"Smart Power" at USC CPD

I haven't been blogging about soft power lately, but some folks at USC's Center on Public Diplomacy are taking up the slack in the form of a new blog, Smart Power. It's the outgrowth of a class by the same name taught by Ernest Wilson, who is guest-starring at USC for a semester rather than hang around the chilly University of Maryland campus all winter.

"Smart power" is Dr. Wilson's (and others') term for creative combinations of hard and soft power; check out the blog's introductory post and stay tuned for more.

The Return of the Professionals

GUESS WHOSE PHONES HAVE BEEN RINGING.


It’s odd to watch President Bush’s administration quietly recall to service people who are actually experts on the Middle East—a small group who can’t even be called Cassandras, so little were their advice and predictions about the Iraq war heeded.

Last night “Diplomat Tapped to Head Iraq Reconstruction” told the story of Timothy M. Carney, who headed Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Minerals for two months in 2003 before deciding that then-Ambassador Paul Bremer’s nickel-and-dime approach to economic reconstruction doomed his mission. Carney resigned and headed home, firing off warnings that the administration ignored.

Now it looks like another old pro, Ryan Crocker, has been tapped as the newest U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. (He replaces Zalmay Khalilzad, scheduled to become neocon-in-residence as U.S. ambassador to the UN.) Crocker, the current U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, speaks Persian and Arabic and has been a diplomat long enough to have had at least one U.S. embassy (in Beirut) blown out from under him.

Crocker is the first career foreign service officer and Arabist to take the Baghdad job, which may put him at a disadvantage in persuading the administration on policy. The three previous U.S. envoys -- Khalilzad, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer -- had all been political appointees who had a direct line into the White House.

"It's going to be a terrible job," says former ambassador to Lebanon Robert Dillon, who was also in the [Beirut] embassy when it blew up. "As a career guy, he's going to be under a lot of pressure and I'm not sure how much support he'll get in Washington."

But diplomats and military officers who have served with him say Crocker, who knows Iraq's tribes as well as its Arabic dialect, was the only realistic choice to deal with the country's labyrinthine politics.

Given the administration’s “surge” plan, which is unpopular in both the U.S. and Iraq, not having a direct line to the White House may actually be a blessing, enabling these two diplomats and others to distance themselves from policymaking and actually work on improving the situation in Iraq.

AU Kurdistan

INVESTORS MAY FOUND AN AMERICAN-STYLE SCHOOL IN IRAQ’S MOST STABLE REGION.


As much as I hate to sound like Thomas Friedman—not that I dislike him or his writing, it’s just that some days he’s seemingly everywhere—if you build stability, they will come.

In this case, what would come is an American University in Iraq, modeled on similar institutions in Cairo and Beirut. But as “An American University for Iraq but Not in Baghdad” shows, support for an American-style institution of higher learning in Iraq flows in direct proportion to distance from the capital’s chaos:

Their planned American University of Iraq is modeled after the famous private universities in Cairo and Beirut. The project’s managers have a board of trustees; a business plan recently completed by McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm; three candidates for university president; and $25 million, much of it in pledges from the American government and Kurdish sources. To fulfill their dream, they need much more: $200 million to $250 million over 15 years, said Azzam Alwash, the board’s executive secretary.

But if it does become a reality, the university will not be built in Baghdad, which for centuries was a beacon of learning in the Arab world.

Instead, it is slated for what is the most non-Iraqi part of Iraq. The site is on a windswept hilltop along the outskirts of Sulaimaniya, the eastern capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, 150 miles north of Baghdad and far from the car bombs and death squads that are tearing apart the Arab regions of Iraq. Because of its relative safety so far, Kurdistan can more easily attract aid and reconstruction money.

It’s telling that Baghdad, for centuries a center of learning in the Arab world, is barely being considered for the next American University in an "Arab" country.

Say what you will about the Kurds—their government is corrupt, their intent to secede poorly disguised, their thumbing of noses at Ankara poorly timed—they are well-organized and have carved out a stable portion of Iraq, and those are currently the only factors that matter to those with money to invest in Mesopotamia.

Asia in Comic Form

BUT DESIS MAY NOT LOVE “DEVI”.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal covered Virgin Group’s premiere of a new series of comics centered on South Asian mythology:

A sexy villain swoops out of the night sky, her hands morphing into terrifying swords. She intends to kill a girl named Tara, who is driving home from a nightclub. But suddenly a secret society of caped men whisks Tara away—aboard an elephant.

Soon Tara will learn the startling truth: It’s her destiny to become a Hindu goddess.

