Questions for Karen Hughes

by John Brown
from Common Dreams

“When I was young and irresponsible, I sometimes acted young and irresponsible.”
-- Karen Hughes, Ten Minutes from Normal, p. 61

1. Your appointment as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in July 2005 was met with high expectations, given your confidante status with President George W. Bush, in whose political campaigns you played a key communications role.

The position you hold today, according to the State Department homepage, “helps ensure that public diplomacy (engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences) is practiced in harmony with public affairs (outreach to Americans) and traditional diplomacy to advance U.S. interests and security and to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world.”

Now, more than one year after your appointment, there are indications in Washington coming from a local think tank that you are under pressure to leave your job. Before you depart government service -- if in fact you will be leaving -- allow me ask you a few questions regarding American public diplomacy with you at the helm.

2. According to a recent article in the Dallas Morning News (August 2), you believe that “polishing the badly tarnished U.S. image abroad starts with reshaping the State Department's public diplomacy efforts to fit the rapidly changing communications demands of the 21st century.” But what have you actually done, from a programmatic or bureaucratic standpoint, to reshape this effort during your (granted) brief tenure?

“New” ideas you mention to the public -- such as English-teaching camps -- have been part of U.S. government public diplomacy since the Cold War (they were then called English teaching “seminars” for local teachers of the language). One project you extensively publicized, “rapid response” to false or inaccurate foreign media reports, were high on the list of priorities of the United States Information Agency, which handled public diplomacy from 1953 to 1999 (when it was consolidated into the State Department).

Given a considerable skepticism among persons familiar with public diplomacy that your “new” initiatives are not all that new, can you honestly argue that you and your staff have been able to rethink -- and change in any significant way -- the role of public diplomacy in the transformed world of the 21st century so that it can better serve American national interests?

3. In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in March of this year, you said that "policy must match public diplomacy." But recent events in the Middle East suggest that public diplomacy has had little impact on policy during your tenure. To what extent, for example, was Middle Eastern public opinion taken into consideration by the U.S. government when it decided to approve the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon?

Despite your recent Middle-East related interviews -- on CNN, July 26, which is not posted on the State Department homepage -- and on the Malaysian media (“almost incomprehensible” is how a foreign affairs professional, Patricia Kushlis, characterized your statements on that occasion in her respected blog, Whirled View, August 1), recent media coverage of your policy positions and programs has been minimal. Indeed, all a major publication like the Wall Street Journal online (July 15) could say about you during the past critical weeks was that, on your way to the Middle East with a State Department delegation, irate Lebanese-Americans complained to you at Ireland’s Shannon airport -- while you were sipping wine at the airport bar, the paper doesn’t fail to note -- about their treatment by the State Department during their Beirut evacuation.

And you have been severely criticized by one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the Middle East and its media, Professor Marc Lynch, in his blog, Abu Aardvark, July 26): “If a good, well-prepared, and active Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy had been sitting at the policy-making table, he or she might have … suggested American policies and rhetoric which would have resonated better with Arab publics without compromising the Bush administration's policy goals (whatever those are).

That none of these things happened … makes me once again repeat what I said a few days ago: Karen Hughes should quit immediately. Get somebody in as an acting public diplomacy director who is at least going to try.

(The rest is here.)

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, compiles the “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review”.