Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
An open letter to Karen Hughes by Georgie Anne Geyer 
Can Hughes clean up her boss' mess? Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate. Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington Published by the Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2005 An open letter to Karen Hughes, just chosen by President Bush to take over "public diplomacy" in our not-so-friendly world: Dear Karen, It's really nice to welcome you back. I knew you only slightly when George W. was running for the presidency four years ago, but you were always polite, accessible, funny, intelligent and reasonable. You didn't believe, as some of the president's enforcers later came to believe, that he must be cut off from the world. I remember the time I called to congratulate you on the clever and hysterically funny give-and-take between W. and the press corps on the campaign plane. It was a good time when you were around, until the Bush "take no prisoners" male brigade took over. But by the time you and some of the other originals left--you, in the spring of 2002 because your family missed Texas--the post-Sept. 11, 2001, administration took on its now-well-known approach of telling the whole world to shove it. Too many of the "boys" in the administration acted like unsocialized teenagers out to tell everybody to go to hell. And now they call in you, and Condoleezza Rice, and your deputy, the Egyptian-born Dina Powell, to clean up the mess they made so carelessly. I guess a woman's role never really changes: Even when you're at the top, you're still somehow going to get stuck in the cleanup brigade! First, you well know the outcome of all the "fun." In Asia, a rising and glittering China is winning influence where once the United States prevailed. In a recent poll asking pro-Western Thais, for instance, which nation they considered their country's closest ally, the response was 75 percent for China against 9 percent for the United States. Europe is going its own way, and Latin America no longer counts: The administration doesn't care enough to insult it. But it is clearly the Muslim world that is in crisis with America. According to the comprehensive report by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston: "Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels. What is required is not merely tactical adaptation but strategic and radical transformation." I know that you already know much of this, Madam Ambassador (your new and well-deserved title), but as someone who has lived and worked overseas for four decades, I must also add that probably none of you realizes how bad it really is. When I first went overseas in the 1960s, to Latin America, then to the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, men and women from the United States Information Service were in every embassy; they knew more locals (by far) than the ambassadors. There were American libraries in most big cities, open to the streets and jammed with students. Today, because of threats against America, the embassies have become entrenched fortresses on the outskirts of the cities; the libraries are long gone; and in one of the most asinine acts of the 1990s, the USIS was disbanded under the incredibly naive idea that the United States would never again have another enemy. Well, the answer to that question didn't take long, did it, Karen? Respectfully, here are some things you should not do: (1) For God's sake, do not look upon this as a public relations problem. Your predecessor, the New York ad-agency maven Charlotte Beers, did this--and her videos of happy Muslims dancing and playing in the U.S. laughed her right off the world stage. (2) Don't look at this as giving those "foreigners" some of our good ol' pop music (which we're doing with Radio Sawa), while neglecting real and honest news. (3) While it would be good to re-establish the USIS--and again, as a separate institution and not within the State Department--it must be done in such a way that news is removed from the "news control" of this administration. And here are some things you should do: (1) Realize, as the underpinning for your entire mission, that foreigners, particularly Muslims, are not reacting against the United States primarily out of pique and surely not out of their "hatred of our freedom." They are primarily acting against us because of real and hurtful policies toward them over many decades--everything from the corrosive Israeli-Palestinian question of today, to our bungling in Iran in the '50s, to past support of Saddam Hussein and abandonment of the Shiites, to support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which led directly to the chaos in Lebanon today. To the extent you can and will deal honestly with our mistakes, just to that extent will you begin to be respected and successful. (2) Continue to support the pro-democracy movements everywhere, but beware, for who is elected, anywhere, is never certain. (3) Somehow get around the Abu Ghraibs and the torture excesses of our Special Forces and return to Alexis de Tocqueville's often debated dictum of the 1830s that "America is great because America is good." That concept of America as no longer being good--as no longer being "exceptional," but being simply another nation like any other--is now dominant in the world. So, good luck, Karen, and God bless you. You're starting from zero. Sincerely, Georgie Anne Geyer |