"This guy is the Director of the Center on Public Diplomacy at USC?"
--Reaction of Huffington Post reader robertdoss to the article by USC Center on Public Diplomacy Director Philip Seib, "A Case for Blowing Things Up," Huffington Post; article which first appeared in PD News–CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, August 26, cited as lede item in the Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, August 27; image from
Rethinking Syria: An Open Letter to President Obama - Jerrold Shapiro, Huffington Post: "We wish we knew how to resolve the multiple dilemmas in the Middle East, or in the U.S. We wish we knew a way for Congress to focus on doing what's best for those they purportedly represent. We don't, and greater minds than ours have tried for years to unwind the quandaries and impasses.
But as a clinical psychologist/therapist and graduate student in Public Diplomacy, we do know something about the process of human interaction. From that perspective, we can see that we are in a no-win situation; damned if we act; damned if we do not. We also know that when faced by that apparent choice between two poor outcomes, we need to leave the game and play by a new one that has more equitable rules." [JB Note: Unclear who the "we" in this article are]. Image from
Dr. Martin Luther King, President Obama, and Decapitating The Syrian Government - developingtomorrow.wordpress.com: "I have been thinking about this interesting scenario posed by Dr. John Brown. Dr. Brown presented a hypothetical scenario: ['] I wonder what MLK, a statesman most remembered for his calls for non-violence, would react to a Chief Executive praising him while, at the same time, targeting cruise missiles against a country that has not attacked us. ['] ... By my review of the telegraph correspondence from Dr. King to President Kennedy, I think if Dr. King were alive, he would call on all parties to take a non-violent approach. However, I think he would draw some sort of line to establish a force necessary to prevent a genocide, if I may dare use that term to describe such mass killings. ... Source Material: http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2013/08/honoring-martin-luther-king-and-bombing.html
The Iraq Technique: How to Sell a War - Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch: "The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn’t fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked. Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn’t a diplomat. She wasn’t even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as 'the queen of Madison Avenue.'
On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben’s Rice and another for Head and Shoulder’s dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson. At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell’s words, 'the branding of U.S. foreign policy.' She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens. 'Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time,' said Beers. 'All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world.' Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy. Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It’s a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing. The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference." Image from
Belgique - Paul Rockower, Levantine: "Brussels is apparently a comic-con capital, and I found all sorts of murals to comic book characters like Asterix and Tintin. Immediately I was buzzing with Belgian cultural diplomacy to Japan (Belgian-Anime connections!). And perhaps a lil Belgian comic-con diplomacy? Why not, comic book nerds can be valuable audiences of outreach too. ... Brussels and I are quickly becoming bons amis/goede vrienden over Belgian gastrodiplomacy ideas. ... More to come on
Brussels as the Capital of Europe, and I remain inherently curio[u]s about European public diplomacy internally. I need to investigate pan-European public diplomacy via the EU, and I am quite curious about pan-European cultural and gastrodiplomacy--if you want to bring Europe together as one, the euro is not the ticket, but rather connecting Europe through music, culture and food. More to come on such biz." Image from
State Comptroller's report || Aliyah organization sending mixed messages to Russian Jews: Come, or stay there: State comptroller's report accuses Nativ of budget inconsistencies, wasteful spending, lack of coordination and encouraging emigration from Israel - Ofer Aderet, haaretz.com: "The comptroller found ... examples of wastefulness as the bureau expanded activities into areas not in its purview, such as cultural events and public diplomacy (hasbarah) – targeting audiences that may not have been eligible for aliyah at all. According to the comptroller, these activities took up a major part of the bureau's operations, 'without examining to what extent they serve the goals set by the government.'
In fact, the comptroller expressed concern that this development served as a retroactive justification for the expansion of the bureau’s initial role." Image from article, with caption: Immigrants from the former Soviet Union. On aliyah, see.
Economic corridor links China, Pakistan dreams - Xinhua, africa.chinadaily.com.cn: "The proposed economic corridor between China and Pakistan will connect the dreams of the two countries, experts have said. The China Dream refers to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, while a similar dream in Pakistan is called making the country into an Asian tiger. The notion was raised and well received at the two-day First Annual Meeting of China-Pakistan Thinks Tanks that concluded Sunday. The event was co-hosted by the Tsinghua University's Center for Pakistan Culture and Communication Studies, the China-Pakistan Joint Think Tank at Pakistan's National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and the Chinese Academy of World Agendas. ... During the meeting, the Association of Chinese and Pakistani Scholars was set up and Tsinghua University also handed out the second batch of 'the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Diplomacy' to two laureates: senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed and Wang Shaofeng, vice-general manager of China Water AND Electric International Investment Limited (CWEI). Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed is also chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute and the Committee on Defense and Defense Production of the Pakistan Senate."
Translating Lessons Learned in Colombia and Other Wars Among the People: Confronting the Spectrum of 21st Century Conflict - Max G. Manwaring, smallwarsjournal.com: "[I]t is important to understand that information—not firepower—is the strategic currency upon which modern unconventional war is conducted; and that key operational instruments of power are intelligence, propaganda, public diplomacy, the media, time, and flexibility.
