Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB), as defined by Facebook, has become a visible tool of active measures and political posturing in the new Middle East and North Africa. But while a number of the most high-profile campaigns have been attributed to actors in the Gulf, Egypt, Russia, and Turkey, the template for such action is more readily traced to the War on Terror and to the concerted effort of US public diplomacy experts, intelligence officials, and Gulf-Arab allies in challenging the perceived rise of Islamic extremism in cyberspace. Tens of millions of dollars would flow through official and extra-official campaigns to generate a robust and highly coordinated digital frontier in the War on Terror. Several post-Arab Spring iterations became repurposed for the work of combating Russian disinformation. However, despite the level of funding and the transnational scope of these operations, little has been said about the technological innovations they marshaled, the aesthetic or rhetorical designs they employed, or the ideological prerogatives they conveyed. In this paper, I examine each of these issues as found within the archives of the largest such initiative, the U.A.E. based and US-backed Sawab Center. In conversation with some of the Sawab Center's founding creators as well as recent studies concerning the greater digital pivot within public diplomacy, the goal of this paper is to delineate the history of this major influence hub while parsing its ideological applications, its aesthetic aspirations, and its subsequent afterlife as a vehicle for US and U.A.E. influence strategy writ large.