The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

reaching out through private pro- grams like the Rockefeller and Ford foundations; and government efforts like Fulbright, the Marshall Plan, USAID, the Peace Corps, the International Visitor Program and others. Today, the reservoirs have run dry and, clearly, they cannot be refilled overnight. Despite the pleas of the PD studies, better public relations can do little to fill the gap. Info-prop is no magic wand: spin, focus, staying on message and rebranding are feeble tactical tools. But the strategic problem of sweetening a sour policy when the audience has lost faith in the messenger can take decades to solve. During her initial listening tour in the Near East last fall, and later in Afghanistan where 20 preselected English-speaking students helped her grasp the extent of the damage, Under Secretary Hughes must have learned that rebuilding lost trust is a slow process. Trust depends less on words than on actions, carried on over time. Diplomats call it foreign policy. A Culture-Sensitive Foreign Policy The PD studies repeatedly admit to being stymied by policy, explaining that it falls outside their mandate. But policy is not just a factor; it is the only factor. A decent foreign policy must keep education near its core if it is to be sensitive to managing the irreducible cultural issues which plague us today, when the world sees overwhelm- ing American power as a threat. To confront the example of today’s thorniest cultural problem, Iraq was a recognized diplomatic conundrum, with a history extending back at least a century. It was the classic tough-nut case calling for a long-term cultur- al approach. Today, having jettisoned applied wisdom, it is no surprise that U.S. actions have triggered the very inferno promised by Saddam Hussein. I have little doubt that a cultural approach to U.S.- Iraq relations begun six decades ago would have pro- duced different results — by now, properly funded, it might have produced an alumni body of a thousand or more exchangees. From that pool, we might have drawn a discreet, self-administered, revolving panel of Iraq experts, mingling statesmen young and old with the scholars generated by the investments of Rocke- feller, Ford, Fulbright, USAID, the National Defense and Educa- tion Act and the Peace Corps. An Iraq watch group might have anticipated problems, pressed for more university centers in Near East languages and area studies and warned under-informed poli- cymakers — and their over- informed advisers — about U.S. skills deficits. The military poses a special opportunity, given its impressive record in edu- cation extending back two centuries and its cultural preservation in the European and Pacific theatres in 1943-1945. Today its “cultural” dimension is fragment- ed, reports Thomas Ricks in Fiasco , parceled out to spe- cialists in psy-ops, in counter-insurgency operations and in civil affairs, but enriched by the contributions of thoughtful reservists like Matthew Bogdanos (see his Thieves of Baghdad ). A strong Iraq panel might have persuaded DOD, at little cost, to deploy more soft power; e.g., in heeding the advice delivered to the White House months before the invasion by archeologists and museum directors about minimizing damage to Iraq’s monuments, museums, libraries and historic sites. At the base, a permanent advisory panel might have reminded us of the irreducible obduracy of the tribal communities cobbled together by the British in the 1920s; the predictable reactions from neighbors like Iran, Syria and Turkey; the difficulty of drafting consti- tutions when participants prefer independence; the irony of U.S. forces using torture and “extraordinary ren- dition”; and the inevitable reaction to Crusader analogies and a campaign named Shock and Awe. A respected advisory body would surely have underscored the unbridgable differences between Muslim and Christian; Shia and Sunni; Wahhabi-Salafi and moderate Muslims; Kurd and Arab; Hashemite and Saudi; Third World and First; North and South; tribal and sedentary societies; and high-tech and low-tech cultures. It might even have sorted out the truths to be found among the stony griev- ances for which Arabs and their Islamic cousins have blamed the U.S. for six decades. It is time for a mature nation to ponder the meaning of the empty reservoirs. To begin refilling them will require change reaching across government and the civil sector. As the flagship agency, State will have to persuade F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 6 Trust depends less on words than on actions, carried on over time — a process diplomats call foreign policy.