America's soft power dysfunctions: When Arab problems are allowed to wash up on American shores Emad El-Din Aysha Winter 2008 Vol:XI-4 Whole #: 44  Printer-friendly version  Send by email Our political organization is thoroughly rotten, almost non-existent. It is Carthagian... Never was there such an absurd waste of power, such ridiculous inconsequence of policy—not for want of men but for want of any effective central authority or dominant idea to make them work together. André Siegfried, England's Crisis, 1931 IN MARCH 2006 I watched a rather striking televised debate between Muwafaq Harb, the (then) unpopular director of Al-Hurra and Radio Sawa, and Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. I found out in 2007 that Harb had been fired. His replacement, CNN's Larry Register, was hired specifically to reverse Harb's course. Hence, this article, which is about America's fast depleting soft power reserves—its ideological- cultural appeal, its image abroad—and how Bush administration policy is speeding up this process of erosion, the hiring of Harb as a case in point. Soft power refers to a country's "ability to get desired outcomes through attraction instead of force." By force we mean hard power (military and economic coercion). 1 In policy parlance it refers to public diplomacy—"short- term public relations: explaining current U.S. policy, circulating speeches"—and cultural diplomacy, involving longer-term initiatives: "academic exchanges… U.S. libraries and American- studies programs, cultivating relationships with writers and editors receptive to America and its values." 2 The role reversals of war fatigue BRINGING HARB IN and setting up Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra TV was such a soft power policy of the longer-term kind, a cultural diplomacy move meant to do even more than just improve the impression Arabs have of the U.S. They were meant to reform the Arab psyche in general, away from extremism, fundamentalism and anti-Americanism towards democratization and Westernization. (Not to mention peace with Israel). The argument could always be made, of course, that globalization by itself would do the job for the U.S. of pacifying and modernizing the recalcitrant Arabs. That was the operative assumption in the good old 1990s, an article of faith that took a nasty shock with the fall of the Twin Towers, leading to a major overhaul of older approaches to managing America's image abroad. 3 And so that Al-Jazeera broadcast with Harb put the lie to this whole grand project because it was the American guest who was criticizing the behavior of the U.S. media and its slavish devotion to post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. The Arab, by contrast, was the one "defending" U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. media, with all the quite explicit anti-libertarian implications involved in such a stance. 4 I suspect this compare-and-contrast was intentional on the part of the ever-shrewd Al-Jazeera producers, showing that even Americans are unhappy about U.S. media coverage of Mideast conflicts, politics and culture. This means, by extension, that this Arab, as an Arab doing America's bidding for it, "must" be