These are the kinds of instruments of statecraft (i.e., power) that can ultimately capture public opinion and influence decision-makers. Thus, contemporary war among the people employs a combination of possibilities (i.e., hybrid war) that is only limited by imagination and willingness to use all available methods and means, and in which the various 'battlefields' (i.e., spectrum of conflict) may be extended to everyone, everything, and everywhere." Image from
New UN Online Courses: Public Diplomacy in a Multipolar World - Student Editor, internationallawobserver.eu: "The courses of Public Diplomacy in a Multiploar World will take place from 23 September – 20 October 2013."
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A Look at Syria Developments Around the World - The Associated Press
Forcing Obama’s Hand in Syria - Vali Nasr, New York Times: Americans are justifiably weary of war, but the lesson of Syria is that shirking from our global responsibilities will only create bigger problems that will eventually raise both the cost and the likelihood of American intervention. It is in America’s strategic interestto take decisive action to mortally wound the Assad regime. Ensuring that Syria does not become a haven for Al Qaeda — a legitimate fear — would have to immediately follow.
Obama Will Launch a Huge Propaganda Blitz -- And May Attack Syria Even If He Loses the Vote in Congress - Norman Solomon, Huffington Post: A careful reading of Obama's Rose Garden announcement on Saturday verifies that he never quite said he will abide by the decision
of Congress if it refuses to approve an attack on Syria. At the grassroots, people across the United States will be working very hard to prevent congressional approval of an attack on Syria. Image from
Sarin Gas: A New Propaganda Campaign against Syria - globalresearch.ca: According to the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian authorities have bombarded the ghoutta, a suburb of Damascus, with sarin gas, Wednesday, August 21, 2013, resulting in a total of 1700 deaths. This announcement was immediately commented on by German, British and French authorities who have called an emergency meeting of the Security Council so that UN observers can be allowed to investigate. All of this information is taken over by the Atlanticist media as a certainty, the conditional being formally employed to allow investigators time to report evidence in the West. This propaganda operation is grotesque: as everyone can observe on YouTube, the video evidence of the massacre of August 21st having been posted by the “Majles Rif” account … the day before, on August 20th . On these videos, shocking at first, one quickly detects a setup: the wounded children appear haggard or drugged, do not have parents who accompany them. Boys are often naked, while the girls are all dressed. We see no hospital structure, not even a clandestine one, except screens and pockets of serum. Some photographs had already been distributed by the Atlanticist media to accuse the Egyptian Army of a massacre at a camp of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. [See below image:]
U.S. intervention in Syria: War for virtue - Henry Allen, Washington Post: The
Assad's Inevitable Propaganda Victory - Hassan Mneimneh, realclearworld.com: Damascus, on the other hand, is poised to declare victory irrespective of what happens. If limited U.S.-led military strikes do take place, the regime will claim victory in repelling foreign aggression and foiling the West's plans. Assad's propaganda machine is already setting the stage for this narrative by suggesting that a full scale invasion is in the works. Worse, if a strike does not happen, the regime will boast of its deterrence power and declare the end of U.S. hegemony. Rather than being punished for its lethal use of chemical weapons against its own civilians, the Assad regime is almost guaranteed to achieve a propaganda victory. Obama has fallen into a trap
Syria between the shadow of Iraq,confusion and propaganda - Editor, redressonline.com:
Are we about to see a repeat performance of the 
In his blogpost, Whitaker points out three key differences between
Iraq Syndrome afflicts critics of intelligence on Syria - Michael McGough, latimes.com: Call it the Iraq Syndrome. Because the United States and its allies invaded Iraq a decade ago under the erroneous assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and British Prime Minister David Cameron are encountering skepticism when they argue that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against civilians. Yet the differences between Iraq and Syria are as notable as the similarities. In Iraq, the question was whether Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons; in Syria, it seems undeniable that such weapons exist and were used. The question is whether they were deployed by the Assad government, either on orders from the top or as part of a rogue commander’s operation.
Syria is for dummies - Armstrong Williams, Washington Times: President Obama learned nothing from the war failures of President George W. Bush. In fact, he continues to make the same (and worse) mistakes under the cover of a sympathetic media and a blindly loyal Democratic electorate. We absolutely should not directly intervene in Syria. There are two reasons why: (1) the entire situation was brought on by a reckless ad-libbing policy to the media; (2) we have no end-state objective.
Who wins in Syria? Why, the world's arms makers, of course - Paul Whitefield, latimes.com: Against Assad, $25 billion to $30 billion worth of U.S. military hardware, all warmed up and ready to go.
Skipping over the people, of course; you go ahead, but I’m not going to put a price tag on human life. Image from article, with caption: The guided-missile destroyer Stout will join U.S. forces in the eastern Mediterranean.
Analysis: Syria shows Obama’s unsteadiness in conducting foreign policy - John Solomon, Washington Times: No matter where one stands on the crises in the Middle East, there’s little argument right now on either side of the political aisle that the president’s handling of Syria is no way to conduct American foreign policy. It has defied all the rules, conventions and wisdom accrued on the global stage since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
The U.S. ranks 17th in confidence in President Obama - rankingamerica.wordpress.com: Image from entry:
Explosions and Robot Propaganda Spotted on the Set of Transformers 4 - comingsoon.net: We've seen many videos from the set of
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