(Karen) Hughes screws the pooch

For a good example of why foreigners hate or resent the U.S. government, one need look no further than Karen Hughes, Bush’s former political advisor who Bush hired as a U.S. government public-relations representative whose mission, ironically, is supposed to be improve the image of the U.S. government among foreigners.

Hughes has been in Saudi Arabia lecturing Saudi women on why their way of life is not as good as that of women in the United States and why it would behoove them to copy the American system. What is amazing is that Hughes is unable to recognize how she and other similarly situated U.S. officials come across to foreigners when they go overseas and lecture people on what they need to do to improve their country. They don’t see what foreigners see - that U.S. officials come across as arrogant, pretentious, pompous, obnoxious, know-all-all imperial bureaucrats preaching down to what U.S. officials perceive as dumb, ignorant, and incompetent foreigners. In fact, you see this phenomenon not only in the Middle East but also all the time in Latin America.

Hughes was undoubtedly taken aback when Saudi women gave her an earful after hearing Hughes lecture them on how they should be permitted to drive cars in their own country. According to the New York Times,

“‘The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn’t happy,’ one audience member said. ‘Well, we’re all pretty happy.’ The room, full of students, faculty members and some professionals, resounded with applause.

That’s not what the lowly foreigners are supposed to say to a U.S. government bureaucrat, especially one who is telling them what they need to do to be happy and free. But in the mind of an imperial bureaucrat, this just confirms even more that these people need U.S. guidance.

Turkish women must have stunned Hughes even more. They expressed anger and resentment not against America’s “freedom and values” but rather against the U.S. government’s foreign policy, especially its war on the Iraqi people. According to the New York Times,

“Under Secretary of State Karen P. Hughes, seeking common ground with leading women’s rights advocates in Turkey, was confronted instead on Wednesday with anguished denunciations of the war in Iraq and what the women said were American efforts to export democracy by force.”

Hughes fell back and defended President Bush’s war on Iraq, by repeating the standard U.S. government bromides: how President Bush did everything to avoid attacking and invading Iraq and how America was defending itself (apparently from an imminent WMD attack). Now, I’m sure that those assertions really impressed those Turkish women!

Hughes also preached that Iraqi women are better off now than under Saddam Hussein because under Saddam they were being raped, tortured, and murdered. Of course, the women who are supposedly better off today might not include the Iraqi women who are among the estimated 30,000 Iraqi dead as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. It also might not include those Iraqi women who have lost their sons, husbands, and fathers at the hands of the U.S. government. There are also the rapes, torture, sex abuse, and murder of Iraqis at the hands of U.S. troops to consider.

Perhaps Hughes would respond in the same way that her fellow U.S. diplomat Madeleine Albright responded when asked if the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children due to the cruel and brutal sanctions were worth the effort to rid Iraq of Saddam - that, yes, those deaths were “worth it” - words that were not as well received in Iraq and the Middle East as they were within the bowels of the U.S. government.

U.S. officials just don’t get it, and Hughes is the latest example of this. The problem is an overgrown, pretentious, obnoxious, and imperial federal government whose policies are the cause of foreign anger, hatred, and terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks. The only solution is for the American people to rein in the federal government, dismantle its overseas empire, and dismantle every restriction on private Americans to travel, trade, tour, and invest overseas. The American people are the greatest diplomats our country could have. Federal officials are the worst, and they are doing nothing but making more enemies for our country.

http://www.fff.org/blog/index.asp