Download - Winston Churchill

When it comes to reaching out to potential friends, we’redoing very, very badly. I will waste no time enunciatingsomething that has been talked of in this town for years.We have a problem, and we must face it, belatedly,in this sixth year of war. Churchill would not want us tocome here to Old Ebbitt’s just to drink and chatter andcomplain. He would want us to discuss solutions to theproblem…while we are drinking. In that spirit, here are afew considered ideas to improve things a little inAmerican information operations and public diplomacy. Ichose to focus here, at the expense of other issues in grandstrategy. Call these rubrics “The Four R’s.”“The Four R’s”1) Recreate the Bureaucracy of Public DiplomacyDuring the Cold War we had an entity—the UnitedStates Information Agency—that specialized at reachingover the Iron Curtain, over the heads of despots, to subjectpopulations. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty andlike programs were deemed by people like AlexanderSolzhenitsyn to be powerful. But after the Berlin Wallcame down, so did the architecture of USIA. It was foldedinto the State Department in much smaller form. Nowwe have a small office for public diplomacy which hasbeen frequently vacant and often badly staffed. I will notname any of the incumbents of that office. But when Ipuzzle on why this part of government has done so littlefor so many years—years the locusts have eaten—I recallan acidic remark incorrectly attributed to Churchill: “anempty car drew up and Clement Attlee got out.”There is inadequate leadership at State on this issue,and the same is true on the National Security Council—even though one of its six directorships is titled “global outreach.”Our best diplomats are schooled to cultivate foreigndiplomats, not foreign populations and news editors. Weneed a separate bureaucracy with its own culture and thespecial function of public diplomacy. Before 9/11, we didn’tknow we needed this; we should have created it in 2002;we will be suffering for it when 2007 merges into 2008.2) Resource the EffortThe State Department has been under-funded. Ifneed be I’d take $10 or $15 billion from Defense and reallocateit to State. 10 In the present crisis, instead of doingmuch more to reach out overseas, we’ve constricted someoperations. There are consulates that closed in the 1990s,and so too did some embassy and consulate libraries—yetthey are exactly the kind of place that students and othercurious people can come to learn about the USA and itspolicies and its people.We have set up a TV station that beams in Arabiclanguage to the Middle East—al-Hurrah. The concept isgood. It will need better supervision, and it will needresources. So do other radio services which are beingcropped back for 2007 or 2008. Our government isapparently eliminating VOA broadcasting in Uzbek,Croatian, and Georgian, reducing VOA and RFE/RLservices in the Ukraine and former Portuguese Africa, andreducing broadcasts in Kazakh. 11 And then there is this:we are now eliminating VOA broadcasting in the Englishlanguage. Is this because using English abroad is consideredimperialist? Or is it that we are too foolish to see thatbroadcasting news and healthy entertainment in Englishis a friendly way to teach other peoples about ourselves?As a congressional staffer, I observed how quick weare to trim away public diplomacy programs. When cutswere proposed in the National Endowment for Democracy,then receiving a mere $17 million, George Willreferred to this as “slaying the butterfly of democracy.”Some critics think our approach to the Long War is toomilitary. Let them speak up! Words are cheaper thanweapons, and often more effective.3) Restore the Moral Impulse and Argument to DiplomacyIn 2002-03 in the war on terrorists, we were tooquiet on the moral front. We felt quelled by Abu Ghareb.Now many of our leaders say little or nothing at all, onmost occasions, about the moral obscenity of terrorism.Democracy, the rule of law, and moderation are thebest and the obvious alternatives to politics driven by terrorism.That is evident in sad places such as Lebanon, SriLanka, the Congo. We should quit apologizing for whowe are and make overtly the robust defense that democracyand freedom deserve. No one should defend AbuGhareb. Nor should we apologize for fighting people whowrite manuals advising how to torture and how to killinnocents. 12 It is time to adjust our direction and proceedwith some confidence on the rhetorical path that is centralto reaching public opinion in the world. Right actionis vital, but we need the right arguments too.Do public spokesmen know how to make the argumentsagainst terrorism? Do they at least remember theones that used to be made by Jean François Revel andRonald Reagan? Do our social scientists teaching here inAmerica recall what they were taught in civics class? I harbordoubts. As a student in graduate school in the late1970s, I heard a foreign-born student ask our Poly Sciprofessor for a definition of democracy. He balked, andthen asked me, because he knew I was taking a course inpolitical philosophy. “Self-rule under law” is a wonderful,short, powerful definition of democracy.Churchill wrote and spoke to this question so often.Two years before his Fulton speech, for example, inAugust 1944, he was asked how he would judge whetherthe new Italian government was a true democracy.Churchill described what he called “simple and practicaltests” by which democratic freedom can be measured:Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of oppositionand criticism of the Government of the day? >>FINEST HOUR 135 / 29