Lipstick on a Pig Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Matt Yglesias defends the Bush Administration for its $1 million investment in PR for Mahmoud Abbas.  I disagree.  Not because of any moral problem I have with “high powered PR techniques,” but because I could have thought of better things to do with the money.  If you really wanted to help Abbas you could have spent that money delivering services to the Palestinian people and giving Fatah the credit for it (Both Hezbollah and Hamas are really good at this).  You could have invested in building Palestinian civil society, ensuring that more affective alternatives to Hamas and Fatah emerge.  Basically, you could have found something else to do with this money that would have delivered tangible benefits to the Palestinian people and improved Abbas’s standing.

Matt also argues that the Bushies are actually pretty good at political marketing.  So it’s not bad that they are exporting it.  At home this is true.  But they have been surprisingly incompetent in the Middle East.  The initial Karen Hughes trip to the region was just embarrassing.  Al Hurrah, the American supported Middle East Television network, has no viewers.  And handling PR in Iraq has been just about as bad as everything else they’ve done over there.  In other words, I’m not sure I want any Arab ally taking PR advice from these guys.

Overall, there is a larger point here, where I expect that Matt and I agree.  In the short-term you can get away with bad policy and good spin.  But in the long term, PR, in the absence of responsible policy, is useless.  No amount of PR will overcome the reality that Abbas’s government can’t deliver for the Palestinian people.  No amount of PR will help the Bush Administration out of the mess it has made in Iraq. 

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