It’s a key scene in “Devi,” a new comic book that’s part of an ambitious effort by a unit of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Ltd. to develop story lines based on Indian religion and mythology. Others take inspiration from the Sanskrit epic poem Ramayana and traditional legends such as one involving snakes that can take on human form.

East Asia has been big in the comic-book world for years, and appears to be reaching a peak; a friend of mine didn’t see daylight for most of 2006, so busy was he helping to translate Japanese manga comics into English 18 hours at a time.

That said, turning South Asian mythology into comics for both Western and Indian audiences is a new phenomenon. But the Virgin brand is a strong one and chief Richard Branson has a knack for attracting talent; one of the titles at Virgin Comics, “The Sadhu,” is already slated for moviedom with Deepak Chopra writing the screenplay and Nicholas Cage playing the title character, a British chap who finds out he was an Indian holy man in a previous life. (Cage now has his opportunity to mangle two accents in a single film.)

Virgin Comics is “aggressively targeting Indian-Americans, by sponsoring Indian-American events and linking up with student clubs at colleges.” Although the comics are being created in Bangalore, will Desis here respond to Branson—who after all is just a particularly hip white guy—appropriating the foundations of subcontinental culture?

Up next for cultural strip-mining: Perhaps Iran, with the release of a movie based on Frank Miller’s 300, which involves 300 Spartans holding off thousands of Persians at Thermopylae.

Suddenly, Turkmenistan

IF YOU WERE PARANOID, YOU’D SAY IRAN WAS REMAKING ALL ITS NEIGHBORS. PERHAPS WE SHOULD BE PALS.


Saparmurad Niyazov, paranoid dictator of Turkmenistan, died suddenly this week and it’s power struggles, ahoy! in Central Asia for natural gas, land and post-Soviet democracy, as successors scramble for power:

Early signs of internal discord were evident in an official announcement that the speaker of the parliament's lower house, who under constitutional rules should have become acting president, had been placed under criminal investigation.

With winter closing in, the global energy industry was monitoring the surprise news from Turkmenistan closely. Turkmen gas is already an important element in state-controlled Gazprom's ability to meet customer demand at home and abroad and could become vital as demand rises over the next decade.

The United States has lobbied Turkmenistan, so far unsuccessfully, to build a pipeline across the Caspian Sea that would bypass Russian territory to deliver gas to the outside world. European countries have quietly supported the idea, which would reduce their dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas.

The strategic competition known as the Great Game that bedeviled Central Asia more than a century ago may get a rerun as Western-oriented and exiled opposition leaders return to Turkmenistan and jostle with Russian surrogates for power in the vacuum left by Niyazov's death.

Complicating the mix are tribal politics and the loyalties of the powerful security services.

The Niyazov government was dominated by the Akhal Teke tribe, but the desert country's major gas fields lie in areas dominated by other tribes. Tensions over distribution of power and benefits from the sales never surfaced because Niyazov maintained an internal security cocoon that smothered dissent.

Largely desert country. Centralized power on one tribe’s ground, valuable resources on another tribe’s. Repressed peoples yearning to breathe free. Dissenters returning from abroad for hastily called elections. Tension between Islam and secularism.

If I were as paranoid as Niyazov was, I’d wonder why the 21st century’s maximum craziness all seems to occur in countries that border Iran.

I’m not saying Ahmadinejad’s bloody fingerprints are all over this, but because Iran borders so many countries—besides those I linked to above, it shares frontiers with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Turkey, and half a dozen Gulf states—the U.S. must deal with Iran eventually, particularly as Tehran closes in on working nuclear weapons. Better, I think, to start befriending the Islamic Republic now than later; by being in a position to influence Tehran, Washington would be better able to influence the politics of Iran’s neighbors, with benefits for U.S. interests.

Remember that Iran was helping to sustain Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance before 9/11, and had absorbed millions of Afghan refugees on its own. No one knew how valuable these Iranian actions would be to the West until 9/11 threw Afghan politics into high relief; without Iran, there would likely have been no Northern Alliance left for the U.S. to ally itself with, and many more Americans would have died to force the Taliban out of the country.

On the Punjab Border

AFTER THE OBLIGATORY CHEST-THUMPING, THE SHY SMILES.


Not all public diplomacy is international—at least, not at one of the border crossings between India and Pakistan. NPR’s Philip Reeves reports in “Border Ceremony Draws Crowds in Pakistan, India” that the nightly lowering of the two countries’ flags at a border crossing in the Punjab has evolved into a highly choreographed ritual that combines nationalist rabble-rousing and military chest-thumping, complete with bleachers on each side of the border and vendors hawking beer and peanuts to the crowds that show up to watch.

