Village Soup

By Rufus Foshee

October 8, 2005

If the United States has had a foreign policy since 2001, it has been kept highly secret. Any evidence that such a policy exists has been obscured by the lack of communication as to who would deliver the country's message and to whom.

During Bush’s first term, Karen Hughes, the president's longtime adviser and friend, left the White House to return to Texas to attend to her husband and son. It is not clear what happened to her husband or her son. What we do know is that while attending whatever in Texas, she wrote her 2004 book, "Ten Minutes from Normal," which was a glorious PR job for her boss and friend.

The burning issues in the Middle East are many: For some time Turkey’s entry into the European Union has been blocked; Egypt is prosecuting a popular opposition leader for fraud; and violence is spreading in Iraq and Lebanon, and between Israelis and Palestinians.

It was into these hotspots that the president sent envoy Hughes and her bullhorn to defend unpopular American policies. Her worn-out message was that the United States stands for peace, democracy, faith and family values. This floating envoy with her plane load of reporters was sent to the countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, not one of which Hughes had ever visited.

By carrying out Bush’s scheme to appoint Hughes to such a job, Rice has set a new low for qualifications for an ambassador, roaming or otherwise. The only diplomatic qualification to Hughes' credit is that she is George Bush’s friend, and she is free to speak.

It was Rice who babysat and attempted to educate Bush so he could speak with literacy. It was she, as national security adviser, who from the beginning in 2001 created the strategy promised in the 2000 Bush campaign, one that would withdraw the United States from global affairs and put it back into 19th century isolation. Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had meddled in world affairs and failed. Bush, Rice and then Secretary of State Colin Powell would stay home and let the world bake its own cookies. Bush and Rice would sit on their thrones, and by sheer wishful power rule the world without participating in it.

Then one morning Sept. 11 dawned and the illusions that Bush, Rice and Powell had promised were washed away like a fishing boat in New Orleans after the levees gave way. The similarities do not end there. There were no preparations for the catastrophic events that were sliding by.

Disbelief and denial have been benchmarks of the Bush administration from the beginning. Rice’s confession that she had never imagined that terrorists would attack us with our own planes and gasoline was typical of the status quo thinking that continues to dominate the White House.

What had she imagined, if anything?

The appointment of Hughes, who has no diplomatic training, as roving envoy in countries where she does not know the culture or people is on the level of FEMA appointing Michael D. Brown to resurrect the Gulf Coast. Brown met with failure and so has Hughes.

Bush is accustomed to window dressing and stage settings, such as in New York after Sept. 11 and more recently in New Orleans. He has been getting by since most media are not looking for substance in his words or deeds. Envoy Hughes with her plane load of reporters, looking for photo ops, is another stage setting intended to lecture and advise Muslims about their culture.

It is not clear just what Bush thought he might accomplish by sending Hughes to do a job that neither Powell nor Rice had been able to deliver. The lecturing and advising did not work. Upon Hughes’ arrival in Cairo on Sept. 26, the new editor of al-Gomhuria Daily said that those meeting Hughes “...should advise the United States to withdraw from Iraq and put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, after leaving Gaza.”

And that was only the opening.

Mohamed Ali Ibrahim wrote, “We in Egypt or anywhere else do not need a public relations campaign like the one America is conducting. Egyptians or Saudis or Turks will not suddenly like America because it has set up a television or radio station...but feelings may change if America changes its whole approach.”

Gomhuria’s editor continued, “Egyptian officials can also advise Washington...not to concentrate on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a great breakthrough for peace, because there are many parts of occupied Palestine which are still waiting for the occupiers to leave.”

After Hughes arrived in Jeddah, Patricia Wilson of Reuters wrote, “Hughes knows how to stay on message and her message to Muslims is: We care.”

What is not clear is how many are listening.

Hughes was mostly ignored by the media wherever she went. Her message that American Democracy, faith and family values were superior to all others fell flat. The Muslims have a good deal of faith and strong family values.

After visiting with Saudi royalty, but not dining, wining or dancing, Hughes met with 500 uppercrust women at a university in Jeddah where it was assumed the lecturing and advising would get a better reception. Instead, Hughes had her back pinned to the wall and immediately went on the defensive. Hughes is not usually a woman without words, but here...? The women were educated and not going to be roped in by Hughes’ suggestion that if you drive a car or wear colorful clothes and high heels, you will have more freedom.

Secretary Rice is accustomed to meeting with the men and making demands on behalf of the Bush administration. She has continued to do so without any real interchange between the United States and other countries -- Iran, Japan and China for example. While the Bush White House has gone to great lengths to ignore the United Nations, if not destroy it, Rice uses it like a pit bull to threaten these countries when she does not have her way.

This has not worked. Last summer Rice became the first secretary of state to skip the important meeting of Asian Nations, saying her schedule did not allow her to attend. One expert of international affairs said, “I don’t think she was missed.”

Rice continued, as recently as mid-September, to threaten and bully the Middle Eastern and Asian nations instead of trying to engage them in meaningful discussions. To Rice, meaningful discussion means seeing things her way and accepting American Democracy in a plastic bag.

It seems evident that Hughes, all dressed up with her weight loss and short hair and pretty clothes, was chosen to be a killer with Muslim women, her target for this trip. She arrived at every stop yelling like a bull horn, “I am a mom.”

Her insistence that Muslim women ought to be more like American women was an insult. If these women are in captivity, as some would lead us to believe, they escaped and found their tongues, especially when Hughes arrived in Turkey.

Hughes insisted that if the Muslim women would drive cars and get rid of their black garb, better days would be right around the corner. She was shocked to find that the greatest feminist concern with her Turkish counterparts was the enormous number of women and children dying in Iraq. American media have chosen to ignore this, just as Bush deliberately ignored the returning caskets of dead soldiers. It was on this ground that the women so violently opposed the Iraq war next door. Hughes could not get off the hook, uncharacteristically struggling for words to fight back.

A Kurdish rights advocate, Fatma Nevin Vargun, said she was ashamed of the war, adding that the United States bore the responsibility. Referring to the arrest of a war protester at the White House Sept. 26, she added, “This was a pity for us as well.”

Feray Salmon, a human rights campaigner, said that while she believed in democracy, it could not be exported by force or interference through war.

It seems evident that the State Department anticipated the negative reactions to the traveling farce. At the end of the trip, Hughes flew into Istanbul were she spoke to 500 people who had been carefully handpicked by the department. The trip ended with Hughes talking to children, none of whom talked back.

And so ended the first costly effort in PR as diplomacy.