Don't Dismiss Iran's President

The contents of the letter from the President of Iran to President Bush should not be dismissed as a mere scolding by a grievant nation. Citing the war in Iraq and reports of secret prisons around Europe, Mr. Ahmadinejad argued that the United States had failed to live up to its own stated values, an argument that resonates in the streets of the Middle East.

"His letter was addressed more to young people in the Islamic world than to the American president," said Wahid Abdel Maguid, deputy director of the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt. "He wants to play the hero, mobilizing and inciting the enthusiasm of the young people. This is not a kind of letter that a head of state sends to another,”

We should not let Maguid’s dismissal of this letter lose its connection with its relevance for U.S. diplomacy. The parallel with the position of past U.S. President Jimmy Carter is notable. To a considerable extent, the President of Iran is calling on America to return to its traditional standards of foreign policy well articulated in Carter's book, Our Endangered Values in which he stipulated: “The concept that America maintains superior ethical and moral standards propelled us after the 9/11 attacks into a global leadership role in combating terrorism. To restore that position, it is important that Americans understand the revolutionary changes in policy that we are using to reach our critical goal of self protection.” Mr. Carter maintains accurately that the current Administration’s intrusion into the rights of its citizens, as well as internationally defying the Geneva Convention by detaining and torturing captives without legal representation and permitting its use of false information as a basis for attacking Iraq are examples of slipping below standards. Is not this deviation from the policy standards expected from America in some, if not great part, what the President of Iran has called attention to? There can be little doubt that America's world standing as suffered as a result of these deviations as well articulated in the following article

America’s Sagging Brand

Council on Foreign Relations writer Michael Moran in a 5/10/06 piece (www.cfr.org/publication) sees no reason for complacency on the issues raised by President Carter.
Though Americans diverge on many aspects of foreign policy, they generally agree about the need to improve their nation's declining image abroad, which is charted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. To combat the slide, the Bush administration began spending more on public diplomacy immediately after 9/11. Last year, President Bush appointed a former aide and confidante, Karen Hughes, as a kind of ambassador-at-large to explain American policy aims to the world. Hughes spoke on the challenges facing the U.S. public diplomacy effort at CFR's New York headquarters on Wednesday. Funding government-wide has increased yearly since, according to the Congressional Research Service; the latest rise from $954 million in FY 2005 to just over $1 billion this year. Arguing on behalf of another increase, to $1.14 billion for FY 2007, Hughes told a House panel on May 3 "the values we promote are universal, meant for people everywhere, and we seek to promote them with other nations and peoples in a spirit of partnership and respect."

But the government's efforts are beset by problems. Testifying the same day as Hughes, the Government Accountability Office's lead auditor on public diplomacy efforts reported the U.S. public diplomacy campaign still lacked strategic coherence. Disturbingly, "30 percent of officers in language-designated public diplomacy positions in the Muslim world have not attained the level of language proficiency required for their positions, hampering their ability to engage with foreign publics," he said.

Nor is needle of global opinion moving significantly. Confirming years of negative poll results, Andrew Kohut, who runs Pew's surveys, concludes in his recent book that "America's image is at a low ebb: where once it was considered the champion of democracy, America is now seen as a self-absorbed, militant hyperpower." (In an interesting corollary, Pew last November found more Americans harboring isolationist attitudes due to the war in Iraq and other issues.)

CFR Fellow Julia Sweig blames much of this backlash on the Bush administration's unilateralism. Sweig, who talks about her new book, Friendly Fire, in this cfr.org Podcast, is a Latin America expert who sees parallels between Washington's poor reputation in its immediate neighborhood and the recent spike in anti-Americanism in the rest of the world. In effect, she says, America's dismissive attitude toward its own hemisphere has gone global, with predictable results.

Want to find out the extreme view of what happens next if these issues are not adroitly addressed? The extreme view is expressed in The Nostradamus Code: World War III, which predicts::
-Destruction of major cities around the globe.
-Military confrontations and major terrorist attacks.
-Radical new weapons described in striking detail.
-The identity of the third Antichrist (Napoleon, Hitler, ??)
-Geological Earth shifts caused by man-made weaponry.