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State Department kicks Salvadoran ally in the face

Here's a great way to reward the only country in the hemisphere that still has troops in Iraq and is one of our last solid Latin American allies: Give a high-level diplomatic reception to its Marxist opposition.

This is precisely what the State Department did today to our ally El Salvador, poking it in the eyes or worse by receiving a delegation from the Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) - the group that murdered US Marine Embassy guards in the notorious Zona Rosa massacre, among other things.

The formerly Soviet-backed organization, which still sports the communist red banner and celebrates its Stalinist namesake, Salvadoran Communist Party founder Farabundo Marti, set down its arms to avoid defeat 15 years ago. But it still finds common cause with the FARC narcoterrorists of Colombia, Fidel Castro, Palestinian terrorists and other extremists.

Now Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is bankrolling the FMLN's attempt to defeat the pro-US government of El Salvador in the 2009 elections - and Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon is right there to help. He's greeting FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes with full diplomatic recognition, ignoring the fact that the meeting boosts the credibility of the Marxist opposition party in what most observers agree will be a tight election.

Meanwhile, Funes is in Washington meddling in American internal political affairs, saying he hopes the Democrats win the 2008 presidential elections here. All the Democrat candidates for president should disavow his endorsement, but I'm not holding my breath.

Glassman brings new opportunity for public diplomacy

The naming of James Glassman to replace Karen Hughes as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is a great opportunity finally to get something accomplished.

We don't need to recount the horror show of feckless ineptitude that has plagued the administration's public diplomacy for nearly seven years.

Glassman has the potential to fix it. Not for the next thirteen months by any means, but to fix things for the long term. He should use his very short tenure at the State Department to clean up the wreckage by designing a new public diplomacy agency that will really do what the nation needs it to do.

That means creating a modern analogue to the former United States Information Agency (USIA) - an independent organization answerable to the president and the secretary of state, with its own mission and bureaucratic culture.

The forced marriage between the public diplomats and the traditional foreign service - producing a Quasimodo-like love child of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her nemesis-turned-dancing partner, former Senator Jesse Helms - is the number one reason why the US was caught with its pants down after 9/11, when the world saw that the US no longer had a functioning public diplomacy instrument or information strategy.

Glassman gets it. As the new head of the other unloved bastard child of Albright-Helms - the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) - Glassman knows what a lot of the problems are. He hasn't been in office long enough to fix many of them, but he knows the deal. As Undersecretary of State, he will remain on the BBG board and ideally should arrange for a successor who answers to him and not to the majority of schemers who dominate the board.

Here's the bottom line: Jim Glassman should spend the next six months designing a new, separate public diplomacy agency infused with a real culture of influence, and work with Congress to establish the organization by statute, with full funding, so that the next president can get moving.

The president and secretary of state should support such an initiative, both for the good of the country and to turn the public diplomacy horror show into a positive legacy.

Anti-American operatives at VOA's Iranian service

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A music video mocking democracy and heaping scorn on the United States is the product of staffers for the Voice of America's Farsi language service to Iran. The VOA employees used several terrorist propaganda video clips showing IED attacks on American humvees and armored vehicles in Iraq.

The title of the video is "DemoKracy." (Click here to view the video if the YouTube image is not visible above.)

Produced by an obscure Swedish-Iranian band called Abjeez, the music video is themed in and around a TV newsroom, with the anchor and a reporter, played respectively by Safoura and Melody Safavi, mocking the United States and democracy.

The "reporter," shown at right holding the microphone in the first part of the video, is the VOA employee, Melody Safavi, whose married name is Arbabi. This blogger has learned that VOA fired her after an Iranian former political prisoner filed a complaint to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, but her husband Saman Arbabi, who directed the video, reportedly is still on VOA staff.

The video includes pictures of civilian casualties, grieving women and wounded children, Iraqi and American coffins and funerals, and a weather map of the Middle East showing bombs dropping on every country in the greater Middle East, from Sudan and Egypt to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Three nuclear bomb-style mushroom clouds are superimposed over the part of the map depicting Iran. The video closes with an archival aerial photo of a nuclear weapon test in the desert.

Abjeez has produced the video in several languages, though viewer statistics on YouTube show few people worldwide have accessed the video. Nevertheless, the production raises questions about the editorial judgment of VOA personnel, and whether US taxpayers should have such individuals on the payroll to wage the war of ideas against Islamist extremism.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which governs VOA, has long denied problems with its controversial Iran services. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has been raising concerns for a year about the broadcasts to the Islamic republic, but the BBG and State Department were dismissive. Last spring, this blogger also submitted a set of written questions to outgoing Under Secretary of State Hughes at the request of a senior aide, and received a written response that ignored or evaded the answers. It's time for BBG and State to catch up with the new leadership at RFE/RL and tackle the larger problems of US broadcasting into Iran.