Al
Doomed diplomacy: Karen Hughes in the Middle East
By Max J. Castro
First, there was “Mission:
Impossible.” Then there was Karen Hughes’s “listening tour of the Middle East.”
Call it “Mission: Futile.”
Grant this to the Bush
administration’s brand-new under secretary of state for public diplomacy: She
picked the toughest possible destination for her first overseas sales trip. The
image of the United States has sunk in nearly every country during the
presidency of George W. Bush, but it is in the Middle East that it has hit rock
bottom. The tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey by Bush’s political hack
turned international public relations czar was meant to begin to change all that
by showing the softer side of empire. Conceived according to wrong-headed and
arrogant premises, what was supposed to be an image improvement campaign quickly
disintegrated into a public relations disaster at home and abroad.
The reason for the debacle
of Hughes’s inaugural mission is that the seething rage in the Muslim and Arab
worlds has little to do with cosmetics or communication and everything to do
with American policies. Anger in the Arab world has long been driven by the
strong U.S. tilt in favor of Israel in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which
contrasts with the more even-handed policies of other Western democracies.
During the Bush administration that bias has been more pronounced than ever, and
it has redounded to the benefit of the government of Ariel Sharon, a hardliner
despised in the Arab world where the Israeli Prime Minister Bush has called “a
man of peace” is widely seen as a war criminal. The invasion and occupation of
Iraq has strengthened the conviction that the United States has it in for the
Arabs. Finally, high-sounding American rhetoric about democracy at a time when
this country continues to support Middle Eastern autocratic rulers has raised
doubts about American sincerity and the real intentions of the U.S. in the
region.
Only an administration so
enamored of its own fantasies that it believed U.S. troops would be welcomed
with flowers in Iraq could place any hopes in the Hughes demarche. The idea that
the soft entreaties of a presidential pal and soccer mom could somehow soothe
outrage over the bully boy tactics of Bush, Sharon and Arab strongmen allied to
the United States can only be described as deluded.
The reaction of the mostly
female interlocutors Hughes met with was predictable though mostly polite. In
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, U.S. diplomats limited the fireworks by arranging for
Hughes to meet with representatives of organizations that receive funds from the
United States government. But in Turkey, where the participants were convened by
independent organizations, Hughes got an earful from women who railed at the
human cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and expressed their incredulity of
Hughes’s rationales for U.S. policies.
If the Turkish women told
Hughes the U.S. lacked credibility as long as it was occupying Iraq, the Arab
press was equally critical but less polite. As reported in the New York Times, a
Qatar newspaper compared Hughes to a hurricane and wished Hurricane Hughes would
be the last American storm to visit the region. Ben Tanosborn for Al-Jazeera
described the trip as a circus:
America’s circus diplomacy has arrived in the
Middle East. The lady from Texas, grand emissary of the American Sultanate
headed by Bush, has come to change the hearts and minds of people in the eastern
caliphates, particularly those that hide behind the veils and beneath the
scarves of Muslim women. Imagine: Karen Hughes proselytizing those daughters of
the Qur’an… and with a Southern televangelical accent no less!
But irreverent comments
aside, and in deference to the seriousness of the task at hand [changing hearts
and minds in the Muslim world] let the circus have its day, and let the star
clown perform.
At home, the coverage
seemed to reflect the previously cowed media’s new spunk. Lenore Skenazy’s
column in the New York Daily News titled “Turning a Deaf Ear” said Hughes seemed
clueless on her listening tour. Fred Kaplan in Slate weighed in: “Karen Hughes,
Stay Home! What on earth is she doing in the Middle East?”
Certainly, Karen Hughes’s
career as a top operative for a take-no-prisoners Republican political machine
hardly qualifies her for a supreme diplomatic challenge like winning friends and
influencing people in the Islamic world. But Hughes is not really the problem;
the most skilled diplomat or the most popular American in the Arab world, say
Muhammad Ali in his prime, could not have pulled it off.
That is because the
friendly façade and sweet words that Karen Hughes brought to the region are
belied every day by the realities on the ground. On Oct. 2, for example, The
Miami Herald reported two wire service stories that illustrate why the problem
is only getting worse.
Tom Lasseter for the Knight
Ridder News Service wrote about a U.S. Army report that found that the shooting
of Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi correspondent for CNN, by U.S military sniper was
justified because the soldier thought he might be a suicide bomber. Such
incidents fuel outrage in the region insofar as they suggest a callous disregard
for the lives of the local population. Lacking credibility or impartiality and
often blaming the victim, investigations, far from restoring a sense of justice,
add insult to injury. The UK newspaper The Guardian reports that
“[I]nvestigations into shootings are conducted by an officer from the unit which
opened fire. Invariably shooters are exonerated and victims deemed at least
partly culpable.”
A separate story that
appeared the same day written by Matthew Pennington of AP reported on the
shooting death of an Afghan interpreter at the hands of his employer, a U.S.
security firm worker. The shooter left the country before any investigation was
undertaken. The victim’s brother said that if the shooter is not tried it would
be a mockery of Afghan democracy and threatened that he and fellow tribesmen
would set fire to themselves unless the killer is brought to justice.
In the face of such harsh
realities, it takes the kind of mixture of naiveté and arrogance that has
characterized this administration’s policies in the Middle East to think that
one can persuade the citizens of the region merely by offering up a softer
message delivered by a less threatening messenger. Bush and his masters of spin
managed for a long time to fool a healthy proportion of the American people, but
unlike the traumatized post-9/11 American citizenry desperate to believe in the
nation’s supreme authority figure, the audience in the Middle East is profoundly
skeptical. And, even here on the home turf, this administration’s numerous
debacles, distortions and deceits have finally overcome the American public’s
desire to believe.
|
