The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2015 61 FEATURE Deconstructing the uproar over a controversial Al-Jazeera interview, the author offers insight into the challenges of public diplomacy. BY ALBERTO M . F ERNANDEZ Alberto Miguel Fernandez spent 32 years as a public diplomacy officer in the Foreign Service, both with the U.S. Information Agency and the Department of State. He served as chief of mission in Sudan and Equatorial Guinea, in addition to tours in Afghanistan, Jordan, Guatemala, Syria, Nicaragua, Kuwait, the Dominican Republic and the United Arab Emirates. His last assignment before retiring from the Foreign Service in 2015 was as coordinator of the interagency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. He is a recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy. G lenn Beck once called me an “enemy of the state,” and “not a patriot.” He did this on CNN during prime time, before his descent into the fringes of apocalyptic Internet television, in reference to a single phrase from a 30-minute inter- view I did on Al-Jazeera (in Arabic) in October 2006. My concession Surviving Al-Jazeera and Other Public Calamities that “there was U.S. arrogance and stupidity in Iraq” briefly but intensely caught the attention of the media and blogosphere. Beck was joined in his outrage by Michelle Malkin, the New York Post , National Review and assorted bloggers, all participants in what Middle East scholar Marc Lynch called “the Fernandez Stupidstorm.” Lynch, one of the fewWesterners who actually watched and understood the entire interview, was an informed defender, as was Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writing in the Weekly Standard . My hometown newspaper, the Miami Herald , also came to my defense. I received a dozen calls from total strangers telling me that I “should go back to Mexico (or Venezuela or Mecca or Tehran)” or congratulating me for “coming out against the war/sticking it to the Man.” Some good came out of the notoriety, too: I reconnected with an old Army buddy and with a good friend from high school. And a leading Egyptian magazine, Rose al-Youssef , produced a puff piece on “The Fate of the Man Who Told the Truth.” Yet except for a few foreign policy cognoscenti and Middle East scholars, almost no one knew actually what they were talking about. Both the right and the left were wrong. I had neither come