Challenges and Opportunities for Public Diplomacy

She was also a terrific Ambassador for our country to the OECD in Paris for 2 years and had a chance to continue to serve our country in many ways. So, Jeanne, thank you for your friendship and for that generous introduction. I'm glad that my mom and sister could be here. Thank you all for being here. I look out and I see so many friends I can't name them all, but I have to mention a couple of others--Jim Oberwetter and his lovely wife Anita, and my friend Lee Jackson. And Jeanne and I were all in a group together. We called it the lunch bunch. And for years here in Dallas, we met every Saturday for lunch, and that's where I learned how to solve the problems of the world and everything I know about politics. And so I've got to thank them for giving me that training.

I also have to mention that we've got a former member of this group and a very instrumental leader here in Dallas who has joined me at the State Department as a key member of my senior team, and that is the former editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News, Rena Pederson.

And I'm just -- but she's been invaluable to my efforts to share America's story and help communicate America's story with the rest of the world. And so I'm delighted, I'm really honored that she would agree to move from Dallas temporarily and come to Washington and join me in this challenging and difficult but rewarding job.

I just returned this weekend. If I seem a little jet-lagged, I got in about 4 a.m. in the morning. The airplanes have been horrible this summer. I got in--I was bumped in Paris, spent 8 or 9 hours in Newark, finally got home to Austin, Texas where my dear husband picked me up at quarter of 4 in the morning on Saturday morning, after I was supposed to be in in the afternoon on Friday.

But I had a wonderful experience in Morocco. I met with some young people there who were participating in one of our new programs. It's a summer enrichment program for young people where they're learning English and they're participating in some sports activities and leadership and citizenship skills development. And for many of them, it was the first time at this camp experience that they've ever met an American, and it was also the first time that they had ever seen the beauty--many of them came from very impoverished neighborhoods--the first time they'd ever been to the beach and seen the beauty of their own country.

So we're doing some wonderful programs around the world that are bringing Americans together with young people across the world in a way that opens their horizons. And I'm very proud of that.

Since I had started my job at the State Department now a little more than 2 years ago, I've traveled to several dozen countries. I was trying to count up yesterday. I think it's approaching 40. And I found that people overseas, everywhere I go, people tend to base their opinions of America based on what they perceive that Americans think about them. They worry that we don't listen or respect them.

I remember a woman in Egypt who looked at me and said, "You all think we're all terrorists." And I said, "No, we don't think that. Why would you think that?" Well, that's what I can tell from America, and this was before even the Dubai Ports controversy. And so it's our clear challenge to reach out to the world and let the world know that we are interested in getting to know them, that we want to learn more about their country and culture, we want to partner with them to make our world a safer and a better place. And that's why groups like this one, like the Dallas World Affairs Council, are so important because your members are actively engaged in world events, you keep informed about foreign policy. Many of you have helped host foreign dignitaries and academics who come here through our International Visitors Program. I'm so proud to welcome these three young women from the Middle East here.

These kind of people-to-people exchange programs are absolutely vital, and I really want to thank you for your support of these programs. You're also setting a great example for the rest of the country with your outreach to students in high schools to get them engaged in world affairs. I just came from the Southern Methodist University campus, my alma mater. President Turner was there. We had a youth diversity conference this morning with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, who's doing a great job of encouraging young people in her district to get engaged and to care about the world and begin to know the languages of the world

I want to thank Jim Faulk and Pat Patterson for all that you do and that the World Affairs Council--all of you do it so well. And I know you've received a great recognition -- I believe it was earlier this year -- as the most dynamic council in the United States of America. So congratulations to all of you for that vital work.

I have a little bit of a challenge for you today: This is one of the projects Rena worked on for me at the State Department. She said, you know, people want to know -- Americans want to know what they can do to help because they realize that the challenge of America's public diplomacy and our engagement in the world is larger than just something government should have to deal with, and so they see the negative polls and they realize that all of us really have an opportunity to do something. And Rena came up with a list of 10 things that everyday Americans can to do help public diplomacy. She's dropped some copies that we'll make available to you at the end of the program. And Jim's offered to put it on the website for us.

Number one on the list is to host a foreign exchange student at your home. And we want to increase these opportunities for young people, we need to increase these opportunities, and so we need more American host families. And so everywhere I go, I make an appeal, whether it's a short-term, several-week program or a year-long experience, to have a high school student from the Middle East or somewhere in the world live at your home. That's one of the best things you can do to really help our country, because our experience has shown that the single most effective thing we can do to change people's minds and attitudes about our country is to bring them here and let them see America for themselves.

After September 11, more than 30 different studies looked at America's public diplomacy efforts, and one of the top recommendations was to significantly expand our education and exchange programs, and so I've really focused on that. The year that I started at State Department, the previous year we had 27,000 participants in these education and exchange programs worldwide. This year we're going to have about 40,000 participants, and I'm working on a budget that I hope with some arm-twisting with members of Congress we'll be able to increase it to over 50,000 people participating in these programs.

I meet with a lot of the young people who participate, and I imagine these young women will have the same thing to say because they almost always say the exact same thing. They almost always say, "It changed my life." And we're able to document that those--that that change is lifelong and that it results in a lifelong, more positive appreciation for America and a better understanding of our country.

