{"id":370736,"date":"2010-02-27T19:00:07","date_gmt":"2010-02-28T00:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=69539"},"modified":"2010-02-27T19:00:07","modified_gmt":"2010-02-28T00:00:07","slug":"the-only-public-diplomacy-campaign-that-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/370736","title":{"rendered":"The Only Public Diplomacy Campaign That Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Afghanistan<\/a><\/p>\n

barefoot on broken glass (image courtesy US Army)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This is Tareq al-Fadhli, a Yemeni who’s lived a picaresque life, one that included a stint fighting the Soviets beside Usama bin Laden. He’s against the Yemeni government and wants to ingratiate himself to the Americans, but I don’t care about that right now. I care about broadcasting this far and wide.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u201cWhen I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians, and I would never have supported them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have talked to counterterrorism and intelligence professionals, people who spend all their time trying to anticipate al-Qaeda’s next moves — in six months and over 20 years — and their takeaway is clear: what al-Qaeda-the-movement cannot survive is the justified perception among Muslims that they’re murderers<\/em>. They’re not warriors. They’re criminals. They’re murderers<\/em>. That’s why in videos like this one<\/a>, Ayman Zawahiri feels the need to contextualize al-Qaeda seeking civilian targets (and pretend as if the overwhelming majority of al-Qaeda victims aren’t Muslims). If even extremist<\/em> Muslims consider al-Qaeda to be murderers, the movement dies. Permanently.<\/p>\n

There are different conceptions of public diplomacy out there. Many of them concern how the U.S. talks to skeptical publics. I tend to feel that public diplomacy divorced from substantive policy decisions is transparent, condescending, credibility-destroying bullshit. Instead, public diplomacy should be viewed as an offensive capability — to attack an adversary’s credibility, aimed at his weak point, to destroy him, and rapidly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine praising the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000<\/em>, but by God, Jim Glassman, Bush’s last undersecretary of State for public diplomacy got that<\/em><\/a>. (I’m sure I’ll go back to my comfortable ideological views about Jim now that he’s in charge of promoting the Bush legacy<\/a>, but credit where due and all.)<\/p>\n

Get al-Fadhli in a video, saying this shit in Arabic, and find a way to get it to al-Jazeera. It goes viral and we watch the cognitive dissonance batter al-Qaeda while they’re weakened.<\/p>\n

\"Share <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

barefoot on broken glass (image courtesy US Army) This is Tareq al-Fadhli, a Yemeni who’s lived a picaresque life, one that included a stint fighting the Soviets beside Usama bin Laden. He’s against the Yemeni government and wants to ingratiate himself to the Americans, but I don’t care about that right now. I care about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}