NP? winning the PR war

[Doug Millison]

CORN: Why Bush Needs to Spin the War
David Corn, AlterNet
November 9, 2001

"[...] Bush could not have had an easier set-up. A villain out of a James
Bond film unleashes murder and mayhem against thousands of civilians --
including many from countries other than the United States. He essentially
acknowledges his culpability and threatens more of the same. He calls for
uprisings against various Arab states. He is protected by a regime of
totalitarian, misogynistic, extremists who maintain official relations with
only three other nations in the world.

How could Bush be outflanked by this foul individual? How much more can bin
Laden be demonized? (He's Lucifer and he has nuclear weapons!) Shouldn't a
just war, a good war, be largely self-evident? No spinning required? In
recent days, pundits, commentators, and administration officials (the
latter speaking off the record) have asserted that Washington needs to find
and promote Islamic voices that can present the case for the war. As former
U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke said, "We need to use authentic and
credible Muslims, clerics and religious leaders and political speakers ...
speaking in their own terms, not just President Bush and Prime Minister
Blair, to make clear to the people in the Middle East and the whole Muslim
world ... to make clear to them what's going on." But this advice ignores a
sad reality: such persons have not felt compelled to spout ringing
endorsements of Bush's war. What might be the reasons for this?

Here's a partial answer with two pieces: throughout much of the world,
America has no credit to draw upon, and, beyond that, Bush has so bungled
the meta-framework of this war that PR efforts may be useless at this
point. When you're the only superpower left standing, large portions of the
rest of the world may feel resentment and not possess a charitable attitude
toward you. But the United States's decision to share only a meager slice
of its tremendous wealth with other nations, its my-way-or-the-highway
approach to certain international matters, its rapacious consumption of a
disproportionate amount of global resources (see SUVs), its occasional
heavy-handed interventions on behalf of less-than-exemplary regimes -- all
of this has left it little good will in the bank of international
sentiment. It rescued Europe six decades ago. But there's been a lot of oil
under the bridge since then. [...]"
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11893



....And I liked what the editor of a major daily Pakistani newspaper told
NPR today, about why that country joined the coalition even though so many
people in that country seem to hate America -- "They abandoned Pakistan for
10 years, then they come back and put a gun to our head. Oo course we had
to side with the US."