Uncle Sam says Hi: the State Department sets out to win hearts and minds in the Middle East with a glossy lifestyle magazine.

As America's standing with the Arab public continues to drop, many Americans ask just what the world's greatest superpower must do to improve its image. The latest U.S. venture in public diplomacy, a glossy, Arabic-language monthly called Hi, is an exercise in American earnestness designed to answer precisely that question.

In an introductory note to the inaugural issue, the magazine's editors, who are employed by the Washington-based Magazine Group but answer to a review board at the U.S. State Department, explained that the magazine's title was an invitation to genuine intercultural exchange. Pop culture may present Michael Jordan and Madonna as the face of America, but, the editors said, they intended to present "the other Americans who live normal, simple lives far from fame and the lights of Hollywood." They hoped these quotidian stories would engage Arab readers in "positive, constructive dialogue."

When it was unveiled in Washington, Hi drew fire from reporters on the State Department beat for its conspicuous failure to cover pressing concerns of U.S.-Arab relations like the Iraq war and al-Qaeda. The criticism, while sensible, was unfair. Neither the editors nor their overseers in Foggy Bottom make any bones about the apolitical content of their lifestyle magazine. Hi is intended solely to be high on life. Snappy profiles of renowned chefs, each shown playfully preparing his signature vegetable, compete for readers' attentions with full-color spreads of rock climbers and a down-home Denver wedding. You can eat red meat and still stay slim if you avoid carbohydrates, an article advises. Another offers helpful hints to Muslims looking for online matchmaking services. A third gives a passable account of the steady entry of Arab musicians into the U.S. market.

Hi's journalism does not pretend to be path-breaking, though some articles could have educational value. A feature on Latinos, who now make up the largest non-white ethnic group in the U.S., does not shy away from identifying the structural barriers to their social advancement, even quoting a bigoted woman who can't abide hearing recorded messages in Spanish. Asks a text box at the end of the article: "Are there diverse races in your country? What problems do they face?"

Similar questions, all bereft of irony, solicit reader feedback on Hi investigations of yoga and Internet search engines. The editors promise to post the correspondence on the magazine's website. The closest Hi comes to Arab social engineering is in resolving the great debate on New York's ban on smoking in bars and restaurants (the magazine concluded the state did it to protect public health, not infringe on individual rights).

The magazine's willfully ingenuous tone and mostly fluffy content make it tempting to dismiss. Do the editors really imagine the average Egyptian will spend five pounds to read about sand-boarding when he could buy good American cigarettes instead? But the magazine is not simply mindless happy talk. The subtext beneath the smiling surface is why Arabs are unlikely to subscribe, should the magazine find an Arab readership at all.

No one has explained the periodical's subtext better than Christopher Ross, the State Department's special adviser on public diplomacy, who presumably helped Hi off the drawing board and onto Arab newsstands. Ross, a former ambassador to Algeria and Syria, famously appeared on al-Jazeera to defend U.S. Middle East policy, speaking in Arabic. He told the Washington Post that the magazine "is a long-term way to build a relationship with people who will be the future leaders of the Arab world. It's good to get them in a dialogue while their opinions are not fully formed on matters large and small." The editors of Hi are speaking to an audience that, in their minds, is not yet mature.

Ross has unscrambled the inner voice of Hi: it is that of an adult setting the ground rules for an adolescent. By all means, let's explore Arab feelings about yoga. We really want your feedback on the status of racial minorities in your country, even if you're a Palestinian born in Israel, like our featured oud player Simon Shaheen. Why have a dialogue on such issues as U.S. Middle East policy, which, after all, is not up for discussion? We've had plenty of dialogue with Arabs about the subject, anyway. Learn to accept what you cannot change ... and while you're at it, quit smoking.

Perhaps only the State Department, its sensitivities warped by years of defending an indefensible set of policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, could have conceived of a magazine so purportedly apolitical, and yet whose message is so essentially political.

Not Up for Discussion

A dubious truism advanced by American commentators these days is that the Arab press is moribund and censorious, if not brimming with hateful incitement. While aspects of this pronouncement are true, it has been puffed up by journalists like Thomas Friedman, and the pro-Israel translation project Middle East Media Research Institute, to the point where it is now accepted wholesale by people who do not know Arabic, but think they have access to the total range of opinion expressed in Arab media. In this atmosphere, the State Department may honestly believe that its lifestyle magazine fills a void in the Arab world.

But in its many failings, Hi is not particularly unique or innovative: it is only the latest in a series of public relations drives to divert attention from the conflicts exacerbated, if not fostered, by U.S. policies in the Middle East. The words of an influential Council on Foreign Relations paper on public diplomacy are helpfully blunt. "Some of the animosity against America is related to serious policy issues. We cannot always make others happy with our policy choices, nor should we.... We should not leave the impression that all differences are resolvable or could be if we could be nicer or more empathetic." Exhibit A in the Council's report is U.S. support for Israel, which the authors contend can be better explained to the world with reference to the constraints imposed on Washington by democratically expressed domestic opinion. But public diplomacy; the Council avers, "does not mean that the U.S. should change policies in order to make them easier to sell." Hi reflects this mentality with its implicit message that, while sand-boarding and yoga are up for discussion, U.S. Middle East policy is not.

Should they return to the drawing board, the public diplomacy mandarins might recall how the Egyptian historian al-Jabarti reacted to the French occupation of his country in 1798 by trying to read what French proclamations in Arabic actually said. The French Directorate, like the Bush White House today, understood it was on a mission to bring enlightenment to a barbaric world. Napoleon, like the State Department, hired a group of Arabs and Arabists who would translate a series of pronouncements designed to quiet the natives through public relations. What Napoleon's printers hadn't appreciated was the extent to which Arabic literary style rested on the study of correct grammar and the appropriateness of discourse to the audience addressed. In the end, few if any Egyptians were convinced of the chief French proclamation which announced, in infelicitous Arabic style, that they had come to liberate them by the sword.

Al-Jabarti's critique showed that Napoleon's proclamation was not just filled with lies, but was in the end incomprehensible as a gesture of cultural communication. Certainly, there are important differences between Napoleon's proclamations and the unctuous Hi echoing from Foggy Bottom. Yet both expose, for Arabic reading publics, a spirit of arrogance and disingenuousness that is remarkably similar. If al-Jabarti were here today to read Hi, he might say that the evangelical bloody-mindedness of imperial power has changed little in 200 years.

Chris Yoensing is editor of Middle East Report, a publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project. Elliott Calla teaches comparative literature at Brown University. This article is drawn from material previously published in the Daily Star and Middle East Report Online.