The View From Planet Earth

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I suppose this is a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but do you remember Karen Hughes?  A Bush friend from his time as governor, she worked as counselor to the President in 2001 and 2002.  In 2005 Bush rehired her as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy.  

Bush’s idea was that Hughes would go around the world as a one-woman PR-circus for the Bush administration.  He thought, or seemed to think, that the main cause of negative world opinions of US policy was not US policy itself but the bad spin it got on, well, planet Earth.

Karen Hughes To Work on The World’s View of U.S.

By Peter Baker

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, March 12, 2005; Page A03

Former White House counselor Karen P. Hughes will take over the Bush administration’s troubled public diplomacy effort intended to burnish the U.S. image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world, where anti-Americanism has fueled extremist groups and terrorism, a senior administration official said yesterday.

It seems to me that this must have been a particularly thankless job.  Not so much because the world wasn’t about to listen to the Bush Administration’s tale that the only problem with the US was that it needed better commercials, but rather because no one in power in the US could seriously have believed that that was the problem in the first place.

The standard Republican mantra of “we need to do a better job communicating our intentions to the world” is just boilerplate, meant to hinder discussion.  But, I want to say, it’s particularly nasty boilerplate because what it hinders is so gigantic: the truth that human beings overwhelmingly reject the policies of the Republican party.

Shortly after Bush announced his intention to nominate Hughes to the post, Price Floyd, “State Department Media Affairs Director and 17-year veteran”, resigned.  Floyd was interviewed by NPR after his resignation:

BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about Karen Hughes, who is the current hearts and minds tsarina. Do you think that she understands that there is a cognitive dissonance between our words and our actions?

PRICE FLOYD: I’ve met with her several times. She is one of the most dynamic people I have ever been around. She is truly impressive. But she comes at it from a press/media angle, and public diplomacy I don’t think is that.

I think now – I mean, this is bigger than Karen Hughes, it’s bigger than the State Department. It’s going to mean an administration change. Someone new is going to have to come in. No matter who that is, Republican or Democrat, I think people around the world would give them the benefit of the doubt, at least at first. But having a press conference is not going to take care of anything.

Perhaps Floyd is merely being polite, here.  His comments, taken seriously, signal a misunderstanding as to exactly which problem Hughes was being ask to solve.  She was not, of course, seriously expected to change the opinions of Earthlings in regards to the Bush Administration.  She was expected to create flak — to prevent Americans from noticing that Bush policies are anti-human, and known to be, and that the Bush Administration doesn’t care.  The problem Hughes was working on was not perception but fact.  Bush policy kills people.  This is inconvenient.

To her credit, Hughes was consistent in acting out the sham.  On Hughes’s attitude toward world opinion of the Bush response to Katrina, Dana Milibank wrote:

The image of the United States has taken a beating over the past 10 days, as foreign television and newspapers show images of death, chaos and disease in New Orleans. Even lowly Bangladesh (per capita income: $400 a year) was moved to send $1 million in foreign aid.

But Karen Hughes has another view. The Bush confidante, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, held a meeting with her staff in Foggy Bottom yesterday and was asked about the international ramifications of the response to the New Orleans flooding. The problem, Hughes replied, was not a failed relief effort but a foreign press that did not appreciate the federal government’s good work.

“There are a lot of things being said about us around the world that aren’t true,” said the woman in charge of polishing the American image abroad. “We’ve marshaled the resources of our federal government” to help fellow Americans, she said, and if people think otherwise, “we need to aggressively challenge that idea around the world.”

This gives the appearance of sincerity, which one assumes was the point.  

An article by Alan Cowell in today’s New York Times, which prompted these musings about Hughes, gives examples of world concern about the upcoming election.

U.S. Race Captures World’s Eye, and Holds It

By ALAN COWELL

Published: January 26, 2008

— snip —

In Paris, the fascination with the Clinton-Obama duel seemed to eclipse the Republican contest. “The Republican candidates are much less well known in France,” said Alain Frachon, the editor in chief of Le Monde. “It might be wishful thinking, but the French believe that this Republican era is over.”

Not only the French. Much of the fervid absorption in the primaries and caucuses – accessible as never before on 24-hour satellite and cable television channels like CNN and Fox News – seems inspired by a hope that the American electoral process will end an era of foreign policy dominance by neoconservatives.

“There is a desperate sense of need that there must be something better than Bush out there,” said Dean Godson, head of a conservative research group in London called Policy Exchange. Or, as Thomas Valasek, a spokesman for the Center for European Reform in London, put it: “The world at large has a massive stake in the outcome of the elections. Never before has the U.S. had such a terrible reputation, a terrible image.”

— snip —

This article is frustrating in that it relies upon anecdotes.  It’s easy enough to cite polls.  WorldPublicOpinion.org reported last year:

World View of US Role Goes From Bad to Worse

January 22, 2007

— snip —

The poll shows that in the 18 countries that were previously polled, the average percentage saying that the United States is having a mainly positive influence in the world has dropped seven points from a year ago-from 36 percent to 29 percent-after having already dropped four points the year before. Across all 25 countries polled, one citizen in two (49%) now says the US is playing a mainly negative role in the world.

Over two-thirds (68%) believe the US military presence in the Middle East provokes more conflict than it prevents and only 17 percent believes US troops there are a stabilizing force.

The poll shows that world citizens disapprove of the way the US government has handled all six of the foreign policy areas explored. After the Iraq war (73% disapproval), majorities across the 25 countries also disapprove of US handling of Guantanamo detainees (67%), the Israeli-Hezbollah war (65%), Iran’s nuclear program (60%), global warming (56%), and North Korea’s nuclear program (54%).

On March 4, 2007, Dr. Steven Kull — Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org — presented testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight.

After running through some very dismall poll results concerning world attitudes to the US role in the world, Dr. Kull said something that I think is worth keeping in mind.

So in summary, the challenge we face in dealing with the recent upsurge in negative feelings about US foreign policy, is not that we need to convince people of the value of the principles the US has tried to promote in the world. The world is already pretty much convinced. This is a tremendous asset for the US.

What the world is looking for is reassurance that the US is constrained by the rules that the US itself has promoted; that it is still committed to the rule of international law, to limits on the use of military force, to respect for human rights, and to fairness in the world economic system.

So it’s not as though these things aren’t known.  The world likes the US and detests one of its political parties, especially as currently constituted.  We often brush past the observation that the perception of the US has deteriorated around the world, but we ought, from time to time, pause for a moment and reflect on the enormity of what is here being revealed.  The United States has a decisive influence on world events.  This is known, and not appreciated, by human beings.

A multinational poll finds that publics around the world reject the idea that the United States should play the role of preeminent world leader. Most publics say the United States plays the role of world policeman more than it should, fails to take their country’s interests into account and cannot be trusted to act responsibly.

Americans share this view.

Americans match the French in their support for the United States doing its share together with other nations (75%), with small numbers favoring a preeminent role (10%) or isolationism (12%).

And this little fact shows another aspect of what Karen Hughes’s job really was: to prevent discussion in the US itself about the self-evidently problematic nature of being “the world’s policeman.”  

The thing I want to emphasize in all this is not the bland observation that the Bush Administration is missing the point when they try to PR the world in to liking it, but rather the more insidious point that the leaders of the Republican party don’t care that their policies are radically anti-human.  There is something cordially disquieting, even terrifying, about this; something cold and bracing, as if of catching a draft while walking past an open tomb.