The diplomat hat doesn’t fit well on Karen Hughes

September 30, 2005

I’ve never been entirely clear on why Karen Hughes was tapped to be the Bush the administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Granted, Hughes is not without talents — she was a capable local journalist, she’s not a bad writer, and she has an uncanny ability to keep the president focused — but there’s literally nothing in her background about diplomacy or international affairs. (Of course, matching unqualified loyalists with key government posts is about the only thing the Bush gang does with any efficiency).

With her limitations in mind, Hughes’ journey to the Middle East this week would inevitably be fascinating. Would Bush’s trusted aide win over skeptics? As Fred Kaplan explained, not so much.

Could someone please explain to me what Karen Hughes is doing. Her maiden voyage to the Middle East has turned into a fiasco. She assures a room of Saudi women that they, too, will someday drive cars; they tell her they’re actually happy right now, thank you. She meets with a group of Turkish women — hand-picked by an outfit that supports women running for political office — who brusquely tell her she has no credibility as long as U.S. troops occupy Iraq.

In a sense, this is par for the course when American officials meet with unofficial audiences abroad.

Maybe Hughes should have stuck to the Bubble Boy policy and met exclusively with pre-screened, loyalty-oath signing sycophants. It would have made for better pictures back home.

But Kaplan’s broader point about the message behind Hughes’ trip is an important one.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Let’s say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans’ image of Islam. It’s doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented “Good morning.” Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding (“I’m a working mom”) and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, “Yes, we know, that’s why he’s relaunched the Crusades”).

This isn’t necessarily about mocking Hughes’ goals, only the style in which she hopes to achieve them. She talks down to her audience, offers the kind of schlock that no one in the Arab world wants, and lectures them about the inadequacies of their culture.

Is this really intended to improve the United States’ standing? Aren’t there any real diplomats around who could be more effective?

As a good a place as any to let the bad news
out – Bush approval ratings on the way back
up. All it took was Rita, in which he received
a 71% approval rating in the latest
USA/CNN/Gallup poll. Incredibly, his
overall approval rating recovered to 45%
from 40%, and his disapproval rate
dropped to a shocking 50% from 58%.
Even I, the resident cynic, am surprised
by the magnitude of his recovery. A
couple more photo-ops, some talk
of rebuilding and he’ll be over 50% again.

You can’t beat these guys. So much
for the Democratic strategy of waiting
for the great implosion. Ain’t gonna
happen. Even if Rove and Frist are
indicted.

  • In Bushland, she’s a consumate diplomat. She’s been very successful at selling Bush to the American people. The mindset of this admin is that any problem can be solved with the right spin and photo-op. In a word, salemanship.

    She wasn’t sent over there to come to any sort of real understanding. She was sent to sell the Bush admin. This is just another flavor of the cowboy diplomacy Bush tried with ‘Bring it on’, or ‘Wanted: Dead or alive,’

    The underlying problem is that these people only understand the culture of their own base. ‘Bring it on’, and Hughs’ vision of ‘Leave it to Beaver America’ have a resonance with the right wing base that leaves the rest of the world shaking their collective head.

  • JoeW said it well.
    Their weak attempt to put perfume on a smelly pig does’t work with people who’s brains don’t operate in binary.

  • And yam expects a Bush team member to meet with someone who’s *not* a member of the Saudi elite? Hell, the Bushes practically *are* members of the Saudi elite. Let’s see a Bushite even try to meet with some of the disaffected Shia in the kingdom or even with some of the pro-reform people there. Ain’t gonna happen.

    The last thing that the Republicans want is genuine democratic governments in the ME. Those governments would be almost uniformly hostile to Republican-led America at a minimum and at this point given the harm done to America’s reputation by Republican foreign policy, probably hostile to America and Americans generally.

  • You and must have been on the same page thinking-wise today. Was reading Thomas P.M. Barnett’s (he wrote The Pentagon’s New Map) blog and he had a post on this very topic that I rather enjoyed.

    http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002362.html

    This was my favorite part:

    But even in such circumstances, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of women, I imagine, who can easily stand having the big-boned American woman march into their ranks and start telling them about how much they “suffer” is her twangy Texas accent. I mean, people anywhere just don’t like having strangers come in and diss them (and a Texan like Hughes should know better).

    Sure, Hughes tried hard to be humble and “listen,” but this tour is mostly about propaganda, not the re-education of Karen Hughes.

    The best line in the piece said it all: “Many in this region say they resent the American assuption that, given the chance, everyone would live like Americans.”

  • I think Hughes may have topped Maureen Down in the “let’s insult Saudi women” department.

    Remember when Maureen went all the way to Saudi Arabia and the only thing she could think of to write about was lingerie? Every Saudi who read her column must have rolled his or her eyes in disbelief that a twit like Maureen could take up space in the NY Times and get paid for it.

    Do either of these dopes know that Saudi women own property in the US in their own names? I’m talking big bucks.

  • Maybe Karen Hughes is really an emissary for General Motors and
    Ford. They are desperate for new markets, after all. Someone has
    to buy and drive all those hulking SUV’s that Detroit has on its hands now.
    Are there enough Saudi Soccer Moms to replace more fuel-conscious
    American drivers? Gotta think out of the box.

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