Spirit of America

Found this article in the Morning Briefing. Careful readers will note that along with Spirit of America a trio of fine bloggers gets a mention. So as Secretary Rumsfeld chugged coffee from the commuter mug and read the scathing coverage of his press conference yesterday, he on some level or another became aquainted with blogs.

Here's A Way You Can Help The Cause In Iraq

By Daniel Henninger

...Over the past year, a successful technology entrepreneur named Jim Hake has been working with the Marine Corps to help their reconstruction projects in Iraq. The Marines identify local equipment needs, and Mr. Hake's organization, Spirit of America, after raising the money, acquires the stuff, typically for schools and medical clinics. It flies directly out of Camp Pendleton in California. Jim Hake and the Marines are a coalition of the can-do, bypassing the slow U.S. procurement bureaucracy. More on that effort in a moment. Here's where you come in:

The First Marine Expeditionary Force and U.S. Army in Iraq want to equip and upgrade seven defunct, Iraqi-owned TV stations in Al Anbar province -- west of Baghdad -- so that average Iraqis have better televised information than the propaganda they get from the notorious Al-Jazeera. If Jim Hake can raise $100,000, his Spirit of America will buy the equipment in the U.S., ship it to the Marines in Iraq and get Iraqi-run TV on the air before the June 30 handover.

Now we are getting somewhere. Since day one, the Coalition Provisional Authority's weakest suit has been the war of ideas, images and public relations. Into this use-it-or-lose-it void stepped Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV operation that somehow has wires running to every camcorder in the Arab terrorist world. Punch in english.aljazeera.net for a look at "news" from Iraq spun tirelessly against the coalition. Its photos of "Falluja after the siege" are preposterous, depicting nothing but "destroyed homes" and ominous GIs. The text: "As we drive through the back roads on the way to Falluja, U.S. jets are pounding the area around the tiny village of Garma."

If this hooey is what they feed to the English-language audience, imagine the daily TV diet Al-Jazeera trowels on for Iraqis.

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Jim Hake's organizational insight is to deploy the best practices of the modern U.S. economy -- efficiency and speed -- around the margins of the Iraqi war effort. The Amazons, Best Buys, FedExes and DHLs can get anything anywhere -- fast. Why not use the same all-American skill at procurement efficiency and quick distribution to get the soldiers in Iraq (and Afghanistan) the stuff that government red tape will never provide in time?

His operation, in Los Angeles, is wholly New Economy. For past projects he's gotten the word out via Web bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds's InstaPundit.com, windsofchange.net and hughhewitt.com. Mr. Hake finds low-cost suppliers on the Internet and negotiates prices. His donor network also suggests suppliers.

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Want a piece of the action? Spirit of America's project with the 1st Marine Division, and how to donate, is at Spirit of America, or directly here or 800-691-2209. It's brand extension of the Marines' now-famous saying: "No better friend, no worse enemy."

Update: Some may recall Spirit of America as the organization Smash and a group of several other bloggers assisted with loading tous and other items destined for the kids of Iraq. That was obviously a worthy effort.

A confession: My first thought on hearing all this was "Well, this video thing is probably a very worthwhile, but I can't imagine the the people of Iraq not previously so inclined will suddenly embrace America once they see cool digital movies of Marines building schools.

But then I'm usually a cynic. But oddly, perhaps, I'm also an optimist. And that side of me says this is a great idea. Anyone remember this?

A new report mandated by the U.S. Congress and released in Washington on 1 October says the United States must drastically overhaul its public diplomacy efforts to stem a tide of surging anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

...Drafted by a panel of 13 independent experts, the 81-page report urges a radical overhaul of the way Washington communicates U.S. values and policies to the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Titled "Changing Minds, Winning Peace," the study was led by Edward Djerijian, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Israel who is now with Rice University in Texas.

Djerijian told reporters at the State Department that if "America does not define itself" to the Muslim world, then "the extremists will do it for us."

"This report is a wake-up call. I think it is a wake-up call for the United States to face effectively the challenge of the battle for minds that we have out there," Djerijian said.

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He noted that total funding for public diplomacy -- just over $1 billion a year -- amounts to about three-tenths of 1 percent of the Pentagon's budget. In real terms, Djerijian says that a mere $25 million is spent on programs that actually touch lives in the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Glenn Reynolds hypothesizes asking the President: A year after the invasion, the Marines are seeking donations from blog readers to set up TV stations in Iraq so as to counter anti-American propaganda from Al Jazeera and other hostile media. Why wasn't this a priority from day one? Why isn't it one now?

I'll note the Marines aren't asking, but thats not the point. I'll answer for my boss: it has been. We've been tackling it in our best big government style:

The panel's recommendations come as Washington has already spent tens of millions of dollars since the attacks of September 2001 in a bid to improve its image in the Middle East, through radio broadcasts, magazines, and television advertisements on Muslim life in America.

Some U.S. officials acknowledge that some of those efforts have been ineffective, such as a series of television commercials in 2002 called "Shared Values" that sought to depict Muslim-Americans living happy and prosperous lives. Several Arab countries refused to broadcast the commercials.

A few million or billion more seems like good money after bad to me. But here's where optimisim kicks in: I say that no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, who wouldn't like to see this grass roots program, giving the power to Iraqis to get their own message out at a fraction of the cost, suceed on a much greater scale? (It couldn't do worse.) That, I think, is the appeal - low cost grass roots effort suceeds where government millions fail.

One hundred thousand.

How congress would laugh.

Omar, at Iraq the Model

:: I've been visiting the BBC Arabic site in the last few days and I found a forum where people from many Arab countries –including Iraq- post their opinions about some hot topics, the main of those is Iraq and terrorism of course. I wasn't surprised to see that most Arabs (especially from Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Syria) are forming one side of the debates while Iraqis and people from the rest of the gulf countries are taking the other side. But I was surprised when I found that the almost all the Iraqis who took part in the debates are on our side, maybe 95% of Iraqis expressed their rejection to the violent behavior of some Iraqis and condemned the terrorists attacks on both Iraqis and the coalition saying that the Arab world must stop supporting the terrorists and the thugs from inside Iraq. It's also surprising that many of those Iraqis live in areas that are recognized to have a public anti American attitude in general like A'adhamiya, Diyala and Najaf. I feel that those people are still afraid to voice their points of view in public in such hostile atmospheres but the internet is providing them freedom and safety to say whatever they believe in. Here, I translated three of the posts made by Iraqis and for those who can read Arabic or have a way to translate web pages, here's the link.

You'll have to visit there for the link, but really, we can amplify these voices.

Can? I think we must. The troops are ready to come home, you know?

Spirit of America site here.

Direct contributions here (or 800-691-2209).

(If you want to get in on some blogospheric fun though, go here. And personally I'm pledging at least 10 cents, maybe more, for every contest entry left here. Donation in the name of the contest winner.)

Update 2: Originally thought the WSJ story was subscription only. May have been, but it's available now, so minor rewrite to first paragraph and several edits.