To the Secretary Page 5

  The U.S. consulate in Jeddah reported that a North African astrologer, locally renowned for his accurate forecasts, predicted that President Bush would be assassinated sometime in 2007. The claim was quickly posted to the Islamic extremist Al Sahat website. Internet visitors left prayers, known as doa’a, for the assassination to occur, giving a grim new meaning to the idea of praying for leaders. Within days, the site had recorded more than 24,000 hits.14

  In the Gulf region, Embassy Manama reported the good news that commemorations for the Shia holiday of Ashura were less offensive in 2007. “The U.S. and Israeli flags nailed into the street for people to walk on were not present this year.” 15

  In Islamic countries, Friday sermons are a good way to gauge anti-Americanism, and on a March day in Khobar at the Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal mosque, Sheikh al-Qahtani did not disappoint. A consular official sat through his sweeping views of American misdeeds throughout history, starting with the colonists’ slaughter of Native Americans, running right up to the fluctuations in the stock market. He admonished his congregation “never to believe America’s failed propaganda war deceiving Arabs and Muslims alike”; derided what he called failed American efforts to improve its public image in Arab and Muslim countries; and ominously warned that “things may even get worse as long as Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Palestine remain fresh in people’s minds.” 16

  In Saharan African, U.S. Embassy Nouakchott described a rash of groundless, paranoid press reports of alleged U.S. spying. One news story noted the chargé was seen in the company of a uniformed U.S. military man (a bodyguard), and several papers alleged that the Marine House (a dormitory for off-duty marines attached to the embassy) was a secret CIA prison. Peace Corps volunteers were also accused of spying, and one paper offered proof through photos of the U.S. embassy cafeteria and the chargé at a ceremony for U.N. Human Rights Day. The cause of all this hullabaloo? The chargé had called a recent coup a coup, rather than using the preferred politically correct term, “event.” 17

  Strained U.S.–Zimbabwean relations are nothing new, so a cable from the embassy in Harare shrugged off a protest of a thousand chanting youths bused in from rural areas, wearing matching t-shirts emblazoned SANCTIONS ARE CRIMINAL and carrying professional-looking placards, referring to U.S. sanctions against the government of longtime strongman Robert Mugabe. They booed, pumped fists, sang political songs, and called for war with America. After a strong finish that included taunting the local guard force, the crowd moved discreetly down the street to receive payment.18

  Sometimes, embassies struggled to know where to begin to counter outright lies and disinformation. In one of the more bizarre examples, Tajikistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs published a pamphlet saying that Afghan farmers began producing opium poppy at the behest of the U.S. government; that Americans profited from this business; and that the United States wished to destroy Persian, Islamic, and former Soviet societies through drug addiction. Embassy Drug Enforcement Administration officers met with the commander of the ministry’s narcotics unit, where they were treated to “an angry tirade from the unit chief, who defended the allegations, claimed they were true because they could be found on the Internet, said the U.S. government had in fact done much worse than the allegations in question, and insulted the embassy officers and the ambassador.” The DEA officers walked out of the meeting.

  Not willing to give up so easily, the ambassador went to the commander’s boss, the interior minister, who disavowed the pamphlet, said he had not authorized it, and had not yet had time to examine it. The embassy offered an understated comment: “Old Soviet and more recent Russian propaganda against the United States influences individual officials in Tajikistan. This incident highlights the public diplomacy challenge we face in defending U.S. interests here.”19

  Latin America offers an abundance of equally bizarre rhetoric. It’s hard to see why the United States would bother dignifying Hugo Chávez’s utterances with a response. He once compared George W. Bush to Hitler and warned that exporting Halloween to Latin America was tantamount to terrorism; he also told the U.N. General Assembly that Bush was “the devil himself” and had left a smell of sulphur in the Assembly chamber.20

  But Chávez had lots of company in the region. Piling on from anti-U.S. stalwarts such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ecuador might well be expected, but even Brazil exhibited entrenched, generations-long anti-Americanism. In an analysis of foreign ministry leadership, the embassy noted that one of the three senior-most diplomats was “virulently anti-American, and anti–first world in general. He has advocated extreme positions . . . that Brazil must develop nuclear weapons—and as the senior official in charge of personnel matters, issued a required reading list of anti-American books that has only recently been toned down.” 21

  American popular culture—music, films, and television shows—and its commercial orientation rarely represents the best of U.S. culture. American diplomats worried about conclusions Egyptians and Saudis would draw from watching The Simpsons, Desperate Housewives, and Friends.22 And yet, one Saudi television executive told the embassy that American television is “winning over ordinary Saudis in a way that Alhurra (a U.S.-funded Arab-language satellite television network) and other U.S. propaganda never could.” In the ultimate irony, the executive said the programming had been so effective that it was widely assumed the U.S. government must be behind it.23

  Far from the Muslim world, Embassy Ottawa gave a run-down of anti-Americanism Canadian-style on several TV shows. In a humorless analysis, the writer alleged “the level of anti-American melodrama has been given a huge boost . . . as a number of programs offer Canadian viewers their fill of nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada while Canadian officials either oppose them or fail trying.” The writer described episodes and plots featuring CIA rendition flights, schemes to steal Canada’s water, and F-16s flying in for bombing runs in Quebec to eliminate escaped terrorists. The writer, who seemed to have momentarily forgotten that this was merely entertainment, warned that “twisting current events to feed long-standing negative images of the U.S.—and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast—is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada.” 24 The author somehow missed an earlier and much-beloved Canadian show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, with Rick Mercer’s weekly feature, “Talking to Americans,” in which he enticed prominent American politicians (including governors and presidential candidates) to comment on ridiculous statements designed to show how little Americans know about Canada.

