WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a leading Republican foreign policy voice, today sharply criticized United States efforts to improve the American image among Muslims and others abroad, calling them an "all thumbs" policy in need of reform.
He leveled the charges during a nomination hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Mr. Lugar, the chairman of the committee, called the position "one of the most difficult posts in the United States government," but praised the nominee, Margaret D. Tutwiler, as "eminently qualified."
Ms. Tutwiler, a former State Department spokesman and ambassador to Mo rocco, whose nomination is expected to be confirmed, appeared before the committee just weeks after a study panel named by the Bush administration urged a drastic overhaul of United States public relations efforts in the Arab world.
"Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," said the panel, the United States Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World. Mr. Lugar and others have said that recent American public diplomacy efforts, undertaken after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, reflected more a heavy-handed, Madison Avenue advertising sensibility than a nuanced understanding of Muslim concerns and realities. The previous head of public diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, resigned, citing health problems.
Ms. Tutwiler, who this spring spent weeks in Iraq in charge of the United States communications effort, and in 1991 was State Department spokesman during the first Gulf War, told the Lugar committee that the American image problem would not lend itself to easy solution.
She said she knew of "no one magic bullet, magic program, magic solution" to overcome anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and elsewhere. Ms. Tutwiler told the committee that while she thought the United States had done a good job of communicating its views and values to foreign elites and governments, "we have not placed enough effort and focus with the average person, the non-elite, who today have a much stronger voice within their countries than they did in the past."
She offered no detailed plan for doing so. Ms. Tutwiler did note, however, that the State Department was in the process of sending 24 public-diplomacy officials to Iraq, "the largest PD contingent, I believe, in any embassy that we have."
President Bush has sought through public comments and meetings to proclaim respect for Muslims, to assure them that the American-led fight on terror does not target them, and to underscore his support for a Palestinian state.
But opinion polls show this message has not always reached, or been accepted by, Muslim ears.
An opinion survey known as the Pew Global Attitudes Project found a few months ago that "the bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world," reaching beyond the Mideast to places like Nigeria and Indonesia.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/international/middleeast/29CND-DIPL.html?tntemail0=&pagewanted=print&position= 29oct03
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