This would be reminiscent of the “We’ve got spirit, yes we do” scene in Hoosiers, with the addition of guns and goose-stepping.

But then, after the border is closed for the night and the pro-Indian and pro-Pakistani chants have died down, an odd thing happens:

... Bright-eyed and smiling almost bashfully, people begin to wave at the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis wave back. If you think of the history of this landscape, this makes sense. When Pakistan was born after the partition of India, amid terrible communal bloodletting, Punjab was split in two. Families and friends were separated. Those bonds are not forgotten. For all the trumpeting and strutting, there are plenty of people who just want peace.

It’s a hopeful message: Once Official India and Official Pakistan have gotten their quien es más macho messages across, civilians on both sides—remembering they were part of a single country just a few generations back—seem ready to just sit down and have some dal.

Silly String in Mesopotamia

One thing Americans are noted for is "American ingenuity," and it seems to be on display at the platoon level in Iraq.

BoingBoing calls our attention to an AP story noting that Silly String is saving Americans from booby traps:

Before entering a building, troops squirt the plastic goo, which can shoot strands about 10 to 12 feet, across the room. If it falls to the ground, no trip wires. If it hangs in the air, they know they have a problem. The wires are otherwise nearly invisible.

Not only has counterinsurgency theory been rescued from its Vietnam-era suspended animation; so has rubbery aerosolized goo.

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

Global Hopscotch

EYEBROW-RAISING DISPATCHES FROM THE U.S. PRESS.


First, the silly: The U.S. and UN are threatening to cut off North Korea’s 600-odd ruling families from importing certain luxury goods. Here's a Chicago Tribune editorial on the subject:

On the U.S. list, according to the Associated Press, are such Kim favorites as Johnny Walker scotch whiskey, Cadillac cars, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, yachts, plasma TVs, Rolex watches, Segway scooters, Jet Ski personal watercraft and iPods. Japan includes beef, caviar, fatty tuna, expensive cameras and cars on its list of banned items. Many European nations are still working on their lists.

This just proves Thomas Friedman’s old point about how warfare is evolving from state-vs.-state to state-vs.-man. We’re not even trying to kill a single guy, like Usama bin Ladin, in this case; the U.S. is reduced to attempts to keep Kim Jong Il from getting bombed on the wrong scotch—a brand that, incidentally, is available in every airport duty-free store in the world.

Second, Arianna Huffington continues her march from bluster toward substance with a modest proposal:

Well, it appears [Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s] government wants us out six months from now. And what about the Iraqi people, those purple-fingered symbols of democracy in action? What about what they want?

If Bush is all about the Tenacious D(emocracy), why not have the Iraqi people "express their desires and wishes" and hold a plebiscite on the most pressing question facing the country: Should the United States withdraw its troops from Iraq -- Yes or No? (Talk about your Pick of Destiny).

Simple, in a vicious sort of way, with all parties in Iraq having to do something they don’t want to: Sunni insurgents would be discouraged from trying to stop the election, since it would likely go their way (U.S. out!). The al-Maliki government would be embarrassed into a get-of-the-vote effort to counter a high Sunni turnout. And the U.S., when its troops are told to go, has to leave, except for whatever right it asserts to protect Iraq’s oil wealth for export.

Finally, Minnesota congressman-elect Keith Ellison wants to be sworn in this January with his hand on a Qur’an, prompting predictable outrage from Christian conservatives. One of the most prominent has been pundit Dennis Prager, who called Ellison’s proposed action "an act of hubris ... that undermines American civilization. ... Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress."

Prager’s remarks are resounding throughout the nation and around the world, which must be extremely interested to see how America’s most prominent Muslim elected official (Zalmay Khalilzad is an appointee) is treated.

Of course, it turns out that Prager is Jewish, meaning he has not only soured the fragile U.S. reputation for religious tolerance in the Muslim world, he has managed to single-handedly unite the ADL and CAIR for one glorious moment:

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement calling his argument "intolerant, misinformed, and downright un-American." Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, says the text used should be that which "is most sacred to the individual taking the oath. To ask ... otherwise is not only disrespectful to the person and to an entire religious tradition, but is asking the public official to be hypocritical."

The Council for American-Islamic Relations has called for Prager to be dropped from his recent presidential appointment to the Holocaust Memorial Council. "He is trying to marginalize Muslims by making it seem as though any practice of American Muslims is different or 'other' than what America stands for," says Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's legal counsel.