  Spy-versus-spy antics in Nouakchott and the latest rants from Chávez in Caracas are amusing and mostly harmless, but it’s quite another thing to read thoughtful reporting from intelligent observers in key countries like Russia, Turkey, or France. Embassy officers described their conversations with sophisticated opinion leaders who showed the depth and complexity of anti-Americanism.

  Istanbul media representatives offered a thoughtful analysis of what they described as a deep and potent anger and mistrust of the United States. One editor explained that the views of Turkish youths toward the United States were not fundamentally anti-American but a reaction to Bush administration policies toward the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, and the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Another editor criticized Bush’s use of the word crusade in describing the fight against terrorism, which the public perceived as anti-Islam.25

  In 2007, Russian analysts linked anti-Americanism to unpopular U.S. policies, including missile defense. Both pro-Kremlin and liberal analysts told U.S. diplomats that anti-Americanism was popular across all major political parties and helped forge a political consensus in favor of a resurgent Russia playing a more assertive role internationally. They said some Russians see the United States as playing the role of puppeteer, encouraging misbehavior by Poland and the Baltics and trying to set the “new” Europe against Russia’s “old” p
artners. 26 This distinction between new and old Europe surfaced frequently following the collapse of communism and was often shorthand for a view of a still-divided continent.

  Despite the well-publicized U.S. “reset” on Russian relations, prominent Russian analysts told assistant secretary for European Affairs Philip Gordon that U.S.–Russian relations had continued their slide. One asserted that anti-Americanism “was a pillar of Russian foreign policy,” citing Russian public opinion polling that showed the percentage of Russians who believed the United States presented the greatest terrorist threat had grown from 8 percent in 2007 to 26 percent in 2009. Turning to the July 2009 meeting between President Barack Obama and then–prime minister Vladimir Putin, analysts said that while there was a temporary uptick in U.S.–Russian relations, “darker forces” were consolidating. While anti-American sentiment had been muzzled immediately after the meeting, it persisted. The United States was an easy target and kept the Russian people mobilized. The analysts noted that Obama’s speech at the New Economic School in Moscow was seen by only 1 percent of the public, and Russian television only gave “half a sentence” to the civil society forum, another U.S.-run feature of his visit. They concluded gloomily that “Russian leadership had no interest in showing Obama’s visit in a positive light.” 27

  In a separate conversation, the political director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gérard Araud, offered the U.S. ambassador a French interpretation of Russia’s negative fixation with America. Araud, who had returned from Moscow the day before, described a meeting in which he and his boss, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, had barely sat down when Putin launched into “a half-hour anti-U.S. harangue bringing together a catalog of complaints and charges about U.S. behavior.” Araud said “Putin offered up a ‘rambling’ indictment of the U.S., ‘linking all the dots’—U.S. unilateralism, its denial of the reality of multipolarity, the anti-Russian nature of NATO enlargement, the U.S. in Central Asia—as he described a ‘U.S. plot against the world.’ Araud said he could only interpret Putin’s tirade as an expression of pent-up resentment and frustration stemming from ‘hundreds of years of Russian history’ and in particular the humiliation of the immediate post–Cold War years.” 28

  Turning to the complexities within the French-American relationship, Araud, who met in 2007 with a congressional delegation led by Representative John Tanner (D-TN), offered a “historical disquisition on the differences between France’s and Britain’s post-war relationship with the United States. He said Britain tries to “ride the tiger,” influencing U.S. policy behind the scenes. “This is what they have tried to do on Iraq: With what success, we might ask?” France, he explained, tries to defend its interests as an independent player. “We’re trying to exist and to exercise our right to have our own opinion, including on how to address international crises. That means that we may agree in some cases—as on Iran where we work extremely closely, coordinating daily. In others, as in Iraq, we disagreed, and still do. This is not anti-Americanism, it is France developing its own analyses and exercising its own policy.” 29

  While anti-Americanism was a “pillar” of Russian foreign policy, differing with the U.S. was explained as a “defining element” of being Canadian. In an extraordinary conversation with Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff’s chief of staff Peter Donolo, Consulate Toronto’s consul general reported on Donolo’s exposition on the importance of differing with the United States.

