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Karen Hughes' Two-Year Halloween
I could not help but notice that Karen Hughes announced her resignation as US public diplomacy chief Wednesday on Halloween day here in the United States. This was an apt moment for her to hit the airwaves - when monsters, ghosts, goblins and witches roam the land for the night, then disappear for another year, all in a make-believe fantasy land that enchants us briefly, and frightens us occasionally, but that we never take seriously.
Her resignation has been greeted in the American press as reflecting mixed results in her two years as undersecretary of state for oublic diplomacy - with progress on institutionally raising the profile of her office in Washington, but no real achievements in improving America's image abroad. That is too kind, in my view, and misses the point of her professional and official calamity.
From the start, Karen Hughes' office and mission - not her personally - were a political catastrophe in all respects. She should not simply resign. If she were a real diplomat and a true American, with honesty and courage to match her Texan bravado, she should apologize for subjecting her own country, and we who were the objects of her mission, to what can only be described as a monumental and insulting hoax.
She will not apologize, of course. So the next best thing is for those whom she leaves behind in Washington - a credibility-shattered and intellectually depleted bureaucracy - to undertake the patriotic mission that she always refused to do: to analyze honestly why the United States is universally criticized and increasingly widely feared as a dangerous menace around the world, and to determine what can be done to turn this situation arouned by adopting better policies, rather than subjecting the world to deceitful political hucksters and naive storytellers.
Her office had no appreciable impact on improving global perceptions of the United States, and in some situations made things worse, especially when she and some of her colleagues spoke to audiences in the Middle East with a combination of political condescension, cultural arrogance, and aggressive moralizing. I had the chance to see her perform in person a few times, and it was always a painful experience. Those left behind in her wake should analyze the last two years honestly, and come up with policies and strategies that shed the sort of racism, fantasy communication and self-delusional political and moral evasion of responsibility that the hapless Hughes and her colleagues practiced with a gusto that was matched by their obvious irrelevance and failure.
I am harsh on her and her work because it reflects the absolute worst in American political culture and America's engagement with the world. What she has done in her two years as public diplomacy chief is not only ineffective and probably counter-productive; it is also very un-American. She rejected the honesty, humility and realism that define the values of most Americans, and instead opted to live in a dream world in which America was perfect, and foreigners who thought badly of it needed to be lectured about American values and policies.
The core, devastating flaw in her entire mission was to completely separate the world's critical views of the US government from the conduct of American foreign policy itself. She assumed that the problem was that foreigners misunderstood American values or foreign policy goals - but she never tried to understand Arab-Muslims in the same way she asked them to understand her country and its policies.
She never understood that her brand of moralizing and arrogant cultural cheerleading - "Go, Muslims, go! Reach for the sky! You can be modern and democratic, if you really try!" - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. She failed to grasp that she was handicapped from the start by trying to make us love a country whose pro-Israeli, pro-Arab autocrats foreign policy - and now the Iraq fiasco - has devastated our lands and cultures for nearly half a century.
By any standards, she failed miserably and totally - but to be fair to her, she never really had a chance, given the enormous handicap of her country's foreign policy in the Middle East. We should criticize her personally only for accepting to be part of this charade, and playing the fool on a global stage that increasingly came to see her as a strange combination of a comedy and horror show rolled into one.
We should instead remind Americans that this is a moment for them to reconsider this whole silly episode, stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on vacuous public diplomacy programs, and stop insulting several billion people around the world who do not need any prompting to enjoy American values, education, business, technology, sports, and other offerings - including Halloween night, with its bags of Tootsie-Rolls, and the fantasy of defeated wicked witches who get on their brooms and disappear into the night sky, to reappear only in our future nightmares.
-- Rami G. Khouri
Copyright © 2007, The Daily Star
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12 Comments so far
Show AllAs was the case with "Doing a heckuva job, Brownie," and Gonzales, and Rumsfeld, etc. the only ones that get near the Bush neocon crash-warrior team are loyalists. They are likely to be fundamentalists of one religion or another, bent on the delusion of holy war, and their grasp of world culture, other perspectives, Truth is made conspicuous BY its absence. I love the Halloween analogy as the woman's entire career simulates the masque, it's all about pretty lies used to distort reality and in its place present more sanitized notions of what's up, down, left, right, front or center. Smoke and mirrors, the woman IS a mask and probably hasn't an inkling of who she is, or would know the truth if it smacked her upside the head. I have utter contempt for anyone who would aid or abet anything the Bush neocons have elected to do, as the blood on their hands stinks to high heaven and there are not roses of this earth to make the stench disappear. Maybe she'll start selling detergent now?
Read the comments on the mainstream media articles over at www.nytimes.com, etc., and one realizes that someone like Karen Hughes is not all that different than the "average Joe" here in the good ol' U.S. of A. Which is to say, she is utterly bereft of any commitment to political reality, living in a fantasy land that properly belongs in a hackneyed 2nd grade history textbook, ca. 1803. Making no serious attempt to understand what is really happening, she is befogged by opaque rose-colored glasses that, like George Bush's hidden earphone in the Kerry debate, whisper to her the sweet nothings that she wants to hear -- sweet nothings that keep out mean ol' Reality. This is the right-wing world.
