What on earth is she doing in the Middle East?: Karen Hughes, Stay Home!

[rodeodance]

http://www.slate.com/id/2127102/?nav=tap3

> Karen Hughes, Stay Home!
> What on earth is she doing in the Middle East?
> By Fred Kaplan
> Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 1:27 PM PT
>
> 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. But here's the puzzler: Why is it Karen Hughes who's taking these meetings? It was strange enough when her longtime friend President George W. Bush named her as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It's absolutely mind-numbing to discover that she considers it one of her mandates to be the public diplomat.
>
> The main task of this posting is to improve America's image in the Muslim world. Let us stipulate for a moment that Hughes is ideally suited for the job—that she can figure out how to spin sheiks, imams, and "the Arab street" as agilely as she spun the White House press corps in her days as Bush's communications director.
> Even if that were so, why would anybody assume that she is the one to do the face-to-face spinning? Wouldn't it be better to find someone who—oh, I don't know—speaks the language, knows the culture, lived there for a while, was maybe born there?
>
> 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").

[ananda]

1. Losing more hearts and minds..

.. what else?

[marmar]

4. Truly...

That woman could f..k up a cup of coffee. They even had her speaking to staged audiences, and even that blew up in her face. I've got to give it to BushCo, when they fuck up, they do it in a big way.

[aquart]

2. Or maybe Karl just wanted her out of town.

[rodeodance]

6. one art. said Karl was jeolous of the attention Jr gave to Hughes--that

was the real reason she took off to TX a few years ago.

[SodoffBush]

3. She's a product of Fox's environment, where women don't know squat

especially women living in countries that don't have 20 different options to ordering a caffe late.

[louis-t]

5. What is she doing in the Middle East?

Condi wouldn't go.

[maxsolomon]

7. its the POLICY, stupid

change the policy, change the perception

[qanda]

8. Just another one of those things

That leaves me scratching my head about the Bush Administration.

[DinahMoeHum]

9. The Bushco pukes think that the fault with Muslim peoples'

perceptions of us in the Middle East is little more than a marketing problem - IOW, the product (US democracy) is great, but we can't seem to market this product out there.

Stupid assholes don't understand that the problem (as far as people in the Middle East are concerned) is in the PRODUCT itself. Right now, thanks to the Iraq war and the general US policy out there for decades (ie. support for the Israeli governments), most Muslims consider this product "damaged goods", and want no part of it.


:banghead:

[acmejack]

10. The Ugly American, Redux.

[bumblebee1]

11. A Muslim leader wouldn't send a clueless man, either. n/t

[rodeodance]

12. I think of all the $$ spent on her and her dept to make fools of us.