered Iraq, all officials were speaking with one powerful voice.

Now that the U.S. occupies Iraq, the problem of coordination has reemerged. When the U.S. military entered Iraq, it became the new face of American public diplomacy. U.S. troops are now both the medium and the message of U.S. public diplomacy in the region.

In this respect, the U.S. military is at a distinct disadvantage. The promise of America as a "liberator" is rapidly fading into the reality of U.S. troops as "occupiers." Americans tend to have a historically positive view of military occupation; the U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan helped transform both into world economic powers. In the Arab and Muslim world, military occupation conjures up highly negative and emotionally charged images of the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land. These images are fertile ground for rumors, stereotypes, and fears. Already one can substitute photo captions from the U.S. military occupation in Iraq, such as the walking patrols and checkpoints, with those of the Israeli military occupation in Gaza. The more entrenched these images become, the more difficult they will be to remove later.

American credibility, matching words about Iraq with deeds in Iraq, will be closely monitored. Given the presence of U.S. troops, it is important that the Bush administration's public statements correspond to the actual situation in Iraq. Credibility and public diplomacy effectiveness will not be measured by mass media efficiency but rather by the tenor of the personal stories circulating during the evening social visits among Iraqi families and neighbors.

Harmonizing America's communication with its internal and external publics will be equally challenging and will require large doses of cultural awareness. The effort to be more culturally attuned will entail fewer Washington-driven initiatives that sound good at home and more field-driven initiatives that work well abroad. Also, implementing some of the institutional recommendations proposed by the Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S. Information Agency Alumni Association may help make U.S. public diplomacy more responsive, flexible, and proactive in the region. Through a dual approach--coordinating communication internally and harmonizing it externally--U.S. officials can avoid the unintended consequences of crisis public diplomacy.

Key Recommendations

* Culture, combined with crisis, produced the unintended consequences of U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world.

* The challenge of effective public diplomacy is bridging cultural differences, so that an administration's communication style positively resonates with domestic and foreign publics.

* As the promise of U.S. liberators fades into the reality of U.S. occupiers in Iraq, the Arab world conjures up highly negative and emotionally charged images of Israel's military occupation of Palestine.

R.S. Zaharna <[e-mail]> is a Middle East analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and an assistant professor of public communication at American University. She specializes in international and intercultural communication.