U.S. Foreign Policy As Poisoned Pill

In a discussion with former U.S. propaganda Czar Charlotte Beers on whether U.S. efforts to sell America to Arabs and Muslims could create backlash, NPR's On the Media host Bob Garfield asks, "Given United States' policy with respect to Israel and the Palestinians, for example, or given the fact that the United States was invading Iraq, was there a chance that the very existence of the public diplomacy efforts were only going to harden opposition to everything that America stands for?" In her reply, Beers dissembles, comparing U.S. foreign policy to a poisoned painkiller: "Nothing would be more dangerous than silence. It's like asking Tylenol to be very quiet when people found out there was poison inadvertently put into their Tylenol packages. They went immediately to the air and every phase of communication to talk about what they were going to do, how it would be handled, and they won a huge round with the consumer groups. We do have some policies that are not popular, and that doesn't mean necessarily that we can make those popular, but we can certainly engage on many other fronts."