The Heritage Foundation has released a report by Lisa Curtis titled “America’s Image Abroad: Room for Improvement.” While the title represents a triumph in terms of overcoming denial of the condition, the evasion of the central problem with “America’s image” in the article is truly remarkable.

Curtis cites the 2004 Defense Science Board report on strategic communication. Here’s what it says, in part:

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies…Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies.

That’s the Defense Science Board, not Noam Chomsky. Curtis then cites a 2006 GAO report. It says, in part:

All of our panelists agreed that U.S. foreign policy is the major root cause behind anti-American sentiments among Muslim populations and that this point needs to be better researched, absorbed, and acted upon by government officials.

Somehow those concepts don’t make their way into the Heritage paper. The fundamental problem here is that you can have the best salesman in the world plugging your product, but if the product itself stinks, nobody’s going to buy. Until we get past the governing assumption that somehow we just aren’t presenting American foreign policy in the right way, we’re bound to continue hurting ourselves.

But of course if you’d been reading Cato at Liberty, say, more than one year ago, you would have seen this all already.