THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN EXPLAIN AMERICA

First there was the new Office of Homeland Security proposed by President Bush and former Governor Tom Ridge. Now, it appears, the White House is looking into the possibility of another new government agency. To be known as the "Office of Global Communications," this new organization will be tasked with the job of improving America’s "shaky" image overseas, according to a report from the Reuters news agency.

Boy, for people who came into office on the promise of smaller government, these folks sure seem fond of creating new agencies, don’t they? But when you think about it, however, it may not be such a bad idea to have an agency whose job is, in the words of White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, to explain "what America is all about and why America does what it does."

I for one would like to be on their mailing list, because I’ll be doggoned if I can figure out this Administration’s foreign policy. I mean, first they’re telling us terrorism is bad and terrorists need to be rooted out of where they’re hiding. If some civilians who are, for instance, attending a wedding, get killed, it’s regrettable, but hey, that’s the way it goes. Okay, no real problems there, at least for me. But when Israel drops a bomb that kills the military leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization that is behind the near-daily slaughter of Israelis, suddenly that’s a Bad Thing because there were civilians in the building. (This condemnation seems a little disingenuous, considering that we’re the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population. I don’t want to seem callous about recent civilian deaths caused by Israeli or American warplanes, but when you stack them up against the civilian casualties deliberately inflicted in the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, we’re actually making some progress here in the 21^st century. But I digress.)

On a related topic, I seem to remember that George Dubbya made several speeches in which he decried the idea of U.S. soldiers involved in "nation building". Of course, that was before we put a new President of Afghanistan into power, then started using U.S. Special Forces troops as President Kharzai’s personal bodyguards.

Or how about human rights? According to our President, Fidel Castro ''ought to have free elections,'' ''ought to have a free press'' and ''ought to free his political prisoners.'' Darn right, I say. Unfortunately, when he made that speech, the President was standing next to the President of Malaysia, whose country has no free press, has no free elections, and who’s got more political prisoners than a dog has fleas. Plus, there aren’t hundreds of thousands of Malaysians opposed to the current regime living in South Florida, or anywhere else for that matter. They’re mostly dead.

Then, of course, there’s our schizophrenic attitude towards that famous "Axis of Evil": North Korea, Iraq, Iran. We’re resuming talks with North Korea. We’re getting ready to attack Iraq. Iran? Who knows? I’m pretty sure we don’t like them, at least today.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not condemning Bush for what he’s doing to fight terrorism. The world is a dangerous place, and September 11^th literally brought that home to us. When your survival as a nation is at stake, sometimes you have to do some hard things and hang out with some unsavory characters. And Bush is certainly not the first President whose high-flying words on foreign policy have gone smash against the cliff of reality. But when you have an Administration that supports an Israeli incursion into the West Bank to go after terrorists, then signs onto a UN resolution condemning that very incursion the next day...well, it’s understandable why a lot of folks in faraway lands are either confused or enraged.

So maybe this Office of Global Communication is a good idea. But I think it’s a mistake to just have it "coordinate various U.S. agencies at the State Department and elsewhere," as the Reuters story reports. No, what this Administration needs are advertising people, the type of people who mold images for a living in bold defiance of reality. The people who can take a product that makes your breath stink, your teeth yellow and then gives you cancer, and make you think that product is essential to your happiness. The people who can show you frozen beef of dubious origin smashed into a shapeless mass and seared to a flavorless chunk of carbon and make your stomach growl at the sight.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need to draft America’s advertisers into the battle for the hearts and minds of all those folks overseas. Maybe they can come up with a loveable Joe-Camel style cartoon mascot. (You can’t use a camel, of course, lest you be accused of racial stereotyping by Arabs.) Maybe something like "Preddy the Missile Firing Predator Drone," friend of little kids everywhere. For the teens, there’s always the prospect of vaguely scruffy looking yet cuddly boy-band types marketing "America Xtreme."

If our advertisers can sell cigarettes and fast food, they can sell the Bush foreign policy. As soon as Bush figures out what it is.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.