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クリスチャンサイエンスモニター：対米反感は衝撃的程度の報告。
当たり前のことだから、調査すれば、当然の結果で、どこかで記事を見たような気がするが、あったかな。
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/sept11/dailyUpdate.html
Daily Update
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
updated 11:00 a.m. ET October 2, 2003
Report: Hostility toward US at 'shocking' levels
"You know, Woody Allen said 90 percent of life is just showing up. In the Arab world, the US just doesn't show up."
-- Edward Djerejian, Arab specialist, former ambassador and White House spokesman
ChannelNewsAsia reports that a US advisory committee, created by Congress to study the problem of the US's image abroad, has urged that the Bush administration overhaul its public diplomacy to reverse its sinking popularity in the Arab and Muslim world. "Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," the committee wrote in its report.
In some areas of the world, the decline has been precipitous. In Indonesia in 2002, the US received a favourable rating from 61 percent of the public. Today, it is only 15 percent. In the Middle East, among US allies, only seven percent of Saudis, and six percent of Jordanians views the US in a favorable light.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Congress directed the advisory group only to study the public diplomacy apparatus, not to make recommendations about whether to adjust any US policies such as Washington's support for Israel, and for conservative regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. These policies are generally seen as the root causes of discontent among many people in the Muslim world.
Even so, the chair of the group, Edward P. Djerejian, a former US ambassador to Israel and Syria, and George H. W. Bush's top Middle East advisor, was quick to point out that his committee did not think that better PR alone would solve the problem. "We also very firmly believe that our story ... has not been told very well, partly because we haven't listened to the other side."
In fact, writes Jim Lobe in the Inter Press Service News Agency, the report not only says that better communication is needed, but that the US needs to narrow the gap between what it proclaims are its values, and what Washington actually does, particularly in the Middle East.
Lobe says that while the report does not disagree with the argument that the US needs to make its case more effectively, it also makes the point that Washington has to listen far more carefully to what people in the Islamic world themselves are saying. According to the report, "Public opinion in the Arab world and Muslim world cannot be cavalierly dismissed." It stressed that the gap between professed US values -- which are widely appreciated among Muslims -- and actual policy is often too deep to "ignore or paper over."
The New York Times reports that the US State Department spent about $600 million last year on its programs to advocate American policies, and $540 million more for the Voice of America and other broadcast networks. If the $100 million to expand economic aid in the Middle East is included, the report notes, the total is about three-tenths of a percent of the Defense Department budget. But only $25 million of that total is spent on outreach programs in the Arab and Muslim worlds. (It's interesting to note, as MSNBC reports, that while the US is spending a small amount on communicating its image to the Muslim world, the 'new economy of terror' has grown into a $1.5 trillion globe-spanning system.)
In order to help overcome this image problem, the committee recommends the creation of an image czar inside the White House to oversee America's public diplomacy effort. The committee also recommends more libraries and information centers in the Muslim world, the translation of more books into Arabic, the increase of scholarships and fellowships, an upgrade of the American Internet presence, and the training more Arabists, Arab speakers and PR specialists so they could at least appear in public in the Arab world.
But Mushahid Hussain, a former education minister in Pakistan and a current member of its senate, writes in the Gulf News that one unintended "benefit" of the war in Iraq has been that the debate has shifted from the "war on terrorism" to the "problem of anti-Americanism." Mr. Hussain says this problem won't go away with "better communication." He says the image of American has changed for three main reasons:
* "After the Iraq invasion and occupation, a widespread belief that an imperial America is keen to capture oil resources and seek a colonial-style political restructuring of the Middle East."
* "The interests of a foreign country (Israel) are now taking precedence over America's own national security interests and image in the Muslim World."
* "US policy towards Muslims is now marked by confusion. Even 'moderate' allies like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are sometimes not sure whether they are friend or foe."
This message was in fact given to the committee directly when it travelled to Indonesia "There is no point in saying this is a problem of communication, blah blah blah," said Yenni Zannuba Wahid, 28, who is the daughter of former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, and who has just returned from a year of graduate study at Harvard University. "The perception in the Muslim world is that the problem is the policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Iraq," Ms. Wahid told the group.
David Hoffman of Internews Network argues in The Christian Science Monitor that even if we do want to improve our standing in the Arab world by use of communication, the ways that we communicate make all the difference. He points out that after years of state-fed news from Saddam Hussein, Iraqis have no trust in any kind of "official" news agency, which is why the US-sponsored Iraq Media Network is dismissed by almost all Iraqis. Instead, Mr. Hoffman argues, the best thing the US can do is to help independent media, especially by training a new generation of journalists.
But writing in The Weekly Standard, David Gelernter, says that one of the best arguments President Bush can make to his critics (but isn't) about the US in Iraq (and thus the rest of the world), is that when the US takes an action like invading Iraq, it does so not only because it is in the interest of the US, but because it is the US's "moral duty."
It [the Bush administration] has a compelling, open-and-shut moral case but prefers to make pragmatic arguments about global terrorism and Arab politics. Of course security is important, but mass murder is even more important. In Iraq the torture is over, the gale of blood is finished; we put an end to them. What else matters next to a truth like that?
Two US senators think that there might be a better way than improved communication or notions of moral duty to help turn around the opinions of the Arab world -- free trade. The Voice of American reports that Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Max Baucus held a forum Tuesday with the research organization, the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, to discuss their ideas. They say strengthening the economy in Middle Eastern countries will help discourage terrorism.
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