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.