The U.S. needs more effort on P.R.(Forward Observer)

Over the past year, "the bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United States," the director of the Pew Research Center said recently. In Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world and a reputation for embracing a moderate Islam, only 15 percent view the U.S. favorably, compared with 61 percent in early 2002. Similarly, in Turkey, a secular Muslim democracy that is a stalwart member of NATO and a longtime supporter of America, favorable opinion toward the U.S. has dropped from 52 percent three years ago to 15 percent today. Shortly before the war against Saddam Hussein, by a greater than two-to-one margin, Muslims surveyed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan said that "the United States was a more serious threat than Iraq."

It is attitudes like these that prompted Congress to set up an advisory board, headed by former U.S. ambassador Edward Djerejian, to find out what's wrong with U.S. public diplomacy and how to fix it. I was a member of that board. After three intensive months we released a report on October 1 that called for dramatic changes.

Public diplomacy is the promotion of the national interest by informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world. Nearly everyone agrees that public diplomacy--through such instruments as Radio Free Europe, which beamed news and comment behind the Iron Curtain--helped win the Cold War. But over the past decade, a process of unilateral disarmament, mainly during the Clinton administration, has stripped the United States of its weapons of advocacy.

To some, this development is not particularly upsetting. "We're not in the business of trying to get people to like us," said one colleague recently.

It's true that American interests must be protected even if those policies annoy others. But it's also true that if we did a better job of explaining our interests--and the values that lie behind them--it would be less costly, in money and lives, to achieve them. Public diplomacy can be as important to national security as ...