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On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing

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  • On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing

    On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's
    Hearing

    The New York Times
    September 30, 2005

    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.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/international/middleeast/30hughes.html
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