Its not about us.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/09/AR2007110901897.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

...........But these tactical achievements cannot hide a stunning strategic failure. Because Hughes was the most senior government official responsible for the "battle of ideas," her principal task should have been to answer the question: How can the United States most effectively empower anti-radical Muslims around the world to combat the spread of Islamist extremism? After all, the "battle of ideas" is not a popularity contest about us; it is a battle for political power among Muslims, in which America's favorability rating is irrelevant.

Hughes clearly was attracted to polls as a metric of success. In a Sept. 17 Post op-ed, she twice referred to positive poll numbers as signs of progress in the fight against al-Qaeda. In so doing, she lost all right to claim that the ideological struggle is, as she sometimes said, "the work of a generation." Journalists who criticized Hughes for failing to improve America's poll numbers abroad were only judging her by the measurement she chose to extol America's successes.

Hughes's resignation gives Bush one last chance to get this right. This requires a conceptual revolution. Rather than expend effort on winning Muslim friendship for America, our engagement with Muslim publics -- what we call "public diplomacy" -- should focus on identifying, nurturing and supporting anti-Islamist Muslims, from secular liberals to pious believers, who fear the encroachment of radical Islamists and are willing to make a stand. ................

and then the paper offers the extraordinarily irrelevant wise advise on how to do it and the noble goals.
What a ludicrous rag that paper has become if they still imagine, still believe, that pretzel boy gives a damn for any of these objectives or could do anything positive about anything. What an isolated, out of touch universe they have forced themselves to dwell. It is like listening to gravely serious musings about tactics in a Dungeons and Dragons fanzine but you have to remind yourself that on the real gameboard real people are dying under rules WAPO refuses to let anyone see.