She would be much better at selling detergent. Is there some relation? -- detergent -- insurgent -- hmmmm. And Madge would say, "You're soaking in it." Remember those commercials? Palmolive.
FIGMENT: Detergent was a metaphor linked to Lady Macbeth... the lady has subliminal blood on her hands for aligning with the Bush cabal. Perhaps the right formula can help clean those hands...
Let's give Karen the benefit of the doubt and assume that she believed she could make a difference.
The Arab world does not need F-16's and F-15's to bring them into the US orbit. That world is already in the US orbit - the one defined by the Microsoft Gates and not the CIA Gates. US Technology and knowledge, entertainment, medicine, and finance will always bring the world into the US orbit - if that's what we want. This orbit is so powerful that no nation on earth wants to be out of it.
Just look at Vietnam today. Bill Gates was treated like a SuperStar from Hollywood when he landed in Hanoi. And Vietnam is still a Communist country, or at least a country run by the Communist party.
In the Middle East, we cannot continue to move with double standards. We need to have one yardstick for all. As long as the US continues to pay lip service - if not denital - to the dispossession and disinheritance of the Palestinian people, people in those parts of the world will never have trust in the political leadership of our nation. They will view our every move as a sinister one for the sake oil and/or Israel. Our blind and uncondditional support of Israel should give way to an even-handed policy that attempts to bring the two peoples together.
Would we have all these problems if Bill Gates was elected President?
Maybe that is where the answer to global peace lies.
What a brilliant, direct, and honest commentary. Why does it seem to take a (sympathetic!) foreigner these days to see America clearly and tell it to us like it is.
Mark Abrahms, I agree, it was revealing to see what the people in the middle east thought of her.
I cannot wait to get all these idiots out of office. The next bunch, if they are any of the 6 Democrats will be head and shoulder above this crew, lets just hope that Americans are smart enough to kick the bastards out.
"....analyze honestly why the United States is universally criticized and increasingly widely feared as a dangerous menace around the world..."
I wasn't aware that this was a great mystery.
It's a little like a guy standing under Niagara Falls asking why he's so wet.
Isn't it just a tad obvious that we're the Playground Bully and that's why we don't get invited to the party?
It's utterly disingenuous even to pose the question as if we should all scratch our heads pondering the possible answer.
Liberty & Justice,
SJ
www.spartacusjones.com
peace and jobs -- sounds like Milton and Thomas Friedman. With all due respect, this is the "on paper" view of capitalism. In reality, it makes one hell of a mess, it's just hoped that the mess is somewhere else. The mess is not so visible in North America or western Europe right now, (but it's not invisible to be sure -- see the article on mountaintop mining -- there's your raw capitalism for you). What we have forgotten is that the wealth all of this is built on was acquired by bloodshed and slavery. How has that changed? It hasn't. It will only get worse as resources become more scarce -- unless WE change. This fundamentalist Capitalism will be found to be utterly corrupt, in the end. Our great grandchildren will see us the way we see the owners of slave ships now.
Your benevolent capitalism, in sum, is a fantasy, not a reality. Show me some sustainability. Show me some genuine concern for the earth and those who are suffering -- I mean besides how many tennis shoes can these poor slobs make for us. We're turning the world into a pile of trash.
Siouxrose -- I don't think even Madge can help Lady MacBeth. :>)
a little sympathy for the devil, please. KH was assigned an impossible task: to stand before audiences who know their own history and convince them that they've been mistaken all along. what was the sad refrain heard most often on 9/11? (all together now) "why do they hate us?"
they know why, and most u.s. citizens don't, which is why we'll soon find ourselves at war with three nations instead of two, in which once again we'll be the innocent victims. (tears of rage, frustration and grief)
I always thought that Hughes' assignment, which she never quite understood, was to make this plea to those in the ME: "Do not hate us because we are predators, because you can be predators too. Sure, you will be at a huge disadvantage as we have a strong position and we make the rules, and the best you can get are the scraps, but predation is what makes life worth living and you should thank us for showing you that!"
"She rejected the honesty, humility and realism that define the values of most Americans, and instead opted to live in a dream world in which America was perfect..."
Mr. Khouri is too kind. Unfortunately, honesty, humility and realism are no longer the values of most Americans. Thank you sir, for appearing to give us the benefit of the doubt; but I would confess, acutely embarrassed, that what I see is those values having been submerged since the time of Ronald Reagan by wilfull ignorance, bellicose chauvanism and unrestrained and utterly breathtaking selfishness. And in a media landscape where the sins committed by our government in our name--in the Mid-East and all over the world--will never get the exposure they deserve, it is going to take some undeniable, overwhelming force to put a stop to our predation. I wish it were not so, and I wish I saw a Democrat who would lead us in a new direction, but I don't.
Good riddance!