The Bush Administration has tried to reach out to Muslims and others throughout the world to educate them about what the U.S. government thinks is the real America. But its efforts indicate it is difficult to sell and market a country's values, policies and actions.

Great Decisions Excerpt:

By the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, political support for public diplomacy programs waned. Funding for exchange programs was reduced, and the number of annual visitors declined from around 45,000 visitors per year to 29,000. Meanwhile, the USIS cultural centers and libraries overseas had become targets of anti-American sentiment.

They tended to be located in accessible areas, such as downtown shopping centers and did not have the security systems that were common in embassies. This made them vulnerable to angry mobs attacks that burned their contents. Cultural centers were also being phased out as public diplomacy tools. Support for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America was reduced, both due to the ending of the Cold War and an assumption that commercial media such as CNN obviated the need for a government funded public information initiative. Concurrently, funding for USAID's foreign aid programs declined by nearly $2 billion in the mid 1990s. In addition, the geographic emphasis of all programs shifted, with significantly more money being allocated to programs in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, resulting in less money to traditional aid recipients in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In the late 1990s, the USIA and the USIS underwent another of their periodic bureaucratic reshufflings. As part of a government-wide reorganization of foreign affairs agencies at the request of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), both information and exchange programs were reabsorbed into the State Department and split into two offices, the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) and the Bureau

of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Some experts now question whether this arrangement has led to a lack of coordination and weakened the programs.

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