FAILED DIPLOMACY

Photo credit
After a little over two years, Karen Hughes is bidding good-bye to her position as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. According to this source, the position with the intention of repairing the United States' image in the Middle East. The reaction in the Middle East, however, was cool within just a month of her having taken the position at State. This item in the November 7, 2007 edition of the Washington Post indicates that the reaction became downright freezing cold over the course of some two years (emphases mine):

As part of her swan song, outgoing State Department public diplomacy chief Karen Hughes is off for speeches yesterday [November 6] in London to the International Public Relations Association annual meeting and today [November 7] in Austria at the Salzburg Global Seminar, "Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Women in Politics and Business."

While most U.S. analysts gave mixed reviews to her two-year stint, some folks in the Mideast were less charitable. Much less charitable.

Hughes, wrote Rami G. Khouri, a widely respected columnist in Lebanon's Daily Star, "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."

Khouri said Hughes "never understood that her brand of moralizing and arrogant cultural cheerleading -- 'Go, Muslims, go! . . . You can be modern and democratic if you really try!' -- was part of the problem, not part of the solution." Hughes "failed miserably and totally," he said, but "she never really had a chance," given U.S. policies, and she ended up "playing the fool on the global stage that increasingly came to see her as a strange combination of a comedy and horror show rolled into one."

Well, you can't please everyone.

Now, I can't say that I'm a fan of Ms. Hughes, who has, in my view, at times played the dhimmi. For example, in 2005, she addressed the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America, an organization which propagates Wahhabism. Nevertheless, the perennial Muslim cry of "Apologize! You've insulted us" is growing old. And is it really so insulting to encourage modernization and democratization? I suppose so, if one doesn't desire to be modern or democratic....

Read the rest at Always On Watch.