Now, in addition to changing an individual life, it also has the potential to change the world. Our State Department personnel have been very good at identifying young leaders in societies across the world, and as a result more than 130 leaders--presidents, prime ministers, leaders of countries around the world--have been participants in these exchange programs, including the new Prime Minister of Great Britain Gordon Brown and the new Prime Minister of France Nicolas Sarkozy. Both participated in America's education and exchange programs as young people. And that's enormous intellectual capital for our country and something that we want to make sure continues to be the case 20 or 30 years into the future.

I want to talk a little bit today about a couple of things; first of all, the three strategic imperatives that I put in place to guide all of our public diplomacy programs, and then tell you a little bit about what I find myself really focusing on after 2 years in my job at the State Department.

We have put in place these three strategic imperatives, and the first is that America must offer people across the world a positive vision of hope and opportunity that is rooted in our most fundamental values -- our belief in liberty, in justice, in equality, in opportunity for all people throughout the world.

I remember seeing as I began this job an interview with a young man in Morocco, and he was asked, "What do you think of when you think of America?" And this was a young man who lived in a very poor neighborhood. And he looked at the camera and he said, "For me," he said, "when I think of America, I think of the hope for a better life." And it's vitally important that we continue to offer the world that sense of hope, that beacon of opportunity, that shining city on the hill that President Reagan talked about so eloquently.

And that's the reason that our country speaks out for democracy and against human rights offenders, that we speak up for a free press and for freedom of religion, and for equal treatment for women and minorities, and against trafficking in persons, because America believes that every person in the world has worth and dignity and value. It's really our founding conviction.

One of the most memorable experiences I've had was in China. We had a wonderful Fulbright scholar who was teaching a class of high school students there. And she was teaching and they had some visiting American exchange students, so this was a cross-cultural exchange high school class where she was teaching young Chinese and young Americans based on the writings and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King. And to see these young Chinese young people stand up and, in English, somewhat accented English, but saying, "I have a dream." And you realized that, you know, it's sort of the universal longing of the human soul.

And I realized as I watched this that what I was also seeing was the difference in the policy positions between the Government of China and the Government of America, because in the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, the letter from the Birmingham jail, he wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." And that's what our country believes. That's why we have to speak up for human rights everywhere. China, on the other hand, has a philosophy to each his own, you know, we'll do what we want, you do what you want, let's not bother each other. We believe, though, that we have an obligation because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We have an obligation to always stand for human rights and human freedom. And so that's my first strategic imperative and I try to remind all of my team of that every--in every program and everything that we do.

The second strategic imperative, at a time when we are confronting a severe threat from al-Qaida and similar violent extremist groups who have declared war on our country, and really I think on the civilized world, on all of those who value human life and human dignity, our second strategic imperative is to isolate and marginalize these extremists and to undermine their efforts to try to appropriate religion to their cause. We must remind people that America and the West are not in conflict with any religion but are open to all religions, and that people of all faiths worship very freely here in America. Now, we know that about our country, but around the world I think they sometimes mistake our freedom of religion to mean freedom from religion, and they don't understand that Americans are people of many different faiths, but for whom many faith is a very important part of life for many people in America.

I've spent a great deal of my time reaching out to Muslim Americans because I believe their voices are very important in the debate as we seek to isolate and marginalize the violent extremists and make it clear that they don't represent any faith, but instead pervert all faiths with their acts of mass murder and violence.

The third imperative, and this one sounds kind of simple, but it's--I think it rings very true. And it came from a beloved former Ambassador at the State Department named Frank Wisner. I went to see him in New York and asked his advice and he said, "You know, Karen," he said, "particularly at a time of war and common threat, it's vitally important that America aggressively nurture a sense of common interests and common values between our citizens and people of different countries and cultures across the world."

I've found as I've worked to do that that, you know, most of us, no matter what language we speak and no matter what the color of our skin, most of us want as human beings pretty much the same things. We want education opportunities for our children. We want healthcare for our families. We want to be able to earn a living so that our family has a decent life. We want to live in a safe neighborhood. We want to be able to worship and speak our minds. And most of all, I think we want to contribute. We want to be able to contribute in a positive way to our communities and our country.

And I think it's really important that as we reach out to people across the world we try to focus on those things that unite us rather than those that divide us. And that has led me to really spend most of my time focusing on three key areas in our public diplomacy outreach to the rest of the world: the education and exchange programs that I've already mentioned; our communications efforts; and finally, what I call the deeds of diplomacy, America's deeds of diplomacy, and that is the concrete ways in which our country is engaged in helping people around the world to have better lives.

I mentioned earlier the education and exchange programs, and I've really become convinced that they are our single most effective public diplomacy outreach of the last 50 years. Today we're trying to become more strategic about how we reach out to people, reaching out to key influencers, specifically those who influence young people with so much of the world's population, in the Middle East for example, in many of the countries, half the population or more is under the age of 25. And so we're really trying to reach out to people like clerics, like teachers, like journalists, those who have a wide circle of influence across a broad spectrum of society.

