Cruise Control: How Hollywood acts as instrument of US 'Soft Power'

From BBC News:
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It all sounds like a sinister plot but the reality is much more banal. There are many things that are attractive about US society and films and TV help to accentuate their impact. For a definition of what soft power means I turned to one of its foremost theorists, Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard . "Hard power," he told me, was "the ability to coerce others by using carrots or sticks as either bribes or threats". But "soft power", he said, "is the ability to get what we want by attracting others, by getting them to want the things we want.
"If I can get what I want because you want it too," he said, "it saves me a lot of carrots and sticks."

But hard and soft power have to be used together. "During the Cold War military containment prevented Soviet expansion but the real victory was the transformation of the cultures behind the Iron Curtain by their attraction to Western values. So soft power was essentially the transformative force," says Mr Nye.

The Bush administration is eager to use soft power to change its image in the Middle East. But it wants to go much further to transform the region as a whole. One of the things we ought to have learned from 9/11 is that in this globalised world we potentially pay an enormous price for the inadequacies and flaws of Middle Eastern societies The US goal is to bring democracy to the Arab world, starting with Iraq. Cynics see such claims as just window-dressing. Critics have argued that the whole grand plan is over-ambitious at best, and plain crazy at worst.

But a former senior official in the Bush administration, Richard Haas, insisted that such a goal was not just feasible but essential.
"One of the things we ought to have learned from 9/11 is that in this globalised world we potentially pay an enormous price for the inadequacies and flaws of Middle Eastern societies," he said. "When young men in particular grow up alienated, when they don't have political choices, when they get a terrible education that teaches them religious texts through rote rather than secular issues and concepts of inquiry, these are young men who are simply unable to get real jobs and compete in this globalised world.

From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3512897.stm

What a pity Haas is so myopic he cannopt see the obvious 'inadequacies andflaws of non-Middle East societies' such as those that perpetrate crimes against their own people.