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Steven Kull, the Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, testified to Congress in 2007 that:

[I]n the world as a whole negative views of the United States have increased sharply in recent years…. Clearly the Muslim world is of particular interest as it is a major source of violence against the US. As you have already heard, it is also an area of the world with particularly negative feelings toward the United States.53

In November 2007, when Karen Hughes announced that she would be stepping down as President Bush’s third Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, the Washington Post reported:

Public opinion polls show that the image of the United States has declined dramatically in the Muslim world, and elsewhere overseas, during Bush’s presidency. The numbers have not improved during Hughes’s two-year stint – and in some cases have gotten worse.54

The steady reporting of such polls and studies, coupled with similar conclusions from a stream of academic and policy experts, government appointed panels, and media

commentators has led to a conventional wisdom that the United States is losing the race for Muslim hearts and minds. This section takes a closer look at this presumptive judgment by first looking at the general findings of major polling efforts and expert studies, and then examining the more complicated, sometimes good but also often troubling picture that is exposed by the break out of more specific Muslim attitudes towards the United States, militant Islamist goals, and the use of violence.

53 _{Kull, "Negative Attitudes Toward the United States in the Muslim World: Do They}

Matter?."

54 _{Kessler and Wright, "Hughes to Leave State Dept. After Mixed Results in Outreach}

The Presumptive Argument: We are Losing

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 the question of “why do they hate us” appeared frequently in American conversations and media commentary.55 The same underlying drive to understand the sources of Islamist terrorism triggered a significant increase in public opinion research focused on global attitudes especially in the Muslim world.56 Establishing a base-line comparison, research on this question from the 1990s, although limited, generally found predominantly positive views of the United States.57 As of early 2008, Marwan Kraidy summarized that since 2001 “numerous polls and surveys have underscored that the image of the United States in the Middle East has

55_{Aslan, 2007, "Why Do They Hate Us? Strange Answers Lie in al-Qaida's Writings,"}

Slate, August 6, http://www.slate.com/id/2171752/. Ford, 2001b, "Why Do They Hate Us?," The Christian Science Monitor, September 27,

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0927/p1s1-wogi.html. Hamid, 2007, "Why Do They Hate Us?," Washington Post, July 22, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001806.html. Kristof, 2002, "Why Do They Hate us?," The New York Times, January 15,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E0D71538F936A25752C0A9649 C8B63. Nye, 2006b, "Why Do They Hate Us?," Washington Post, June 25,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062200972.html. Roy, 2005, "Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq," The New York Times, July 22,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22roy.html. Zakaria, 2001, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us," Newsweek, October 15,

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/ARTICLES/newsweek/101501_why.html.

56 _{While a wide variety of researchers and organizations have contributed to the study of}

Muslim attitudes, this thesis draws primarily on the work of three academic and polling groups that have done significant in depth and repeated work. As of early 2008, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, part of the Pew Research Center, had conducted more than 150,000 interviews in 54 countries, with a significant focus on Muslim populations. Leading up to the March 2008 publication of Who Speaks for Islam by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, the Gallup organization had conducted “50,000 hour-long, face-to- face interviews with residents of more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have substantial Muslim populations … representing the voices of more than 90 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, young and old, educated and illiterate, female and male, living in urban and rural settings.” Finally the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) has conducted a series of in-depth studies of public opinion in Muslim populations using polls, focus groups, and interviews.

57 _{Kull, 2007a, "America's Image in the World: Testimony Before House Committee on}

Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, U.S. House of Representatives," World Public Opinion (March 4),

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/views_on_countriesregions_bt/326.ph p?lb=btvoc&pnt=326&nid=&id=.

steadily deteriorated,”58 while at the same time the “Voice of America reported that international approval of the United States is at an all-time low.”59

The Pew Global Attitudes Project, which began in June 2001, is one of the largest and most exhaustive research efforts focusing on attitudes towards the United States. When Andrew Kohut, President of Pew Research, testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in March of 2007, Pew had carried out in-depth interviews of about 110,000 people in 50 countries. His testimony highlighted that global opinion of the United States began to slip in December 2002 with the initial efforts of the war on terror, plunged in June 2003 in the wake of the Iraq war, and then became increasingly entrenched in following years. Kohut emphasized that “while anti-Americanism is a global phenomenon, it is clearly strongest in the Muslim world.” 60

Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, wrote in January 2008:

It’s a truism among foreign policy wonks that during the Bush administration America has seen an erosion of its ability to persuade other countries to do what it wants them to do... [A]s poll after poll shows, the attitudes of people in other countries toward the United States have declined precipitously.61

58 _{Kraidy, 2008, "Arab Media and US Policy: A Public Diplomacy Reset," In Policy}

Analysis Brief: The Stanley Foundation, January, 2,

http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/PAB08Kraidy.pdf.

59 _{"Report: U.S. Image Tarnished by Iraq," 2008, United Press International, March 17,}

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/03/17/report_us_image_tarnished_by _iraq/6609/. The United States Government Accountability Office similarly referenced Department of State reports documenting negative trends amongst Muslim populations in attitudes towards the United States. GAO, "U.S. Public Diplomacy: State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communication Elements and Face Significant Challenges," 1.