Our new youth enrichment programs like the one I mentioned in Morocco are really breaking new ground by reaching out to a much younger audience than we've ever comprehensively reached before through our public diplomacy programs. This summer, we are reaching more than 6,000 young people, ages 8 to 14, which is a younger age than we've ever comprehensively reached before, in 13 different countries as well as the West Bank and Gaza. And we're starting to receive some feedback from those programs. It is very positive. These young people, whether it's in Egypt or Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa- those are some of the countries where we've had these programs.

And I wanted to share with you a little bit about what these young people are saying. And again, these are people age 8 to 14. As a mom, I know that sometimes by the time kids have reached high school, their opinions are pretty hardened, and they're a lot more open and interested and curious and are willing to consider different points of view at a little younger age. Here are some of the responses the kids have had. One said, "Americans have big hearts and they help everybody, regardless of whether they're rich or poor." And what you hear in that is in some of these countries a lot of the programs are only aimed at the elites, and one of the things that we do is try to reach into disadvantaged communities, low-income neighborhoods, and involve those kids in our programs, too.

"I had another picture of Americans, and I learned from them here. It had changed that picture." They want peace, just like we do. At a time when the television programs in the Middle East are full of images of war, it's important that they understand that, yes, we are a nation at war but we don't want war, we're working for peace.

"Americans respect diversity." "People are good in both countries," one said. "We all want to do good things together." Now, those are impressions that these young people are learning after engaging with Peace Corps volunteers and young American teachers and embassy personnel, and I think those are impressions that will last a lifetime.

I'm also a big believer in the English language instruction that these young people are getting at these programs. I've found as I've traveled the world that English is something young people eagerly seek. It's the -- they tell me it's the only international language. It gives them an opportunity, gives them a marketable skill, and they understand that it opens a wider world of knowledge. One told me in Morocco last week, "I can get on the internet and learn anything I want and find information because now I can speak English."

I was traveling in Malaysia and I saw an advertisement for a madrassa and it was advertising this madrassa, this religious education and the sign said "Good Islam, Good English," and I thought, "I'm not going to let them beat me on English. We know how to do this."

And so I have put a lot of money into English language instruction and I think it's paying off, because I meet with students around the world who are participating in this English Access Program and one of them told me -- I said, "Tell me one difference, really. What is it really -- what difference has it made that you can speak English?" And he said, "I have a job and none of my friends do." Now that's a young man who came from the same neighborhood that produced the Casablanca suicide bombers. And I submit that in addition to a job, he also has a hope and a reason to live rather than to kill himself and others in a suicide bombing. And so I have found that English is a very, very positive tool.

I'd like to bring more people here to learn, but obviously, those of us who are fiscal conservatives also understand that government can't pay for everyone to come, and so I've tried to look at partnerships, particularly with the higher education community, Chancellor Jackson. (Laughter.) We are working aggressively to market America as a higher education destination.

And 2 years ago when I started at the State Department, I had some meetings with university presidents and others and they were alarmed, because in the aftermath of September 11, as we had to tighten security, young people across the world had the perception--for a couple years, it was the reality; later, it was only the lingering perception--that somehow, America no longer welcomed young people and that it was hard to get a student visa. Well, our embassies worked really hard to address that problem. To correct that problem, we put students at the front of the line and I've actually traveled to places like India with delegations of university presidents and others to send a message to young people across the world that you're welcome and we want you to come and study in America and get to know us.

And last year, I'm pleased to report we reversed the trends of decline that began after September 11 and issued an all-time high record number of student visas--591,000--and we think we're on track to break that record again this year. And President Turner, I know you want those young people coming to SMU to study as well. I want them to have the advantages that an American higher education offers and I also want them to spend time in America to get to know what we're really like.

Two years ago, an advisory committee highlighted a critical need for more cultural diplomacy and we're big believers in that. We've launched the new Global Cultural Initiative that the First Lady Laura Bush helped me launch in partnership with groups like the Kennedy Center and the American Film Institute. And by doing so, we're fostering the freedom of expression that is the lifeblood of the arts.

Today at SMU, the dean of the School of Arts there talked to young people about their imagination. The most powerful tool of an artist, he said, is your imagination. And whenever people tell me that the job I have is mission impossible, I just beg to differ. I think we can all imagine a better world and if we can imagine a better world, then we can take some actions to help bring it about.

We've sent musical groups throughout the world. My sister is a great musician, has a wonderful voice. I unfortunately can't carry a tune. I can't even hum. They used to tell me, "Karen, don't sing," when I was a little girl and my son even, once when he was two, looked at me and I was trying to sing him a lullaby and he said, "Mom, don't sing." (Laughter.)

But I do recognize the power of music to cross cultural boundaries and to really speak to the universal longing for the soul. And so we've sent groups as varied as jazz musicians to hip hop artists. We most recently had a group called Ozomatli that performed -- it's a Latino-Asian fusion message that talks about diversity and respect for our differences. And they went to Cairo and Tunis and Amman. They had huge audiences among young people who came and celebrated that message of respecting each other's differences. And as we do that, as we reach out, we're reminding audiences around the world that despite our differences, that those differences can enrich us and can be a cause of celebration rather than division.

