June 26

14.) Does Gen. McChrystal's itinerary each day include a quote from Bruce Lee? NO NOT EVERY DAY. ONLY FOR OUR TRAVEL ITINERARIES - WITHIN AFGH OR INTERNATIONAL. ONE OF OF HIS SENIOR NON COMMISSIONED OFFICERS CHOOSES A NEW ONE FOR EACH TRIP.

--From: “Rolling Stone fact checker sent McChrystal aide 30 questions” [question 14]; Lee image from

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

Lesson 14 The Idea of America - Larry D. Lauer: Pioneer in Integrated Marketing for Academic and Nonprofit Institutions:

"After all, everyday extremists and terrorists grab the headlines and set the daily news agenda. Even failing suicide bombers succeed in making news and speading fear. And to make the situation worse, everyone else winds up sounding defensive about what happened. ... In pondering all this I remembered my graduate student days at American Unversity when a government agency known as the United States Information Agency (USIA) was in full force. It was charged to communicate the larger story of the American people and their values, a story that would go far beyond official foreign policy. Based mostly on people-to-people communication, I thought this agency was very effective. But the USIA I knew was eliminated by the Clinton admnistration and replaced by a smaller strategic communication activity inside the state department… losing independence, not to mention important credibility with the rest of the world. ... Extrem[is]ts and terrorists are already winning the war to dominate the public agenda. The United States therefore should quickly re-establish a highly visible strategic communication and public diplomacy organizaton. Then we must find and hire the best and most creative professionals in the land to run it." Image from

Europeans React Skeptically to McChrystal Debacle - Soeren Kern, Pajamas Media: "[T]he overarching theme in European newspaper commentary is that McChrystal’s insubordination is a symptom of a much larger problem, namely that Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is not working. ... [Comment by] vb: Europe’s pundits for the most part are still trying to show how much more sophisticated they are than American rubes. Take everything they say with a huge block of salt, but remember that they shape the opinions of their consumers. What have Obama’s ambassadors been doing to counter the fallacious messages of the foreign media? Has Obama done anything to improve on the much criticized public diplomacy of Bush? Not that I have noticed."

Anti-American refereeing highlights failure of Obama's public diplomacy –

mattyglesias, Twitter entry; cited at. Image from

Institutional Insularity and Public Diplomacy - John Brown, Notes and Essays: "BP says we the 'small people' want oil-powered motion (we drill for you); the military says we want protection (we kill for you); the church says we want salvation (we illusion for you). ... 'Public diplomacy' for such ... organizations? PR/psyops/religious ceremonies ... which we the 'small people' all too often are willing to accept in order to find emotional comfort in our chaotic age -- an era marked by an explosive mixture of excessive technological rationality and sheer societal madness."

Campaign of Mass-Distraction: A Review of Anne-Marie Brady’s Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China - Marie-Eve Reny, posted at Posthuman Destinies: "China’s foreign propaganda directed at non-Chinese audiences has undergone major reform in the last decade.

These reforms are indicated by the Chinese media’s avoidance of the term 'propaganda' in foreign language publications to discuss CCP media management, though the term 'xuanchuan' (propaganda) continues to be used in Chinese. So for example, the CCP Central Propaganda Department (Zhongxuanbu) is now translated as Central Publicity Department by China Daily and Xinhua and they use terms such As 'publicity,' 'information,' 'public relations,' 'cross cultural communication' and “public diplomacy” to discuss activities which are still classified as waixuan (Foreign Propaganda) in Chinese language publications. As in its domestic propaganda, China now adapts many of the methods of public opinion management which originated in modern industrialized societies such as the United States." Image from

Gastrodiplomacy: The Yummiest Politics – Olga Belogolova: "Paul Rockower, a recent graduate of the Master’s of Public Diplomacy program at the University of Southern California wrote an article about Gastronomy and the re-branding of Korea. 'Gastrodiplomacy,' he writes 'most plainly put, is the act of winning hearts and minds through stomachs.' He also notes that the technique was perfected by Thailand, where the 'Global Thai Program' in 2003 was a means for the government to increase the number of Thai restaurants globally and as a result, create a tourism boom and, according to an article in The Economist, 'deepen relations with other countries.' ... The people of the world, in general, can be pretty bright, but we can also be just plain old ignorant. One thing everyone has in common, though, is food. It has a mass appeal and a mass understanding and therefore creates a large market for cultural diplomacy."

RELATED ITEMS

Worse Than a Nightmare - Bob Herbert, New York Times:

President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support. Image from

Reasons to be hopeful about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan - Michael O'Hanlon, Washington Post: There are indeed weaknesses in U.S. strategy, including problems with the Afghan police and an inadequate plan to fight corruption. Gen. David Petraeus and military and civilian leaders should focus on these and other matters. But on balance, we have many assets and strengths in Afghanistan -- and better-than-even odds of leaving behind a reasonably stable place if we persevere.

Iraq’s Ancient Ruins Face New Looting - Steven Lee Myers, New York Times: The looting of Iraq’s ancient ruins is thriving again. This time it is not a result of the “stuff happens”

chaos that followed the American invasion in 2003, but rather the bureaucratic indifference of Iraq’s newly sovereign government. Thousands of archaeological sites — containing some of the oldest treasures of civilization — have been left unprotected, allowing what officials of Iraq’s antiquities board say is a resumption of brazenly illegal excavations, especially here in southern Iraq. Image from

Cheers at Europe’s Expense - Rob Hughes, New York Times: Soccer, after all, is game underneath all the FIFA marketing and the win-at-all-costs mentality. But something got under the skin of the surly, withdrawn, self-obsessed and now departed French and Italians. They are big names in soccer, but of small consequence to the World Cup as it goes forward without them. They will not be missed. The old order is dead, long live the new.

On Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque National Post — May 29, 2004 by Ian Garrick Mason - posted at John Brown, Notes & Essays: Propaganda is a technique of persuasion. Perhaps it is going too far to say, as advertising pioneer and WWI propagandist Edward Bernays did, that “whether, in any instance, propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published.” But demonizing propaganda may be even worse, by leading us either to deny that it’s part of our society at all, or, if we do accept that it’s present, to demonize our society along with it.

For Levy, though, it’s a matter of how we understand art. The main problem with today’s anti-propaganda attitude is that it boxes us into a one-dimensional view. If we see only the propaganda, as the nineteenth-century anti-Jesuit historians did, we turn art into “evidence”, its aesthetic nature denied. And if we see only the art, as the twentieth-century museum, “its galleries filled with objects separated from the altars of their original gods”, does, then we turn art into a false idol, stripped of its context and purpose. Her point is simple: can we not learn to see both? St. Ignatius image from