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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing by S R Weisman 
New York Times, September 30, 2005 On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing By STEVEN R. WEISMAN ISTANBUL, Sept. 29 - Even by Middle East standards, it has been a tumultuous week. Violence is spreading in Iraq and Lebanon and between Israel and the Palestinians; Egypt is prosecuting a popular opposition leader for fraud; Turkey is in an uproar over efforts to block its entry into the European Union. The relentlessly upbeat American under secretary of state for public diplomacy, Karen P. Hughes, President Bush's longtime communications aide, came into this vortex. She was trying to make news by defending unpopular American policies and by projecting her message that the United States stands for peace, democracy, faith and family values. She also repeatedly asserted, no less than three times in an interview on the Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera, that Mr. Bush was the first American president to call for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. It was a bit of an exaggeration, since President Bill Clinton endorsed such a state a couple of weeks before he left office in 2001. "I am here to listen and to learn and to work to strengthen the relationship and close partnership between our two countries," Ms. Hughes declared in Turkey on Wednesday, in a typical opening comment. Among schoolchildren she later exclaimed, "I look forward to shaking each of your hands and having you give me a hug!" Could this work to turn around anti-American hostility? As they wound up their trip on Thursday, Ms. Hughes and her aides acknowledged that five days of stops in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not do the job. "But you have to start somewhere," Ms. Hughes said. There was some coverage in the regional press, but not a great deal, combined with editorial skepticism, if not hostility, over her first overseas trip in her new role. "The Arab world is tired of U.S. hurricanes," said an editorial in Asharq, a daily paper in Qatar. "It hopes that Hurricane Hughes will be the last one." On the other hand, the picture of Ms. Hughes hugging a child in Istanbul made a lot of papers and television shows, and there were positive stories about how she listened respectfully to criticism of the war in Iraq, provided rebuttals and reiterated American opposition to violence by Kurdish separatists in eastern Turkey. The papers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt did not put Ms. Hughes on the front page, but most ran articles calling attention to her efforts to reach out. If regular diplomacy entails meetings in private to overcome disagreements, "public diplomacy" involves efforts to mold popular opinion abroad, defend American positions and rebut misinformation. In Turkey, for example, American officials have not only had to defend the Iraq war but also to counter erroneous press reports of large numbers of rapes of Iraqi women by Americans. Earlier this year, many papers reported that the tsunami in Asia last December was caused by an American undersea nuclear explosion. Ms. Hughes says she wants to establish a "rapid response" unit to counter such stories and to train diplomats to deliver defenses and rebuttals in the local vernacular. A study two years ago by a panel led by Edward P. Djerejian, a retired diplomat, indicated that anti-American sentiments around the world had risen to alarming levels. Mr. Djerejian said recently that 80 percent of the hostility derived from American policies, especially on Israel, Iraq, the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison and the detention of people captured by the Americans at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "Karen understands that 'it's the policies, stupid,' " Mr. Djerejian said in a recent interview. But the other 20 percent, he said, could be addressed by a sophisticated media strategy that Ms. Hughes should be able to provide. This trip, though, showed the problems she faces as well as the opportunities. Traveling with her was at times like being trapped in a cable television infomercial, with an emphasis on values like family and faith. Ms. Hughes said that she was a "working mom" and that President Bush cared about mothers, fathers and children everywhere, especially in a future Palestinian state. She addressed several policies, but in concise sound bites rather than sustained arguments. In American campaigns, such messages repeated over and over can have an effect because a presidential candidate dominates the news with every statement he makes, and if that fails to work, money can be poured into saturation advertising. By contrast, in the lively and percussive environment of this region, Ms. Hughes came nowhere near the commanding heights of the media. In Egypt, she supported democracy. But the papers focused that day on the prosecution on charges of election fraud of Ayman Nour, the leading opposition figure who got the most votes in the recent presidential election. Local reporters criticized Ms. Hughes for not meeting with enough genuine opposition figures. In Turkey, news coverage was almost exclusively devoted to troubled negotiations over the European Union and the issue of Kurdish separatists. Mr. Bush's support for a Palestinian state also seemed to count for little in an environment where attention is focused on Israeli attacks on Palestinians. "I guess I'm a little surprised that he doesn't get more credit," Ms. Hughes told reporters after hearing criticism in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, of American support for Israel. But Ms. Hughes made it plain that "public diplomacy" was not a one-trip exercise and that she would continue to travel around the world, hone her message and show that the United States was capable of listening - and to urge State Department officials to think in those terms as well. She and her aides said they were satisfied with the publicity they generated, noting that what was billed as a "listening tour" turned out to be just that, leaving a positive impression countering the image of an America unwilling to engage with those who disagree. Ms. Hughes promised to take what she learned from hearing dissenting views back to Washington. She was struck, she said, when a Turkish official told her to try to imagine the situation of Iraq, a next-door neighbor, sliding into possible civil war and engulfing Turkey from the perspective of "the common Turk." "I will be sure to bring that message back to President Bush when I get back to Washington," she said. Abeer Allam contributed reporting from Cairo for this article. |