We found that sports also speaks a universal language and so we're reaching out to young people through partnerships with the Soccer Association, the National Basketball Association. This summer, we've had NBA players and WNBA players in countries across Africa. Just last week, you may have seen we named baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken as our second Public Diplomacy Envoy and I'm confident he'll be a homerun for our country overseas. He's just a man of great integrity and I think his story of hard work and perseverance leading to great success is a great American story that we want to share with young people across the world.

One of our most successful new programs is a program called Citizen Dialogue, which sends a delegation of Muslim Americans to other countries to engage with Muslim populations around the world. And that program actually grew out of an experience I had in Germany. I was meeting at the Ambassador's residence with a small group of Muslims who live in Germany and this one woman from Turkey was telling me that her neighborhood felt very isolated, her neighborhood of primarily immigrants from Turkey felt very isolated. And she talked about this little community center where they gathered and I said, "Well, I would love to come to meet with you people. Could I come visit?" And she said, "No."

And I was sort of taken aback, I said -- you know, people -- when they say no, you can't even come visit -- and I said, "Well, why not," and she said, "Well, we don't even meet with our own government. Why would we want to meet with yours?" (Laughter.) And I thought, "Wow," and so I said, "Well" -- I said the only thing I could think of. I said, "Well, could I send in some of our American citizens to come over and meet with you?" "Oh, that would be great," she said. And so I came home and we recruited a group-- a business leader, a young student, and an imam and they traveled to Germany and several other European countries and they had just a terrific reception. Hundreds of people turned out to talk with them and to talk about issues of identity and what's it like to live as a Muslim in America.

And so we have sent out teams across the world to places as diverse as Jordan and Pakistan and India and Denmark. A group that recently went to Malaysia that included an imam appeared on Malaysia's top rated television program there. The station was so interested that it is sending a camera crew to America this fall to do a series in conjunction with Ramadan to film American Muslims in their homes for an eight-part prime time series on Islam in America. And so we're trying to build these bridges of understanding and we're finding that these people-to-people programs are really invaluable in challenging stereotypes and allowing people to really get to know one another.

The second primary area that I focused on is improving our communications. And I don't have to tell any of you that we live in a dramatically different communications environment. The way I put it is I started my career before the internet existed, I did one presidential campaign without a Blackberry, and four years later, the second campaign, I couldn't imagine being involved and running a presidential campaign without a Blackberry. And so our communications world is just changing dramatically. And when I thought about, you know, what kind of lessons can we learn from the Cold War, from previous eras when we were successful in public diplomacy, I realized that the communications environment was just so dramatically different that it's hard to draw lessons.

In the Cold War, we were trying to get information into largely closed societies whose people were very hungry to hear from us. They would gather together and wait to hear from the Voice of America. Well, I don't have to tell you that with a very few exceptions, there aren't too many people across the world sitting around waiting to hear eagerly from America anymore. Instead, we're competing for attention and credibility in a very crowded and very noisy communications environment.

One of the biggest differences, I believe, in the world today, as even compared to 15 years ago, is that mass audiences are getting news and information and impressions from television in a way that they never have in the history of the world. Any of you who have traveled to the Middle East -- I was stunned to go to Algeria where they've had a significant terrorist problem in the 1990s and so it's not very developed; every apartment, every home I saw, has at least one and usually two satellite dishes bringing in hundreds of television stations from across the world into those homes there. And that has big implications, I think, for our country. Because think about it; when you see something on television, you tend to give it more credibility because you've witnessed it, you've seen it with your own eyes, you've experienced it, you feel, in yourself.

You know, it can be very wrong. I mean, I've had the experience of watching television in the Middle East and I remember being there once when there was a terror attack against Israel and Israel responded. Well, in most of the Middle East, you never heard about the attack against Israel. You only heard about what the Israeli military did in response; so a very skewed view that you received of that event, but nevertheless, the view that you got and what you saw on television was the Israeli military response. And so you only had one side of the story, but you still feel like you got the story because you saw it for yourself.

I had a very sort of troubling, I guess, haunting conversation with a very bright young man in China. He works for their foreign ministry. He had just returned from participating in one of our exchange programs, the International Visitor Program like you all are here on, and he had spent time on the West Coast. And I always like to ask people what surprised them, because I think that tells you a lot about what their impressions were before they came.

And so I remember asking him, "Well, tell me -- you know, what surprised you about America?" And the first thing he said was, "You know" -- he said, "Americans are really friendly." And I thought, well, that's kind of surprising, because we're known for being very friendly. And I said, "Okay, what else surprised you?" And he said, "Well, you know, Americans really care about their families." And I'm thinking, okay, you know, what's the disconnect here? We all know Americans really care about their families. And I said, "Well, what else?" And he said, "Well, you know, I was really surprised at how many Americans go to church or a synagogue or mosque."

And so, you know, think about that. We -- if you ask Americans what's most important to them, most of them will say family, faith, friends. And yet here's a young man from China who is surprised to learn that those things are important to Americans. And so I said to him -- I said, "Why did those surprise you? Because I think if you ask my fellow Americans, they would say those are all very much a part of our country". And he said this one sentence that's haunted me ever since. He said, "America is not the way it looks on television." Now, think about that. Mass audiences around the world getting television in a way they never have seen it before and yet, America is not the way it looks on television. So it's, you know, got big implications.

