America’s Failure to Court the Arab World
In the time after the attacks on September 11th, up until the beginning of the war in Iraq, public diplomacy weighed heavy on the minds of the Bush administration. America’s use of public diplomacy was an effort to enhance its image and impress its way of thinking into the hearts and minds of the Arab people. The reason for the Bush administration’s heavy emphasis on this strategy stemmed from their belief that America was hated by its enemies because they were ill-informed on American values and what we stood for. In reality this disdain came from Arab people feeling as if America did not like them and had no intention of valuing or catering to their needs. The United States failure of public diplomacy and ability to court the Arab world was rooted in their mistreatment of Al Jazeera, the most influential news source in the Middle East.
In order to understand the lives of the Arab people at this time its is crucial to examine the role that Al Jazeera played before and during the Iraqi war. The Qatari news source is one of the world’s largest and the most widely viewed outlets in the Middle East, with nearly 50 million regular viewers. Al Jazeera became so popular due to its ground reporting on relatable subjects such poverty and social disadvantage (Gellespie, 2011, p. 266). Al Jazeera’s mass viewer base came during the heat of the Israel-Palestine conflict when they broadcasted footage of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy dying in his father’s arms after being shot by Israeli soldiers. This image had the ability to connect hundreds of millions of Arab’s around the entire world. As Muhammad El Nawawy and Adel Iskandar put it in their book Al-Jazeera : The Story of the Network That Is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism: “What brings Arabs together is a notion of joint destiny…to understand the Arab public we must venture into the Al Jazeera news network” (El Nawawy & Iskandar, 2003). This explanation gives insight into how strong the ties between Al Jazeera and the Arab people are and how this news source acts as the voice for these people to the rest of the world.
In the period between September 11th and the beginning of the Iraq war, the United States effort to establish amicable relations with the Arab media, specifically Al Jazeera, seemed hopeful. Tine Ustad Figenschou (2006) outlines this relationship in his article “Courting, Criticism, Censorship and Bombs,” by describing how there were some rough patches between the United States and Al Jazeera initially because of American political figures feeling the network was biased and too harsh during interviews that felt more like debates. This issue was resolved and America continued to seek an improved relationship by establishing the American Central Command in Al Jazeera’s home country of Qatar, giving Al-Jazeera access to the events at the center (Figenshou, 2006). In the days leading up to the Iraqi war this relationship had grown to the point that several US media officials reportedly barbecued with Al Jazeera’s news director, seeming as if the United States had succeeded at befriending the voice of the Arab people (Figenshou, 2006). This relationship came crumbling apart as soon as the Iraq war began and Al Jazeera once again became and enemy of the United States due to some of their reporting strategies during the war.
The relationship between Al Jazeera and the United States seemed as if it had the potential to be friendly and beneficial for both parties. Four days after the beginning of the Iraqi war this conclusion seemed futile when Al Jazeera broadcasted both images of dead American soldiers and interviews with other soldiers captured in Nasiriyah, a city in Iraq (Figenshou, 2006). With the intent of showing how this war was anything but “clean” as American media had tried to display it, Al Jazeera received significant backlash for being unacceptable and in conflict with the Geneva Convention (Figenshou, 2006). To combat these accusations, Al Jazeera spokesmen pointed out that the American media had done the exact same thing by airing footage of Iraqi prisoners of war being mistreated and no one seemed to mind. This double standard held by the United States government proved to the Arab people that Americans viewed themselves as being of higher value and because of this the same rules do not apply. In return the way in which America treated Al Jazeera was the way Arab people believed America was treating them.
This incident led to an attack on Al Jazeera that reached much further than the borders of the Arab world and consequently the Arab people felt this attack to be more than just targeted at a news source, but to be personal. In the United States, both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ denied Al Jazeera reporters access to their trading floors, essentially rendering it impossible for the news source to report on the happenings of the US financial market. In American media, an opinion by Fouad Ajami in New York Times slandered the network in his piece “What The Muslim World is Watching,” by comparing their message to that of the Taliban, claiming they believe “the foreign power will nonetheless come to grief” (Ajami, 2001). In the war zone, despite Al Jazeera warning the US if it’s office locations, “two US missiles struck Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau killing correspondent Tarek Ayyub and wounding cameraman Zuheir Iraqi,” and the reason why was never explained by the American government (Figenshou, 2006). The culmination of these events, specifically the Baghdad bombing, made the Arab people believe that the American government was targeting them and there was no longer any desire for public diplomacy.
These events have not only affected how the United States is seen by the Arab world, but by the world as a whole. A report from the Council on Foreign Relations states: “World opinion of the United States and U.S. policy has plummeted in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Iraq” and has led to fear and mistrust, specifically in the Arab world (Council on Foreign Relations, 2003). Through misunderstanding the effect that Al Jazeera had, America failed at their public diplomacy strategy to show the Arab world what the United States stood for and consequently marginalized the Arab people.
References
Ajami, F. (2001, November 18). What the Muslim world is watching. The New York Times Magazine.
Council on Foreign Relations. (2003, September 18). Public Diplomacy Steps Taken Since 9/11 Not Enough; Council Task Force Urges the Bush Administration to Counter America’s Deteriorating Image as Anger at U.S. Deepens Post-Iraq War. Council on Foreign Relations.
El-Nawawy, M., & Iskandar, A. (2003). Al-Jazeera : The Story of the Network That Is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.
Figenschou, T. U. (2006). Courting, Criticism, Censorship and Bombs. NORDICOM Review, 27(1), 81–96.
Gellespie, M. (2011). Our ground zero. In B. Zelizer & S. Allan (Authors), Journalism after September 11th (2nd ed., Vol. 2, p. 266). London: Routledge
