By Tom Plate

Has America gotten Australia into deep trouble in Asia because of Iraq?

Australia, a sprawling continental nation of only 20 million people, has had an image problem in Asia for decades. Asians feel it isn't a true Asian nation, and until recently, perhaps, many Australians probably agreed.

But the dispatch of a couple of thousand Aussie troops to Iraq to help President Bush appear more multilateral snapped much of Asia to renewed anti-Australian attention. A top Malaysian official has even implied that the former British colony's lock-step with the Brits and Yanks unveiled a genetic anti-Muslimism.

Image can be everything when reality sometimes isn't. So argues former Australian diplomat Alison Broinowski, now at Australian National University, in a new essay just published in the current The Sydney Papers, a superb political quarterly. Her country's image in Asia, she says, is that of arrogance and bongkak (a Malay word for too big for one's boots). True, Australia is mainly white, Western and Christian, but in recent years, it has opened up its doors to outsiders as never before. And in 1999, invited by Indonesia, Australia intervened to reduce bloodshed in East Timor. That effort undoubtedly saved many Asian lives.

Whatever the good intentions of that intervention, concludes Broinowski, Iraq was a different kettle of fish: Meekly following Uncle Sam into that controversy was to make Australia "more isolated and exposed to punishment as a scapegoat for the United States than it was at Bali."

Not-always-sincere Asian leaders, reminding constituencies of the historically Christian culture's past contempt for Asia, claim that decision revealed the country's true colors. Thus has Australia developed a new image problem. While its policies are obviously not intended, much less designed, to be anti-Islam or anti-Asia, many too-easily-offended Asians perceive them as white-man's-burden resurrected.

Broinowski's recommendations, though, have less to do with image than policy. Australia has to change its "recent behavior as a culturally cringing, subservient ally of an imperious United States," which "not only undermines our national interests and further damages our reputation in the Asian region, but makes all of us targets, wherever we are."

She's probably right, but such a U-turn is extremely unlikely under the John Howard government and would profoundly shake the Bush administration, which is well aware of its own image problem in the Muslim world. A new report issued last week in Washington reaches a parallel conclusion about the decline in America's worldwide approval rating.

What's the problem? As the U.S. Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World would have it, the U.S. image is tattered largely because of inept articulation and under-funding of public diplomacy (i.e., propaganda). The panel lamented "a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade."

But can piling on the words and the money ameliorate the problem? It's true that the fall of the Soviet Union, the last major worldwide threat, knocked the stuffing out of the U.S. propaganda budget, leaving us, according to the advisory group, bankrupt to face down radical Islam's unwarranted indictment of the West. And so the report's panel of distinguished citizens proposes the creation of a White House director of public diplomacy with new funding to help explain America to the world.

This recommendation, drearily predictable, of course, will probably not fall on deaf ears in today's understandably worried Washington. Even so, they are absurd. America has an image problem in Asia not because the world hasn't heard our message, but because we haven't been listening to theirs.

We too often have national attention deficit disorder: We mostly talk, they mostly listen; we learn little, they go away convinced our minds are made up. The result at this end is ignorance, inconsistency and self-righteousness. The result in the rest of the world is paranoia about our real intentions and festering anti-Americanism.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a UCLA professor and founder of the nonprofit Asia Pacific Media Network. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu.