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Veterans of U.S. foreign information campaigns of both parties critique the administration's current efforts and bemoan the "one-liners coming out of Washington."

By Jake Tapper

Apr 28, 2003 | William Rugh, former ambassador to both Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, was disappointed.

Having served as director of the United States Information Agency's Near East and South Asia bureau, with previous posts in Cairo, Egypt, Damascus, Syria, and both Jedda and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Rugh is an expert on "public diplomacy" -- providing information to foreign audiences that casts the U.S. in the most favorable light. He and several of his fellow USIA alumni were chagrined at how the government had slowly been destroying the USIA in the past 15 years or so, and how worldwide public opinion was turning against the United States. So long before the war in Iraq -- before 9/11, even -- they scheduled a meeting with undersecretary of state for public diplomacy Charlotte Beers.

But Beers, former chairwoman of both J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, was a product of Madison Avenue, and didn't know what she was doing, Rugh felt. "Beers was in way over her head," he tells Salon. "My understanding was that she knew she was a square peg in a round hole from the very beginning," he says. "She was not happy from day one in the job, and the people who worked for her were not entirely happy. She was from an entirely other culture."

That lack of familiarity surely hurt the U.S.'s public diplomacy effort, Rugh says, since she had no particular understanding of public diplomacy, the State Department, or Congress. "She didn't go to Congress to ask for money after 9/11." A full year after 9/11, Rugh would still find members of the House and Senate wondering why Beers hadn't come to ask for more money. "They were more anxious to expand the public diplomacy effort than Charlotte Beers was. They said, 'Why isn't she up here asking for money?' They were ready to give it to her."

When Rugh's group -- which included Fred Coffey, who ran field posts in Indonesia and Thailand; Stan Silverman, the USIA's former comptroller; and Len Baldyga, past director of European affairs for USIA -- met with Beers, they stressed the importance of having foreign service officers stationed around the world to help explain and shape U.S. foreign policy.

"We don't do policy," Beers said, according to Rugh, who found the statement clueless. (Beers, who resigned her post last month citing unspecified health problems, did not return calls or an e-mail requesting an interview.) The opinions of America held by foreign populations obviously shapes the behavior of their governments, which directly impacts foreign policy.

Even though she came from a different world and never seemed to fit into the world of Foggy Bottom, Beers ironically serves as a poster girl for how arrogance, incompetence and government bureaucracy has hampered the cause of U.S. public diplomacy. When we ask, "Why do they hate us?" one of the answers is surely that our efforts at propaganda have largely avoided the foreign policy reasons that anger, say, the Muslim and Arab worlds so much. But another reason is that other efforts to explain our side of the story have been systematically reduced. And those trying to rectify the problem -- like Rugh and the other USIA veterans -- have been ignored.

The group of USIA veterans had been watching the USIA and its public diplomacy mission withering on the vine for almost a generation. Rugh and his friends wanted the new administration of President Bush to rectify the problem. But Beers wasn't receptive; she had her own ideas, like the much-derided "Shared Values Initiative" ad campaign, which Rugh calls "a terrible waste of money based upon a misunderstanding of what our public diplomacy problem is." Instead of showing that Muslims can live happily in the U.S., the U.S. government needs more foreign service workers in the field to better explain and help shape U.S. foreign policy, he argues.

The problem began after the fall of the Soviet Union, when USIA budgets started getting cut. "USIA management had options where to take the cuts, and they took them primarily in the field," Rugh reports. "It was a terrible mistake to cut the field officers and not the Washington office." These decisions, he says, were made "by political appointees who knew very little about the field, [President Clinton's USIA director] Joe Duffey and others."

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