Now a big part of that, obviously, is pop culture. And there's not a whole lot I can do about that. (Laughter.) I decided I couldn't really take on Hollywood. (Laughter.) But what I can do is try to get American voices out a lot more on news and information programs. When I arrived at the State Department, Al Jazeera, of course, was one of the dominant news sources in the Middle East. And when I arrived there, we had kind of an informal policy that basically, we didn't appear on Al Jazeera because we were mad at them.

Well, as a communicator, I sort of thought that was like, you know, cutting off your nose to spite your face. Well, I'm usually mad at NBC and ABC and CBS too, but that doesn't mean I don't appear on them. And so we launched a real aggressive program. And the other thing--and Ambassador Oberwetter will know this--there was sort of an unwritten policy that ambassadors felt like they were pretty much muzzled by Washington; that they couldn't go out in the media in the country where they were representing us unless it was pre-cleared by Washington.

Well, given the time differences in today's world, if you have to wait for permission from Washington, there's no way. You missed the story, you missed the news cycle. And so I have worked very aggressively to empower our ambassadors to get out there, speak up, to be not only the face, but also the voice of America, to engage with media, to get involved and talk about our policies.

We've got--we've created a new Rapid Response Unit, which is a state of the art broadcast center that monitors all the international media in real time. And we have language qualified people in the center who are able to translate it immediately so that I know what is being said around the world at any given moment about news and about America and about our policies. And that produces a daily one-page summary that goes one or two pages at the most because I know busy policymakers won't read it if it's any longer than that. But it goes to every -- to a wide list of several thousand, from our cabinet secretaries, to our military commanders, to our ambassadors.

And it does two things. It gives them a view of what kind of impression is America making with its decisions and its policies, what are people around the world hearing about those decisions, which I think is very valuable for them to understand. It also gives bullet points of what America's position is on those issues and policies, so it's my way of sort of trying to get the entire behemoth federal government on the same page, which, as a communicator, I believe is very important.

We've also established media hubs, regional media hubs, in places like Dubai and Brussels and London to recognize the increasingly regional nature of today's media. You know, the State Department is set up on a very country specific basis. We have an embassy in the country with an ambassador and a public affairs spokesman and that's great because it really allows you to have good engagement. But what it doesn't do is allow you to speak to a regional audience.

So for example, I remember meeting with a Middle Eastern Ambassador in my first couple weeks at the State Department and I said, "Well, tell me about your public diplomacy." And he said, "Well, we meet with the newspaper pretty often and we go down and publish opinion editorials and we talk to the reporters." And I said, "Well, that's good. Do a lot of people in your country get their news from the newspaper?" And he said, "Well, no, most of them are illiterate." And I -- (laughter) -- I said, "Well, how are they getting their news?" And he said, "Well, they watch television." And I said, "So what is your television strategy?" And he said, "Well, they watch Al Jazeera." And I said, "Okay." And he said, "Well, that's in another country." In other words, not my problem; it's in another country.

Well, that's not exactly the way we need to be approaching it. So we've set up these media hubs and we get our spokespeople out, speaking in Arabic, representing America and our policy and our values and our positions and we've increased our appearances on Arab media substantially since we created those hubs. This summer, we've also opened a new counterterrorism communications center; really, my way of saying I want people coming to work every day furthering the ideological struggle against the extremists. And so we have people who are Arabists and Muslims and are culturally sensitive working in that center on an interagency basis to develop messages to help us engage and respond to terrorist propaganda more effectively.

We've also been working to improve our use of technology. Our State Department website is now in English and six other languages, including Chinese and Arabic. And we have a digital outreach team that gets on blogs and actually, in Arabic, counters myths and misinformation that tend to spread across the Middle East very rapidly. I've also tried to challenge my team to use new technology to reach younger people, the iPod generation. I did my first YouTube interview last week with Cal Ripken. (Laughter.) I felt very hip, I have to say, because I was very excited to be on YouTube and this also has big implications for our international broadcasting efforts. Some of you may know that our international broadcasting is actually now governed by an independent board, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, but I serve as a representative of Secretary Rice on that board. And we've really worked to increase our weekly audiences and also to increase our engagement on the internet and in other areas in our broadcasting.

The final and third major area of focus that I've really spent a lot of time on is highlighting what I call America's diplomacy of deeds. And that is the concrete things that we do, particularly around the world and things that resonate most to people around the world to work on education and healthcare and economic opportunity for people. The compassion of our country touches lives around the world and it's not just government. In fact, our government contribution is actually dwarfed by the contributions of our private sector, our private citizens, our charities, our faith-based and community organizations. This compassion made a very positive difference.

After the tsunami in Indonesia, we saw that when people knew that America cared about their lives and cared about helping them, it changed their opinion of our country very dramatically. After the earthquake in Pakistan when we went in, I took a group of business leaders and we raised money to build schools and health clinics there. It made a big difference in how they viewed our country when they understood that we were working to act on our conviction that every life has dignity and value by helping people in their country. And so I think one of my roles is to highlight those good deeds that America is doing around the world, things like our AIDS Initiative in Africa that is saving lives every day, the largest health initiative we've ever engaged in in the history of the world. We're partnering with NGOs and religious congregations across Africa in the fight against malaria, which kills 3,000 children a day. That's a stunning statistic: 3,000 children a day die of a largely preventable disease, malaria.

