Odd, I was just writing something on this concept.

As for your question, it strikes me that Iraqi Kurds are playing the image game precisely as one would think they should.

(i) Get themselves labelled "pro Western" and "pro Democracy" by the naive, the gullible and the mendacious.
(ii) Talk a good game on issues of democracy.
(iii) Have plausible deniability in the West for the slow ethnic cleansing in their border regions.
(iv) Don't engage in flagrantly bad behaviour and no more intra-Kurdish shoot outs like in the mid 90s.

That is "soft power" for a client, my dear. The Kurds have played the game, to date, beautifully.

I agree with Lounsbury - the Kurds have played the image game to perfection.

Nye's interesting, but to be honest his ideas strike me a little naive. He's a neoliberal (not in the lefty anti-globo sense - in the sense that he's articulating a reinterpretation of classical liberalism) and as such shares the liberal view that not all politics comes down to military might - 'soft power' (i.e. communications and economics) also plays a role.

But as a neoliberal he's also an idealist - he labours under the illusion that political actors generally agree that progress and improvement are good things and that they'll be persuaded by the strength of the better argument.

I don't share his idealism, and I think that the way he couches 'soft power' is quaint and out of date. Communications and economics are incredible tools of in this day and age, and in the hands of states they can be can be used for the repression of citizens/subjects and for leverage against foreign powers. And in a world where (fortunately) the threat of nuclear war has sublimated great power rivalry into non-military competition, 'soft power' has become even more important.

Clausewitz said 'War is the continuation of politics by other means'; Foucault inverted it and said 'Politics is the continuation of war by other means'. Nye thinks like Clausewitz - he thinks that there is an escalation from diplomacy to war, and that the use of force should be a last resort. Foucault's formulation is much closer to what we have today: the only differentiation between 'hard' and 'soft' power is in the legal constraints to their use: states will use both simultaneously to achieve their political goals, flowing between one and the other with little regard for obsolete concepts of 'escalation' save where that escalation is intended to convey a particular message.

waterboy! Good to see you again :)

Kurdish soft power? I'd announce that we wanted to join the European Union.