60 _{U.S. House of Representatives, 2007b, Subcommittee on International Organizations,}

Human Rights, and Oversight, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Testimony of Andrew Kohut, March 14, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/koh031407.pdf. Illustrating the decline he reported that based on 1999 and 2000 polling the U.S. was viewed

favourably by 75% of the population in Indonesia, 52% in Turkey, 83% in the United Kingdom, and 78% in Germany. Despite an initial outpouring of public sympathy following the 9/11 attacks, by March 2007 those numbers had fallen to 30%, 12%, 56%, and 37% respectively.

61 _{Drezner, 2008, "Projecting Power," Newsweek Web Exclusive, January 15,}

http://www.newsweek.com/id/94613/output/print. The quotation was shortened above to place the emphasis on the widespread perception of those who study the issue that attitudes have declined. The full quotation from Drezner places the blame for this on the approach of the Bush administration. The excerpted part is: “The unilateralism, the

While one may suspect such criticisms are tainted by partisan political preferences, others have noted a bipartisan consensus, as Krebs wrote “the Bush administration, Republican presidential candidates, and their Democratic counterparts all agree on the problem – the United States is losing the battle of ideas…”62 Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, has said that the United States is losing the media war to al-Qaida,63 is “sitting on the sidelines,”64 and if graded for efforts in the battle of ideas only “deserves a ‘D’ or a ‘D-plus’.”65 Rumsfeld’s successor, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has made similar criticisms, while calling for a “dramatic

increase” in non-defence spending for U.S. diplomacy, stating:

We are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals… It is just plain embarrassing that Al Qaeda is better at

communicating its message on the Internet than America.66

A long list of government, think tank, and academic panels and reports similarly observed that through the end of 2008 anti-American attitudes increased to

unprecedented levels while making a variety of proposals for what should be done.67 _As

a final measure of the conventional wisdom a 2008 Gallup poll found:

blunders in the Middle East, and the Manichean view of the rest of the world have been so off-putting that…”

62 _{Krebs, 2008, "Cruel to be Kind: Why Washington Should Not Reach Out to Muslim}

Moderates," Slate, January 3, http://www.slate.com/id/2181263/.

63 _{Rumsfeld, "New Realities in the Media Age."}

64 _{Arkin, 2008, "In the Ideological War Against Terrorism, the Military Has No}

Mission," Washington Post Online, January 24,

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2008/01/in_the_ideological_war_against. html?nav=rss_blog.

65 _{Associated Press, 2006a, "Rumsfeld: U.S. Losing War of Ideas," CBS News, March}

27, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/27/terror/main1442811.shtml.

66 _{Shanker, 2007, "Defense Secretary Urges More Spending for U.S. Diplomacy," The}

New York Times, November 27,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/washington/27gates.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=s login&adxnnlx=1206332269-OReyCU6CLXAwlW76yuHoOA&oref=slogin.

67 _{Armitage and Nye, 2007, "A Smarter, More Secure America," In Report of the CSIS}

Commission on Smart Power, Washington, DC: CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies, November 6,

http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,4156/type,1/. "Building America's Public Diplomacy Through a Reformed Structure and Additional Resources," 2002: A Report of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, September 18, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/13622.pdf. Defense Science Board, 2004, "Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic

Americans’ view of the United States’ position in the world has undergone a complete reversal… Since February 2001, American’s dissatisfaction with the country’s position in the world has more than doubled… The percentage of Americans saying the United States rates favorably in the eyes of the world has declined from 75% in February 2001 to 43% today.68

The internal data of the report notes that the trend lines for both self-identified Republicans and Democrats followed the same pattern.

The More Complicated Picture: Both Good and Bad News

Because general measures of popularity and favourability are relatively common in these studies they serve a useful purpose for longitudinal and transnational

comparisons. Although one recent quantative study reports that terrorist attacks correlate with changes in general public approval,69 _{such generic measures are only a}

Communication," Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, September,

http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-09-Strategic_Communication.pdf. Defense Science Board, "Strategic Communication.". Djerejian, 2003, "Changing Minds Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab & Muslim World," Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, October 1, 15. GAO, 2006b, "U.S. International Broadcasting:

Management of Middle East Broadcasting Services Could Be Improved," Washington, D.C.: United States Government Accountability Office, August,

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06762.pdf. GAO, "U.S. Public Diplomacy: State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communication Elements and Face Significant Challenges.". Johnson and Dale, 2003, "How to Reinvigorate U.S. Public Diplomacy," Heritage Foundation, April 23,

http://www.heritage.org/Research/PublicDiplomacy/bg1645.cfm. Peterson, Bloomgarden, Morey, Sieg and Herbstman, 2003, "Finding America's Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating U.S. Public Diplomacy," Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/pdf/public_diplomacy.pdf.

68 _{Saad, 2008, "Discontent with U.S. global Position Hits Record High," Gallup, March}

5, http://www.gallup.com/poll/104782/Discontent-US-Global-Position-Hits-Record- High.aspx#1. This conventional wisdom arguably is a reflection of the “wisdom of crowds.” Surowiecki, 2004, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Doubleday.