We're partnering with Nancy Brinker of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which started right here in Dallas. We -- actually, Nancy traveled with me to the Middle East and we set up the first-ever women's health initiative in the Middle East to help women learn about the need for early detection of breast caner. And as we teach those kind of lessons, we're also teaching women, also empowering them to learn to network and to work with other women and to participate in their society and to help take charge of their own lives, which I think are very valuable lessons as well.

When I took this job, President Bush asked me to make our relations in our own hemisphere here in the Americas one of my priorities, not just our outreach to the Muslim world and to our transatlantic allies in Europe and to an emerging China and India, but also our relations here in Central and South America. And so I traveled to Central and South America last year with our Assistant Secretary Tom Shannon and he and I heard the same refrain everywhere and you probably hear it living here in Texas. Latin America, because of the media focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, Latin America feels very ignored.

And so I started looking. Is this true? Well, actually, President Bush has visited Latin America more than any President in U.S. history. He's traveled in the Western Hemisphere. And as you know, one of the most valuable commodities of any presidency is the President's time and so that is an indication of his concern for the hemisphere. He's also nearly doubled development assistance to Latin America. But we found that almost no one knew about this. And so we recommended that the President deploy one of our big U.S. Navy hospital ships, the U.S. Navy ship Comfort to 12 Latin American countries as a very visible demonstration of America's commitment to healthcare.

Two weeks ago, I went to Peru to join up with that ship and I tell you, it would have made you proud to be an American to be there. I was able -- it's not often -- you know, we see the contributions in this country. We see charities gathering food and supplies. In this case, the Lions Clubs had asked people to donate their used eyeglasses. Well, you can see it begins here in America, but I tell you, it brings tears to your eyes when you see them being distributed to people who otherwise would not be able to see, would not be able to read, would not be able to see street signs in very poor countries in Latin America. The ship is a wonderful, I think, example of public/private sector cooperation, which is operated by the U.S. Navy and by its personnel. But many of the staffers on board are volunteers, doctors and nurses from America who volunteer two weeks of their vacation or a month of their lives to go onboard the ship and help provide this outreach.

And I'll tell you, it's not only providing life-saving healthcare to people, hundreds of thousands of people that they will have seen by the end of the deployment, but it's also winning friends for our country in a very lasting way. And so I think we need to take that goodwill and multiply it, magnify it because it's a very, very effective diplomatic tool and it also sends a message of peace and goodwill that people across the world are hungry for.

As I've listened to people that I meet with across the world, I think I have found that most people everywhere really want progress toward peace. I think people even actually sort of want to like America, even though they're a little mad at us about one policy or another or one action or another. I think they're really hungry. They recognize that we are the world's superpower. They want us to have a positive impact in the world. But unfortunately, there are often misperceptions that divide rather than bring us together. And that's why your work -- that's why dialogue between cultures, between people with different cultures is more important than ever before. And that's why we have to work together in this time of terror in the world to address the misperception that is fostered by the extremists that the West is somehow in conflict with the religion of Islam, because that simply is not true.

Islam is a major world religion. It is an important part of the West and an important part of America. As a government official, I represent several million American Muslims who live and work and worship very freely in our country, including a growing Muslim community here in North Texas. And so last night I spoke at a dinner raising funds for scholarships for Muslim Americans to try to encourage them to get more involved in public lives and I would encourage you and your organization to reach out and to involve that community, because we are -- we're a positive example for the world of how people of different faiths can live together in harmony. And the world needs to see that example, especially at this time.

Too often, I think we don't hear about the progress that is actually being made. A major poll was released this summer, the Pew Global Attitude survey of 47 nations, and it found that large and growing numbers of populations in the Middle East and elsewhere are rejecting violence. Now most of the media focused on the polling that showed the United States image in Muslim majority countries remains low. And that's true; it does.

But one of the most striking trends revealed by the poll, I think, was that Muslim majorities are turning their backs on terrorism. Support for terrorist tactics had fallen in seven of the eight predominantly Muslim countries surveyed on that question since 2002. Fewer and fewer people agree that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are ever justifiable. In Lebanon, in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of those populations who viewed suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians as ever justified has declined by half or more over 5 years, so that is progress. It's not enough. We have a lot more work to do, but it is progress.

And the Pew poll also shows that support for Osama bin Laden is waning. In Jordan, for example, just 20% of the population now expressed some confidence in bin Laden down dramatically from 56% just 4 years ago. And so this shift of attitude is an opening that I believe we must seize by reaching out to Muslim communities and populations with even greater energy and a spirit of respect and partnership to talk about the things that we have in common and our common desire to work for peace.

And I like to describe my work as waging peace. And I use the word waging--I've got it on a little coin that I hand out--and I use the word waging very intentionally, because I think we have to be intentional about it. It's not something that's just going to happen. It takes work. It takes effort. It takes outreach. It's the work of generations. I keep a little clip from a Chinese proverb on my desk and it talks about planting the seeds of trees under whose shade you may never sit. And I sometimes feel like that's what I'm doing as I travel the world, that I'm planting some seeds. But I hope one day, there will be shade from those trees.

