Distorting the Process

Abstract

While practitioners and theorists are inclined to argue that an absence of grand strategy or a dependence on Cold War communication approaches resulted in America’s post-9/11 public diplomacy failure, there are more concrete reasons for this breakdown. For example, a US president publicly projecting American Judeo-Christian ideals, the Project for a New American Century steering post-9/11 US foreign policy, and an open disregard by US state actors toward nonelite Muslim perspectives held in global Islamic communities, thereby counteracting any positive public diplomacy attempt. This chapter explores numerous dimensions of the post-9/11 engagement process, moving beyond “what” precisely contributed to distorting US-Muslim relations to “how” exactly American leadership and key conservative special interests distorted relations. Ensuring that the Bush administration met its post-9/11 “unilateral” objectives to win America’s War on Terror and halt the spread of global Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) required that a different political atmosphere be established—driven largely by manufactured fear and a rigid neo conservative agenda. Coupled with US President George W. Bush’s “God-Talk”, a neocon-led agenda succeeded in promulgating America’s political and social arrogance. As this dual agenda failed in winning the War on Terror and attracting global Islamic communities to embrace American values, this chapter makes plain how such attempts created a false sphere of confidence in order to crusade for a staunch US national security agenda, while pacifying yet keeping global Islamic communities at arm’s length.