"Our music is American, it's hip and it's something everybody can be comfortable with …." Thus ends an article funded by the U.S. Government on a group of D.C.-area Muslim-American rappers that are "totally American." So dappled is the text with reminders that the three black Muslims are ‘American' that the article only devotes a single sentence to the content of the group's lyrics—shunning bars, discos, clubs, dancing, alcohol and wind and string instruments. The piece is only part of a recent campaign by the State Department to market to the Muslim world the idea that their American counterparts are living happily after Sept. 11. "I didn't see any prejudice anywhere in my neighborhood after Sept. 11," exclaims Rawia Ismail in a government-produced video set for release in Indonesia.

What is surprising about the campaign is not the existence of a concentrated public diplomacy effort in the Muslim world in anticipation of the looming bad press about Iraq, but the crudeness with which the entire endeavor was put together. A former Madison Avenue advertising executive orchestrated the video series and various domestic freelance writers have been enlisted to document blissful Muslim-Americans around the country in prose. Photographers and poets have both found a steady supply of government grants available to pitch a message, which, whether or not it fully reflects the realities of American society, is reminiscent of past failures in public propaganda.

Tailoring America's image abroad is not a bad idea, but a media blitz cannot save the government from the widespread loathing it endures as a result of its policies in the region. Americans themselves may remember the glut of television commercials that the Saudi Kingdom ran immediately following Sept. 11. This did not save them from scathing articles in the mainstream press about the contradictions of its stance towards Islamic extremists within its own borders, however. The ads were not a part of any broader policy measure or image transformation and thus had little effect on American public opinion.

However laughable the new "Muslim Life in America" campaign is, it does go without precedent. From Eastern Europe in the 1960s to Central America in the 1980s, America has always pursued influence through symbolism—openly with the former U.S. Information Agency and covertly through the C.I.A. Public diplomacy, as modern propaganda is known, can be a useful complement to economic aid and the various cultural programs that have suffered funding cuts lately. The State Department has pulled out funding for educational exchanges and U.S. cultural centers even as it has acknowledged that "something has to be done in that region." It has replaced long-standing American institutions abroad with a history of success in establishing cultural bonds that bridge religious and political differences with public diplomacy that is redolent of the worst of American culture: infomercials. The new series is so dumbed-down, in fact, that it elicited open laughter from a Muslim focus group during an early screening.

The carefully picked ‘real people' that offer testimonials are all Arab even though the release is projected to span the entire Muslim world. The intricacies and duality of being Muslim in America are glossed over to the point that the whole effort evokes the newsreels produced by the government during World War II, when the various ethnic groups were given stereotypical five-second sound bites to reflect the unity through diversity theme.

Public diplomacy abroad is a regrettable aspect of the war on terrorism (or perhaps the assault on America's own image abroad). When it reaches back across the border, however, it skirts the letter of a U.S. law that proscribes such action. In other words, the president must make his case to the people directly. Lest the possibility of such a violation seem too distant, one need only hark back twenty years, when a Wall Street Journal editorial written by a little-known academic warned that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were receiving dangerous arms shipments from the Soviets, threatening regional stability. On what research was the article based? Who funded it? The answer, it would come out, was the U.S. Information Agency, masking an untenable position as pristine academic inquiry. The government employee who worked out the secret editorial was Otto Reich, a rightist Cuban exile and career diplomat. After suffering widespread public disgrace and twenty years of perfunctory recluse, Reich was appointed Assistant Secretary of State by President George W. Bush with little notice two years ago. Public diplomacy isn't about to go away, nor should it, but we're entering a brave new world, and nobody's watching.