Posted on: Wednesday, August 4, 2004

COMMENTARY

By Tom Plate

I felt just a little like John Kerry saluting and "reporting for duty" at the Democratic convention last week. At the U.S. Pacific Command's international conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on "Winning the War for Ideas," I was the Monday keynote speaker, and when Adm. Tom Fargo, commander of the U.S. Pacific region, vacated the podium for me, I instinctively saluted. Call it patriotism, call it silly — but those of us who are not on the front lines being shot at by snipers and endangered by car bombers owe those in uniform some respect.

And, just like Kerry, the officers of the U.S. Pacific Command here are anything but stupid. To a man and woman, they know that wars are won and lost not only on dusty battlefields, in the air or on the sea, but in the hearts and minds of a populace. And so "Pacom," as it calls itself, flew in some leading U.S. government public information officers from around the Pacific in an intense effort to assess the content, applicability and potency of the U.S. ideological message.

I was happy to participate because I believe the American message, though flawed, has much to recommend it and is deserving of a respectful hearing worldwide, including in the Islamic world.

We do have, I told the conference delegates, a good national "product" to sell, and that in the sordid history of global "hegemons," we will go down as one of the kinder, gentler ones. While we have powerful tools of communication, not to mention military-force projection, we are also known for doing bad and dumb things (Abu Ghraib, for starters).

But America is also known for doing many good and important things (like pushing back Japanese imperialism). And some Pentagon media-relations operations, like the embedding of reporters during the Iraq invasion, have been outstanding and brilliant.

No one in the conference was in denial about the damaging Abu Ghraib pictures. Like the unforgettable photo of the lone Chinese protester temporarily halting the progress of the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, it will take a long time before regional and Arab memory of those images fades.

And so we especially need to reach out to younger people in all countries we care about, women as well as men. Take for starters some of our government Web sites. They tend to look like the work of grumpy old men — and are in sore need of Web genius gurus who can youth-enize, as it were, our "war for ideas." Look how important the youth movement has become in South Korea, is becoming in China and is about to become in Japan. Let America not miss this historic boat, too.

This effort to better project our ideas around the world is difficult but not undoable. America may not be universally loved, but neither is it universally detested. Most everyone in the region (except, especially, Iran and, of course, the Kurds) openly or privately believes the Iraq adventure was a blunder, but that the Afghanistan operation was a necessity (even feisty former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir was on our side on that).

Most everyone expects that America's strategic appetite for unilateralism will wane, no matter who occupies the White House next year, as evidenced by the Bush administration's (belated but nonetheless welcome) tilt toward multilateralism in the six-party talks on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

In the final analysis, though, projecting American values will be a pointless exercise unless we back up our proclaimed values with widely viewable actions that reflect deeply held convictions. No matter what the tactical justification, for example, American forces should not shut down newspapers, as we have done in Iraq, and U.S. intelligence forces should be extremely reluctant to bug into dysfunction Internet Web pages, no matter how anti-American.

We cannot win "the war for ideas" if we are seen throughout the region as trying to stifle them.

UCLA Professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is the founder of the Asia Pacific Media network.