Statement at Hearing: Public Diplomacy

I am delighted to appear before you today, just eight days after being sworn in. It was just two weeks ago that the Senate acted on my confirmation, and I am grateful for the vote of trust and confidence.

As you just indicated, Mr. Chairman, Richard Boucher is here, and I want to thank him for the exceptional job he has done of stewarding our public diplomacy work. It's also an excellent time to thank the very talented men and women in public diplomacy who have been working some exceptional hours in these exceptional times.

Like every other department, at State we have been galvanized by the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the great challenge that President Bush posed for all of us. I can assure you that we are working carefully with our colleagues at State, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and other entities, to wholeheartedly focus on our number-one priority: fighting the international war on terrorism.

As Under Secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, I am responsible for the overall planning and management of this global effort. We have been developing a communications platform that is based in part on these four tenets: The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacks not on America but on the world. In many places, but particularly in our International Information Programs (IIP) capacity, we have worked around the clock to make sure that the world understands that this was an attack on the world, starting with a very important graphic that showed in one picture how many members of the world were influenced by those attacks.

In addition to that, U.S. News & World Report has indicated that our Web site is one of the top five in the country, which has given us a much higher profile than we have ever had before. The hits on our Web site have gone from 1 million to 2 million -- doubled -- and many times certain pages are nine times the reader rate they used to be. So as you think about and discuss different distribution channels, let's all remember that the Web and the Internet are yet that third important pole to radio and television.

We also have as a major tenet that the war is not against Islam. That piece of communication will take a long time, and it has begun now. I was very interested in our ability to take articles that are in the press -- the Washington Post had a very good series of articles about American generosity to other Muslims in our country. We made sure that such articles were available to all of our embassies, so that many times we are making the message about where we stand on this through the voice of others.

Americans support the Afghan people, which is why President Bush is providing $320 million in humanitarian assistance. Here it's very crucial that we act in a timely fashion. We put that note about the Afghan assistance program up the very day the president announced it, and three days before the raids started. We had great cooperation with the Voice of America in putting speakers on board to constantly bring forward this message of humanitarian aid, because we wanted it to be parallel with all the necessary news about the raids.

Finally, all nations must band together to eliminate international terrorism. This is not just a job for America alone. Here comes into play something you all have supported over a long period of time, and that is our exchange programs. It's significant I think that 50 of the world leaders with whom we are trying to develop a coalition have been members of and participated in our exchanges over the long number of years that you supported them and we have been able to field them. This kind of liaison experience and dialogue that we set up so long ago is not only going to help us build a coalition but sustain it.

We are working now 24 hours a day and seven days a week in a special task force team within a task force at the State Department. We do constant monitoring of reactions, and hopefully we can develop responses just as quickly. We just reported yesterday all the responses of the Muslim clerics and the headlines from around the world so that we can field these into our embassies and hopefully mount positive and important corrections on misinformation.

Our embassies are given daily cables and information and newspaper clips and speeches and pieces of material and talking points that they can quickly land and put in place with our host media.

It's interesting that we just put together videoteleconferences with Arab journalists who all gather in London -- which has become kind of a gateway to the communication to the Arab world. And we are doing weekly digital videos with not only these journalists but Arab scholars, so that we begin a more constant dialogue.

As well as doing more immediate turnaround tasks, we are in the process of doing business as usual. We conduct our Web site in six languages, and you should know that those languages then are put on to sites in our embassies and translated into many other languages.

The Fulbright academic exchanges and other professional exchanges must continue, and are doing so in 140 countries. It's interesting how we quickly jumped on opportunities. We had a woman who was in Syria for the purpose of developing an art show called "City-Scape." She managed to arrive there September 8. She put her City-Scape up -- everyone in the community came and applauded her, and learned so much more about America that it was one moment of major diplomacy. In Damascus at the time of the strike -- the attack on America -- we had a Syrian Muslim American cleric, and he was quickly sent to meet with everybody in the area and have a dialogue with the cleric. In small ways like that -- happening in many incidents all over the world -- we have these exchanges and dialogues taking place.

Now we are using the contacts we earned over the years with many of the communities that came in part of our exchanges and scholarships to develop a whole new level of diplomacy and speaking between moderate Muslims and the United States. While some issues do require this kind of instant turnaround, we have to be mindful that we are in a long-lived engagement to reach new audiences in different ways, exactly as so many of you have said this morning.

We will activate our ability to engage in dialogue. One of the most painful disciplines of the communication process is that it can never be one-sided. No dialogue takes place without a comprehensive understanding of who the audience is, which means whether we agree with them or not we are bound to comprehend, to understand, and to walk in their shows, so that we know how to draft those messages back to them.

We must constantly put a picture of humanity on the rather sterile words that the government sometimes uses for communication. If you think of this attack as a big building going down, you haven't got it. If you think of it as how many orphans were made that day, and how many people are still weeping and mourning, you will remember. It's part of our goal to put those pictures in the communication process that is so active now in all forms of public diplomacy.

We need to become better at communicating the intangible, the behavior, the emotions that reside in lofty words like "democracy." When we say it, we think people know what we mean. It's not what we say, it's what they hear. So the burden is now on us to act as though no on has ever understood the identity of the United States, and redefine it for audiences who are at best cynical.

There is a quote that I thought was fascinating. After we immediately put out on the Web site the Afghan humanitarian phrase, this is the kind of report we got back from one of the newspapers in Qatar: "The irony is the first humanitarian aid came from the Americans. The food bags have USA written on them. When I saw the Afghans running towards the American bags of flour, I smiled, and for the first time in my life I did not curse America." So our goal is to take that kind of response and magnify it manyfold so that we have our story in front of such unlikely candidates.

This is a war about a way of life and fundamental beliefs in values we did not expect to ever have to explain and defend -- such as freedom and tolerance. We have to prepare our people for an era of vigilance, of nearly invisible enemies with goals that are quite unfamiliar -- goals such as to destabilize, to make radical, to hate all that we hold dear. We must redefine what is success in this new uncharted territory.

I consider this hearing a special opportunity to ask you to take part in the communication to the American people. After all, you are on the front line of a more intimate dialogue with people in your constituencies than we can really reach. You do in fact embody the brand, the United States. You have a more intimate daily dialogue, and you hear the questions back. In our public affairs center, we are going to be fielding even more speakers made available to you in all parts of the United States. Our town meetings are going to double in number. And we are even going to give you, if you should desire, PowerPoint presentations that the advertising business would be proud of.

Finally, I am working with the Ad Council. This is a group that collaborates with all the advertising agencies in the United States, all of whom have world capabilities.

They have offered us their services, and we are now working with them on what messages we can put together that would work not only in the United States for these kinds of issues that we must address for our own people, but also around the world. We will have to be prepared to prepare these messages in almost every kind of channel of distribution.

I thank you very much for this time, and we look forward any questions that you might have.