Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
Hughes's makeover mission - Editorial 
BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL Hughes's makeover mission October 1, 2005 PRESIDENT BUSH had good reason to send Karen Hughes, his longtime friend and communications chief, to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey this week on a mission of public diplomacy. Public opinion surveys in those lands indicate a drastic decline in favorable views of the United States during the Bush years. In Egypt, 22 percent of respondents told Zogby International pollsters in 2002 that they had a favorable view of the United States; by the end of 2004, that number had fallen to 2 percent. Public opinion polls everywhere need to be approached with skepticism, but such dire numbers translate into a troubling message: In parts of the world that can be crucial to US security, popular mistrust of America is becoming an asset for America's enemies. The causes of that mistrust are a mix of the substantive and the propagandistic. When it comes to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or the Guantanamo camp in Cuba, image and reality become inextricable. Ideologues who wish to assert that there is an ongoing crusader war against Muslims can point to pictures of humiliated Muslim captives that have been displayed across the global village. Nevertheless, some opinion makers do grossly exaggerate. A columnist in Egypt's government-run daily Al-Ahram recently decried the detention camp at Guantanamo, saying it is ''very much like the Nazi camps." Whatever Hughes's skills, there is only so much she can do to redeem America's reputation in the Muslim world. To succeed, she will have to prevail on Bush not merely to correct particular policies but to abandon a basic stance that has alienated millions of people around the world. When those millions watch Bush defy and denigrate international institutions and treaties, be it the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, they see arrogance. They conclude that the United States -- not the Al Qaeda terrorists who murder innocent civilians around the world -- is the greatest danger to peace and security. This perception then obliterates Bush's pledge to pursue a viable independent Palestinian state and a peace accord between Palestinians and Israel. On what she calls her ''listening tour," Hughes has heard from Saudi women who say they don't need to drive cars (a privilege forbidden to them); from Turkish women who told her they want the United States to help Turkey crush Kurdish separatists; from Egyptian students who want the United States to be less supportive of Israel. These local concerns should not mask two crucial truths: that Bush's imperial swagger is a large part of the problem Hughes was hired to solve; and that the propagandists of Cairo, Damascus, and Riyadh will ultimately have to be corrected by their own societies, not by foreign spin specialists. |