Given any issue there are bound to be a range of views often in a vaguely normal distribution. Where the centre of the hump lies will depend on the question and group polled. The problem I have with the current administrations strategy is it is being unrealistic given shape of the Muslim opinion curve and its centre of gravity. The very small numbers radicalised to the extent they are willing to don and explosive vest are the tail many standard deviations from the mean and US foreign policy initiatives are trying to nudge the mean away from them. So far so good.
If there is an injustice, or perceived injustice, there will always be the risk that someone will be radicalised to the point of violence this is hardly new and nothing to do with Islam. The problem is the general feeling of injustice and antagonism to the US has become so great that the violently dissatisfied tail is spawning a steady supply of people sufficiently disgruntled to be open to induction into a terrorist group. Which leads us back to the hump. This does not occur in a vacuum the polling data you quote in the CNAS paper shows how severe the problem is in the hump which is now itself radical. If you will bear with me I am going to give a few more selected bits of polling data.

From Marc’s paper a 2007 poll asking if the US was tying to ‘undermine Islam’ the definitely/probably camp ranged from 73 to 92% (Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Morocco).
In the same year a poll of in most Arab countries asked for a most respected World Statesman (unprompted i.e. not from a list) the hands down winner (more votes than 2nd, 3rd combined) was Hassan Nasrallah. As the leader of Hezbollah (designated a terrorist organisation by the US) I am guessing not many Americans would have considered him for the title.
In a poll taken after Pakistan, the US and India had all public stated that the 2008 Mumbai bombings had been carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba (a Muslim group based in Pakistan) the poll found that when asked who carried it out most believed the US government had been behind it. The same poll also showed Osama Bin Laden was marginally more popular than their own prime minister.
Another poll of all the major Arab states (Morocco to KSA to Lebanon and most in-between) asked if Israel agreed to a basket of concession, return to ’67 boundaries, shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, some right of return and the respondent believed they would stick to the agreement should the Arabs stop fighting or continue to try and get all the land back. The people that said fight on were the Saudis.

The reason I have highlighted these is to show just how big a PR job is required. These are not ‘Axis of Evil’ States, I have picked them as they have mainly been described as ‘our partners in the GWOT’ or ‘moderate Arab states’. The good news is that the states we continually vilify are not actually that different, from a public attitudes point of view, it is just that their governments are more likely to reflect these attitudes in their statements.

Given the above I would argue that a gentle nudge of my Bell is not going to address the problem in the way we want. These, admittedly selective, bits of data highlight that the broad mass of the Muslim public are not going to be swayed by some technology summit or improved spinning of our FP message.

“In such a strategy, engagement should focus less upon al Qaeda and more on building broad support for American foreign policy goals and supporting engagement with mainstream populations in order to marginalize al Qaeda as the radical fringe movement that it is” (From page 7)

And now we get to the crux of the matter. It is not possible to build support for ‘American foreign policy goals’ within the global Muslim community. Here I am talking about the subset of policies about which the community care the most. Namely military actions in Muslim countries, the support of authoritarian rulers (when they line up with US policy objectives), failure to support democratic aspirations (when they look likely not to favour US objectives) but most of all – by a long way – the US’s perceived support for Israel against and the Palestinians and groups like Hezbollah which, as evidenced in the polling data, are not view as terrorist organisation. The differences are so fundamental they can not be massaged away by spin or repackaging. If America is serious about removing the terrorist threat it needs to reappraise many of it policies at root and branch level. Have past policies in Somalia made matters worse, are we going to do the same in Yemen. There may be claims of a change of policy in not viewing everything through the GWOT lens but is this the reality. The paper questions Yemen policy but the US and Saudi’s are so fixated on Iran being a problem they are backing an unsavoury Sana’a government, fighting on multiple fronts, because they do not like one of – and not the major – insurgency. A failure to call Ethiopia to account for its actions against its own ethnically Somali Muslim population in the Ogaden. Most of these are off the radar of your average US citizen but they all count in the Muslim world.

“The high-stakes political battle over the Israeli settlements distracted from the other issues and sucked the air out of the fresh start.” (p.19)
This, high-stakes, may be how it was seen in the US, as any kind of daylight between the US & Israel as seen as a very big deal, but in the Muslim world I doubt this was seen as real. If the President had said ‘The $3+ Billion military package I have asked congress for, on you behalf, is conditional on a complete freeze in settlements, a withdrawal timetable and a lifting of the Gaza blockade’ then you would get a serious shift in Global Muslim public opinion and the bell’s hump would move noticeably. I believe this is what the world hoped for after the change of executive and the Cairo speech. Here the problem is a generation of propaganda in the US media has meant a total disconnect between what is possible and what needs to be done. When every media piece used to declare ‘Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction’ and now all refer to ‘Iran’s nuclear weapons program’, as a given fact, it is difficult to have any kind of rational conversation based on the possibility these may only actually be opinions. When we come to the accepted ‘facts’ on the realities of the Israel-Palestine situation the gap between US ‘reality’, global Muslim ‘reality’ and any kind of objective academic ‘reality’ are probably are so far apart they will be harder to counter than the Pakistani ‘reality’ that the US ordered the massacre of 173 civilians – and the wounding or 300 more – in Mumbai in 2008.

Marc I applaud the effort but US engagement is far to superficial.

While I have this page bookmarked as I have been reading you for years at Abu Aadvark and now read a FP, because I followed you here, I do not know how many people will find your posts, or my comment, now you have given away you banner to the ME channel. Couldn't we loose the date or get everyone to type smaller so you can be found again?