69 _{Krueger and Maleckova, 2009, "Attitudes and Action: Public Opinion and the}

Occurrence of International Terrorism," Science 325 (4957), September 18. Summarizing their work: “This paper examines the effect of public opinion in one country toward another country on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by people or groups from the former country against targets in the latter country. Public opinion was measured by the percentage of people in Middle Eastern and North African

rough indication of the cluster of attitudes that determine whether specific populations perceive themselves as similarly aggrieved, share long term objectives, agree on the best tactics to address those grievances, are motivated to take collective action, and are willing to support specific actors pursuing those goals. Further, as the

counterinsurgency literature emphasizes, the crucial choice is who the population chooses to support, and not necessarily who they like or don’t like. More in-depth survey work conducted by a number of organizations, especially after the 9/11 attacks, provides some insight on these questions. The rest of this section examines the more complicated, sometimes good, but often troubling picture that emerges from these studies for the United States and its efforts to win popular support in the Muslim world.

Most of the top-level polls commonly referenced as showing increasing anti- Americanism in the Muslim world specifically ask about perceptions of the U.S. government. One alternative suggestion is that Muslim anger is really directed against the current global system as a whole and not specifically against the United States. However, in-depth polling in countries across the Middle East and North Africa by Gallup in 2007 found that the United States and United Kingdom were viewed significantly more negatively than Russia, Germany, France, China, and Japan. What positive attitudes were expressed towards those two countries came largely from Israel and Christian segments of Lebanon.70 A study conducted for the BBC World Service by PIPA and GlobeScan interviewing 26,000 people across 25 different countries found that views of U.S. influence had increasingly grown to be mainly negative at the start of 2007 as compared to data from 2005 and 2006. The strongest attitudes expressed in the BBC study were against the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, viewed by majorities in 23 of 25 countries as provoking more conflict than it prevents.71

pairs of countries were used to estimate the effect of public opinion on terrorist incidents, controlling for other relevant variables and origin-country fixed effects. We found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.”

70 _{English, 2007, "In Mideast, North Africa, Views of Powerful Nations Differ," Gallup,}

November 13, http://www.gallup.com/poll/102694/Mideast-North-Africa-Views- Powerful-Nations-Differ.aspx.

71 _{"World View of US Role Goes from Bad to Worse," 2007: BBC World Service,}

January 23, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/23_01_07_us_poll.pdf. Andrew Kohut, President of Pew Research, testified in March 2007 based upon analysis of Pew’s Global Attitudes Project as well as the polling by Gallup and the BBC, that while

Analyzing polls specifically asking about attitudes towards the American people as well as the U.S. government shows another disturbing trend. Historically researchers noted that populations in Muslim majority countries tended to report that they “like Americans, but dislike the government.” Polling in recent years, especially following the 2004 U.S. presidential election, has shown what Kohut has called a “qualitatively different” anti-Americanism as negative perceptions are becoming deeper, more entrenched, and increasingly of the American people as well as of the government.72

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, explains another problematic development noting “Americans should also be troubled that most Arabs surveyed now see the United States as one of the greatest threats to them (second only to Israel).”73 Kull, calling this “the most important dynamic in the Muslim world today,” testified in 2007:

But now there is also a new feeling about the US that has emerged in the wake of 9-11. This is not so much an intensification of negative feelings toward the US as much as a new perception of American intentions. There now seems to be a perception that the US has entered into a war against Islam itself. I think perhaps the most significant finding of our study is that across the four

countries, 8 in 10 believe that the US seeks to “weaken and divide the Islamic world.” We do not have trend-line data to demonstrate that this is something new. But in the focus groups this was described as something that has arisen recently from American anger about 9-11. America is perceived as believing that it was attacked by Islam itself and as having declared war on Islam.74 In the 2007 PIPA study, most respondents in all four countries where in-depth surveys were conducted (Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan) agreed that, “America

increasing negative attitudes towards the United States are a global phenomenon, these are “clearly strongest in the Muslim world.” U.S. Congress, 2007a, U.S. House

Committee on Foreign Affairs; Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, America's Image in the World: Findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, March 14,

http://pewglobal.org/commentary/display.php?AnalysisID=1019.

72_{America's Image in the World. Kohut and Stokes, America Against the World, xviii.}

Some researchers have suggested that this reflects a belief that the American people by re-electing George Bush endorsed his policies, especially the Iraq war, or that through the process of the election media coverage foreign publics became more aware that a majority of Americans at the time supported the war.

73 _{Telhami, 2006b, "Hezbollah's Popularity Exposes al-Qaeda's Failure to Win the}

Hearts," The San Jose Mercury News, July 30,

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2006/0730middleeast_telhami.aspx.

74 _{Kull, "Negative Attitudes Toward the United States in the Muslim World: Do They}

pretends to be helpful to Muslim countries, but in fact everything it does is really part of a scheme to take advantage of people in the Middle East and steal their oil.”75 Both Pew