(Thanks to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the Tribune and Huffington items.)

Chaos High and Low

TRIBALISM FLOURISHES IRAQ AND SPAIN.


People identify themselves according to subnational groupings—their tribe—for varying reasons, but safety against other tribes would seem to be the most prominent reason. Growing up at the tail end of the Cold War, I was used to seeing tribes suppressed or subsumed by nation-states and national identities.

Today, though, tribes continue to reemerge from beneath their nation-states. I interpret this trend as being due to either extremely low or extremely high individual security.

At the low end of the security spectrum is Iraq, where the idea of national identity has already fallen through the joke stage and is now discussed primarily among the Western journalists and diplomats posted there. Tribes have reemerged because of an immediate need for physical protection against others, which nowadays means other tribes. Economic security is also extremely tenuous thanks to high unemployment.

At the high end of the security spectrum is Spain, a peaceful, increasingly prosperous European Union member where you’d think national identity would be strong. But as “Fighting Words in Spain” points out, sub-national actors like Andalusians, Basques and Catalonians increasingly threaten to declare nationhood:

Like the Basque Country before it, and perhaps Andalusia after it, Catalonia — one of Spain's 17 state-like autonomous regions — is establishing a separate cultural identity. The move is praised in some quarters as a long-overdue liberation from decades of repression, and attacked elsewhere as local nationalism run amok.

Critics warn ominously of a disintegration of the nation. Spain, they moan, is fast becoming a Tower of Babel. Loyalty to Madrid is weakened; diversity has gone too far.

Unlike Iraq, Spain offers few immediate personal threats beyond the occasional mugging in Madrid, and relatively high economic security thanks to long-term economic growth and a sophisticated public-welfare system. But this wealth and security, pushed along by Spain’s membership in the EU, only hasten Spain’s national erosion; Spaniards are free to pursue intellectual hobbies like the idea of being Basque.

In the phenomenally diverse U.S., however, there is a relatively strong national identity because of a dynamic tension between safety and threat.

Physical and economic security are both markedly lower than in Spain, with higher risks of violent and nonviolent crime and a need to hustle in pursuit of bigger paychecks. The situation is many times better than in Iraq, though, keeping calls for tribalism—even among minorities like African Americans and Arab Americans, who have reason enough to band together tribally—relatively muted.

Beacon No. 101: The Wrong Tool Now

A “POWER BAROMETER” EVEN ITS CREATORS SAY MAKES WEATHER REPORTS LOOK ACCURATE.


As the Washington Post Company ages, its fetish for cute icons is accelerating.

If you never could get enough of Newsweek’s stupefying Conventional Wisdom feature, check out the Post’s Global Power Barometer, which purports to graphically track the question, "Which nations, ideologies and/or movements are most powerful (most successful) in moving global opinion and events in directions they desire?"

Created by Aspen, Colo.-based Denver Research Group, the GPB shows how the U.S., China, Israel, Iran, Islamists and North Korea are being viewed by English-language media, with about a one-day delay, according to Denver’s backgrounder.

The Post flaks the GPB as a way to “watch world power shift in real time,” a far cry from Denver Research Group’s calmer “very reasonable first glimpse at how the world is reacting to an event or issue.” In fact, Denver’s own skepticism about the GPB makes clear that it’s to be considered a starting point, not an end product:

... These types of measures can only be considered an educated guess. Humans and human events are complex; models of the extraordinary interactions of global events make weather models look simple (and accurate). So, the reader is urged not to treat the GPB icons as gospel. That said, the charts can provide a very reasonable first glimpse at how the world is reacting to an event or issue. By letting the GPB provide a general direction, the reader using his or her own sources and concepts can speed analysis and hopefully come up with educated conclusions more quickly and efficiently.

Denver’s tool is a nice try and I hope they are well compensated by the Post; the exposure on washingtonpost.com alone is priceless. But I would be surprised if many of the Post’s readers use the GPB for this intended purpose. I’d guess that most will simply look at the GPB as a box score or price quote—Ford up 1.28 after hours, Celtics win back-to-back on the road, Islamists fall in light shelling—and return to other tasks.

The GPB is precisely what public-diplomacy and soft-power pros do not need: a graphic (an arrow!) rather than a tool that allows more-nuanced interpretations of those same events.

And beyond any questions of accuracy or usefulness to the public at large, the GPB threatens to become the needle that U.S. and other countries’ propaganda programs are intended to move, the benchmark against which success or failure—and funding—are measured.