I want to conclude by sharing a story that, again, has stayed with me from my travels. It was on my very first trip and I was in a low-income housing project area in Turkey, a project where parents bring their children to an after-school community center and volunteers there teach them to read and reach out to them and it was a very positive program. But I met with the parents and this young man asked me a very haunting question. He, through the interpreter, said sort of bleakly -- he said what he wanted to know about America was does the Statue of Liberty still face out.

And I think what he meant is: Are you still that welcoming country? Are you still that beacon of hope? Are you still looking for -- bring me your poor and your masses of those longing to breathe free? And I think it's vitally important that our answer to that question--do we remain open to the worl--that our answer always be yes, the United States of America still very much faces out; that we welcome the world, we want to engage with the world. And it's groups like this one who will help make sure that our answer to that question remains yes.

Thank you so much for having me.

MODERATOR: We have a few members of our staff who have microphones. Nattie, you have one question?

QUESTION: First of all, I'd love to have a transcript of your thoughts. Secondly, could you comment on -- I think it was Washington Post yesterday had an article describing the fact that no matter how noble a cause or how much Bush might be a visionary, he is fighting an inherent bureaucratic State Department that frustrates his every move.

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Well, you know, that's interesting because I hear that and like all organizations, I'm sure there are some people within the bowels of the State Department somewhere who don't agree with the policies of the Administration. But I will tell you that by and large, I have found a very welcome reception among our career Foreign Service professionals at the State Department. I think of my colleague, Nick Burns. He's the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, which is the number three position in the State Department. He oversees all the geographic bureaus. He very much believes that his role is to carry out the Administration's policies.

I found the same thing is true with our Assistant Secretaries: Tom Shannon in Latin America, Dan Fried in Europe -- Jeanne, you are nodding your head because you had experience working with him. In many cases, I have worked with some of these people at the White House when they worked at the National Security Council. And so I have found that they are -- they're very committed to engaging. They're committed to outreach. And so I have been pleasantly surprised by my experiences at the senior levels of the State Department and with the career Foreign Service, who I have found -- they're also very impressive people. Many of them have great education, great backgrounds, they speak a number of different languages.

Now that's not to say that probably everybody -- I mean, I remember when I came to the State Department, someone had said, well, if the presidential elections had been held there, that President Bush would have lost. Well, I don't know that because it's really not discussed there. I mean, our State Department takes very seriously its mandate of being bipartisan, of representing the diversity of America overseas. And I committed -- when I took on this job, I committed to members of Congress that I would view America's public diplomacy not as Republican or Democrat, but as American. And so I try to do that and to represent the breadth and diversity of our country as I travel overseas. And again, that's -- it's been my experience, certainly at senior levels. And I participate in Secretary Rice's most senior meetings every day. And the senior team that she's assembled is certainly very committed to working to enact the policies that President Bush has put into place.

QUESTION: Ma'am, thank you for your service to America. My fundamental question is the war on terrorism that we're in. I believe that it is absolutely--we're at a crossroads of history. I've served in Baghdad. I know the stakes personally. And the issue -- what my concern is our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, our Marines and the families are paying a huge price for this war, some on their third, fourth or fifth deployment in the region. Whereas most Americans, quite honestly, we say we're at war but there's little -- very little being asked in terms of our sacrifice. Can we win the defining battle of this era without asking our citizenry to sacrifice? (Applause.)

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: You know, that's a very good question, and I do agree that our men and women in uniform -- my dad was a career Army officer -- and our men and women -- I come from a military family and I know what it's like to send a parent off to war. And our men and women in uniform are making great sacrifices. And by the way, they're very committed and most of them that I have met with feel that they were doing the right thing, that they understand that we're fighting terrorists across the world so that we aren't having to engage them here at home. We also have a lot of diplomats who are very brave.

I had a young woman who worked for me who spent about 10 years in Iraq under very difficult circumstances, and so we have a number of diplomats who are working at the PRTs and in great peril in embassies around the world. Ambassador Oberwetter and his wife were in a country that's a very difficult country to serve in because there's a constant risk of terror attack; in fact, I think you had an attack on the Consul while you were there. And so there are a number of personnel across the world that are working.

I agree with you that there's probably not the same sense of urgency in the country as a whole that there was, for example, for the first year after September 11. I think -- and that's natural. In fact, I remember President Bush predicting that. I remember him saying that as time goes by people will forget, but I won't forget. And so I understand that.

I do think the President has asked people to serve. He's called, for example, for Peace Corps to double. He's asked young Americans to consider going overseas as Peace Corps representatives, to get involved with groups like the USA Freedom Corps, so I think there are areas where people can serve. I'm not really sure -- I guess other than, say, raising taxes, or -- I'm not sure what kind of other ways that the American people can be involved. They can certainly support a lot of the deeds of diplomacy that we're doing around the world. They can certainly give time to travel and to help others. I know a lot of religious -- I can't think of a church in Texas that doesn't have a mission in Central or South America, that doesn't send members of their congregation to go provide healthcare and to go to hospital services. And my daughter just went on a medical mission trip to Africa for the second time recently.

