November 4, 2007

Karen Hughes was appointed in 2005 by President Bush’s Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs with the aim to improve the US image in the Muslim world. As one of President Bush's last remaining advisers from his tight circle of Texas aides, she announced recently she was leaving the administration at the end of the year. She is going back to her home state. Her resignation appears to have received very little attention from analysts in the west.

Ms Hughes’ resignation is yet another evidence of the extremely difficult challenge the US faces in order to win 'the hearts and minds’ of the Muslim world that makes up roughly a quarter of the world population.

Ms Hughes is considered to be one of the best American minds in the field of public relations and communications: indeed, her CV is quite glamorous to say the least. With a career in journalism, she became responsible for public relations for President Bush leading his election campaign that returned him to the Whitehouse as the most unpopular president ever to be elected to office, courtesy to his administration’s blunders on both the international and domestic scenes. Yet, this media expert was unable to remain in her post for more than 20 months and now with very little success to show for with regards to the winning hearts and minds mission impossible.

The US problem with regards to winning the hearts and minds is not Ms Hughes or her qualification or skill which undoubtedly played a role in her appointment. The US problems are much deeper than that. It is the direct linkage of the US image with blood, hypocrisy, double standards, war, death, destruction, torture, sexual abuse, massacre, ethnic cleansing, invasion, white phosphor (alternatively known as napalm) and depleted uranium, tough backing of dictatorship, installation of puppet regimes, racism and corruption to name but a few. There is no doubt in the minds and hearts, which the US wants to win back by what is essentially a series of publicity stunts paid for in billions of Dollars by the US taxpayer, that the US administration led by President Bush has been using these ugly and abhorrent practices and in direct contradiction of the American constitution, values and heritage of democracy, liberty, human rights, support for the weak and the fight against tyranny and corruption.

Indeed, it is rather simplistic to think that the tarnishing of the US image is confined only to the Muslim world, when the US is actually suffering in that department in almost all the third world as well as many European countries like France, Germany, Spain and Greece but to name a few. For example, recent statistics revealed that 90% of the Spanish people share the almost total Greek distaste of US government foreign policy. It is enough to say that record anti-Bush demonstrations always awaits this US President wherever he visits even in countries considered as traditional allies of the US like the UK and Australia. This is no surprising because Mr Bush and his administration has entered history as those who practiced grotesque torture in Abu Ghraib; established ugly prisons in Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of people are being imprisoned without trial; internationalised torture by sending prisoners to be tortured to countries ruled by despicable dictatorships whom in some cases the US is supposed to be fighting. Other reasons why the US image is suffering include:

- the US backing of tyrannical corrupt governments in the Arab world which have brought nothing more than poverty and suffering to the natives; and deterring of liberty and civil rule from being established by blocking the genuine effort made by the indigenous natives of those countries – by invasion and occupation if necessary;

- the US use of murderous sanctions like those imposed upon Iraq prior to the invasion that were often described as crimes against humanity by UN staff;

- the US’s invasion of two sovereign Muslim states (Iraq and Afghanistan) which has directly caused the death and suffering of over 1.25 million people, the greatest displacement of indigenous people in history (over 6million Iraqis have left their country to escape the air and land bombardments by US occupation troops and the terror to which the Iraqi people are subjected by the US puppet regime in Iraq;

- supported and continues to support ethnic cleansing in places like Iraq and Palestine;

The list goes on and on.

It is no wonder that, despite her frequent trips to the Middle East, the US image in the Arab world has actually declined further under Ms Hughes' watch. At least Ms Hughes was honest in her admission of the uselessness of her mission and decided to jump from President Bush’s ship which is drowning in the swamp of torture, hypocrisy, evidence fabrication, double standards and flagrant abuse of human rights.

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M Taqi is an independent freelance writer and may be contacted on m.taqi@hotmail.co.uk
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The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of the Iraqi League.