The Rude Guest

Karen Hughes, recently appointed to the State Department as head of "Public Diplomacy" didn't fare so well during her recent visit to the Middle East. Her job, ostensibly, is to improve the image of the US, especially in foreign policy matters. Unfortunately, due to her diplomatic inexperience and to her Bushite arrogance, her visit apparently had the opposite effect.

An October 6 editorial in Arab News details some of Hughes' gaffes.

The problem here is not American popular culture — beloved and emulated everywhere — or even American political culture, imbued with the richest ideas about freedom, democracy, and individual rights, ideas embraced by a people who, since 1776, had valued diversity and openness in their lives, and continue to expect candor and accountability from their elected officials.

The problem rather is American foreign policy, that remains, where it is not bellicose, overtly and unabashedly moralistic in tone. Unless you live like us, they seem to be saying, yours is an inferior species of social formation.

Hughes, a former reporter for a local television station in Texas, and close confidante to Bush when he was governor of the state, was an improbable ambassador. She has little foreign policy experience and her pedestrian, at times vapid, responses to questions raised by people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey showed she knew precious little about the region’s social concerns and political preoccupations.

Let the record show that no one has identified the gushy Hughes as an “ugly American,” just an inane one.

The source of anti-American attitudes in the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Muslim world and in Western Europe, is clearly not American culture or American values, but, as Edward P. Djereijan, a retired diplomat who had served as ambassador in Damascus, said in an interview last week, “It’s the policies, stupid.”

Karen Hughes’ visit to the Middle East would not have merited a column here were it not for the egregious remarks she kept making, especially in Saudi Arabia, about how Hamas militants are essentially a bunch of terrorists and how when Israel hits at them, it is hitting back in retaliation. She said that right there, as a guest, in the heartland of our world.

Thanks, Karen, message master, communications guru and undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. You came to our part of the world to aim at the public’s heart, and you ended up hitting it in the stomach. [Emphasis added]

Two things:

First, the fact that Ms. Hughes was not properly briefed and prepared for a visit to a part of the world that not only does not trust us but also has a different set of cultural values than we have speaks volumes about the current state of the State Department.

Second, the fact that Ms. Hughes managed to openly insult Arabs everywhere by referring to Hamas simply as terrorists indicates that she does not have the sense or the grace to realize that insulting one's host is considered rude in all cultures.

It's clear that in this maladministration, the amateurs are in charge.