And so I think there are a lot of ways for Americans to get involved. But I agree with you that as you travel the country, other than military families and Foreign Service families and those who are directly engaged around the world, you probably don't get the same sense of sacrifice and service, but I -- you know, other than having our leaders challenge us to do that, which I think, again, President Bush has certainly asked -- called on people to do and get involved through things like the Freedom Corps, like volunteering, that there's -- I'm not really sure what else, you know, the American people themselves can do.

QUESTION: Your second strategic imperative of (inaudible), could you comment more on how you might actually accomplish that?

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Well, I think one of the ways is we have to amplify mainstream Muslim voices, because frankly, they have more credibility in this debate than we do. So for example, right now on my State Department website, I have an excerpt not of me, but of President Karzai of Afghanistan talking about how suicide bombers and their recruits -- those who recruit and try to radicalize young people cheat children when they try to recruit them to become suicide bombers and that this is wrong and that this is not in keeping with Islam. Now, he has a lot more credibility to say that as a Muslim than I do as a Christian woman and a U.S. Government official.

And so one of the things we've worked to do is empower and amplify mainstream Muslim voices. I hear a lot here in America, and frankly, I think Muslim populations around the world resent it -- I hear a lot, "Why don't more of Muslims speak up." From my own experiences, they do. Frequently, however, those voices don't get published in the media or they're not publicized. The Secretary General of a group called the Organization for Islamic Conference, for example, speaks out after almost every terrorist attack and condemns it and says it's not in keeping with Islam. And so there are voices out there and I think one of my jobs is to try to help amplify them and empower them.

And that's why I've sent these Citizen Dialogue teams out to represent our country, because I really think -- and I'm working on trying to get -- one of the challenges is that our broadcasting entity is an independent agency. And in order to protect the broadcasters from any hint of being politicized, there's a firewall. And so when I make too many suggestions, they remind me that there's a firewall. But I do think that one of the interesting uses for our broadcasting would be to have town hall meetings, for example; to put a group of -- for example, have a group of Sunni and Shia Muslims in America talk with a group of Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq about how those communities relate to each other here in America and how they communicate and how they get along. Let's have a group of Pakistani Americans have a town hall meeting with people in Pakistan and talk about the shared values that we have in common.

And so we are really working on trying to find ways to elevate and empower mainstream voices and make it clearer that the mainstream voice, which I believe is the dominant voice, is heard more often.

QUESTION: And about the journalists or the news media around the world being one-sided and only giving one part of the story, I was wondering what we could do about that. I saw the man who was instrumental in starting Al Jazeera say that he wanted to have a world class news network through Al Jazeera. But when he hired the journalists, I wondered where they were educated. And I know there is a wall between government and the news media, but has anyone in the State Department ever worked with news media organizations or (inaudible) with educators to invite (inaudible) the right thing with journalists and with owners of news media and government public affairs?

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: Actually, that is a great question and it is one of the things we've done. We went to the Aspen Institute, which is a nonpartisan think tank here in America, and Walter Isaacson, formerly of Time and CNN, who is the head of the Aspen Institute now -- and I met with him and we asked him to -- whether he'd be willing to work in partnership with us on a program to train journalists. Because when you have an explosion of the number of journalistic outlets across the world, one of the things -- the needs that you have is the need for journalists who are trained in standards of fairness and accuracy and objectivity.

And so we established a partnership -- it's now in its second year. In the last two years, we've brought several hundred journalists each year to America in partnership with 12 of our communication schools across the country. And what we do is we bring them to Washington for a week and we have them meet with American policymakers. So they came to the State Department and asked questions of Secretary Rice, they met with all our assistant secretaries for different geographical regions, and then they spend three weeks in training at one of these journalism and communications schools. And we don't develop that program; we let the communications schools develop the programs. But it's designed to teach standards of accuracy in reporting and balance in reporting.

Obviously, you know, in different regions of the world, journalists tend to reflect their regions and so the pan-Arab broadcasters tend to have a pan-Arab perspective. And so we're trying to engage in training programs that will teach them the need to try to be more balanced and more objective in the reporting, so we recognize that's something that needs to be done.

One of the questions I get all the time is how people should know what to believe. And I think that's a very good question in today's world. I was at a conference this morning at SMU. One of the other panelists made the point that -- he was suggesting to young people, don't believe everything you read on the Internet; you have to become educated yourself, you have to subject some of the things you read to critical standards, you have to ask a lot of questions. And so today's information world is also a world that challenges us not to just rely on all that information, but to probe and to question and to think about what's behind -- what perspective is behind the source of the news.

One of the things I talked about in my book that I was always concerned about in American journalism was the use of anonymous sources. Because I worried that those sources had an agenda that you couldn't tell, that maybe they'd lost the battle in a public policy debate and so therefore, went out and leaked something designed to make somebody else look bad because they didn't agree with the position.

I think one of the healthy trends we've seen is the New York Times and some other papers are now starting to describe the reasons those sources are anonymous and what their perspective is, which I think is -- I would do away with them altogether. The journalists won't go that far because they say that's their check on government and they would never find out enough. But I think it's important that if I understand, if I see something that somebody anonymously is saying, that I understand that that person is opposed to the policy or is opposed to the legislation or comes from the other political party. And so I think it's a healthy trend that some of the media is beginning to identify at least the motivations of some of those anonymous sources that find their way into the media so much.

Thank you all so much.