  Donolo went on at length about how important it is to Canadians to be seen as different from Americans. He said this difference “defines us” . . . and noted PM [Brian] Mulroney had been a U.S. “lap dog” in a way even [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper was wary of. He recalled once calling White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry after President Clinton had been “over the top” in praising Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, asking that the president be “less generous lest he hurt the PM politically.” McCurry laughingly said it was the first time a foreign leader had ever asked for less love from the president rather than more. “Things are easier with a Democrat in the White House,” he added, “but we should always remember this need for difference.” He speculated that Canada staying out of the Iraq war might have saved free trade by convincing Canadians that they need not fear political integration with the U.S., so economic integration was less threatening.30

  Such subtleties are important in understanding how to think about anti-Americanism and the ways it plays out in different countries and on different foreign policy themes. This kind of information might have been helpful in the many Washington-based discussions on the phenomenon. On any given day, U.S. diplomats will have to deal with the sophistication of a Donolo or an Araud, but also with the crazy accusations of the Tajik narcotics commander. With points of objection this disparate, a local focus, rather than a Washington-directed one, is a better approach.

  As a postscript to the examples above, the United States was not the only country occasionally caught off guard by bizarre local reactions to routine diplomacy. When the Swiss embassy in Bishkek decided to celebrate fifteen years of Swiss-Kyrgyz cooperation on development assistance programs with billboards superimposing a small and understated Swiss flag, which contains a cross, over the Kyrgyz flag, which features a stylized interpretation of a yurt, all hell broke loose. A member of parliament angrily asked the prime minister why the Swiss had been allowed to “deface” the national flag. The Kyrgyz government quickly ripped down all advertising; the keynote speaker canceled his participation at the anniversary event; and the Swiss chargé received a summons to the Kyrgyz version of the attorney general’s office. In a meeting with the U.S. ambassador afterward, the baffled chargé insisted the logo had been preapproved by the Kyrgyz National Commission on the State Language. Nonetheless, the angry Kyrgyz parliamentarian had the last word: “If this had been Turkey, there probably would have been a war.” 31

  PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: THE WASHINGTON PERSPECTIVE

  Countering anti-American sentiment is a fundamental part of public diplomacy, which until 1999 had been the mission of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). With its slogan “Telling America’s Story to the World,” its work ranged from awarding Fulbright scholarships to broadcasting news through an extensive international network that included Voice of America along with other regional outfits.

  Although some would consider this propaganda, the United States has always been ambivalent about that term. Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 to forbid the use of U.S. government propaganda within America’s borders, lest the government propagandize its own citizens. The word carries a freighted history, given its association with the Nazi Germany war machine, yet there was consensus in the early 1950s that America needed to be aggressive about countering Cold War–era distortions and disinformation, especially from the Communist world.

  By the 1990s, disinformation was also coming from the developing world. One of the most malicious and persistent rumors was the baby parts scandal, in which foreign media accused Americans of stealing babies in order to harvest their organs for ailing U.S. children. The repulsive story cast a pall on legitimate adoptions and became remarkably difficult to refute. The story was fueled by reports that technology was making organ transplants a more common medical procedure, along with the advent of organ transplant tourism (the phenomenon of adult citizens in poor countries willing to sell their organs to wealthy recipients). The idea of stealing babies for their organs became more plausible.

  If asked, embassy public diplomacy officers would have denied they trafficked in propaganda, arguing that countering run-of-the-mill disinformation kept them far too busy to engage in darker operations. They would have added that their days were filled with programming, organizing both academic and professional exchanges, cultural representations, and press events for their ambassadors and Washington visitors, along with battling back endless and groundless rumors and misinformation.

  Despite the broad range of activities, the end of the
Cold War signaled to Congress that there was no longer a need for the agency, and the late senator Jesse Helms led an effort to abolish the USIA, which closed in late 1999. Most of the agency’s 6,400 employees—of whom about a thousand were foreign service officers—were absorbed into the State Department. The broadcasting arm of USIA—with its Voice of America radio in forty-five languages, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in twenty-eight languages, and Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti, and TV Martí—was spun off into a newly created federal agency called the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

  The rough road of consolidation is relevant to the leaked cables and anti-Americanism. The cables reveal a State Department struggling to understand public diplomacy and how best to deploy assets of personnel, budgets, and the programs it had unexpectedly acquired.

  The State Department was not alone in its quandary. Following fast on the heels of the demise of the USIA, 9/11 made the scrutiny of the nation’s public diplomacy platforms all the more intense. It would be hard to count the number of blue ribbon panels, special commissions, congressional hearings, op-eds, and scholarly reports that focused on what to do not only about public diplomacy in general but anti-Americanism specifically. (Practitioner-scholar Richard T. Arndt counted more than thirty by 2006.)32 In time, anti-Americanism became so exclusively linked to violent extremism from the Muslim world that the concepts became inseparable. To see anti-Americanism through such a narrow lens, and to link it almost solely to a religion not well understood in Washington, set the stage for a powerful misconception. It also meant that public diplomacy risked being judged by an impatient Congress and others solely on its ability to move the needle in public opinion polls.

  Both the Bush and Obama administrations tended to view anti-Americanism as the single most alarming feature of the Muslim world, especially in countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, and Iraq. As policymakers focused more on Islam, they became trapped in a cycle in which public diplomacy was linked to anti-Americanism, which was in turn linked to Islam.