Karen Hughes, blah, blah, blah

Fred Kaplan in Slate asks what Karen Hughes is doing in the Middle East and why she's there in the first place.

Could someone please explain to me what Karen Hughes is doing. Her maiden voyage to the Middle East has turned into a fiasco. She assures a room of Saudi women that they, too, will someday drive cars; they tell her they're actually happy right now, thank you. She meets with a group of Turkish women -- hand-picked by an outfit that supports women running for political office -- who brusquely tell her she has no credibility as long as U.S. troops occupy Iraq.

In a sense, this is par for the course when American officials meet with unofficial audiences abroad. But here's the puzzler: Why is it Karen Hughes who's taking these meetings? It was strange enough when her longtime friend President George W. Bush named her as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It's absolutely mind-numbing to discover that she considers it one of her mandates to be the public diplomat.

The main task of this posting is to improve America's image in the Muslim world. Let us stipulate for a moment that Hughes is ideally suited for the job -- that she can figure out how to spin sheiks, imams, and "the Arab street" as agilely as she spun the White House press corps in her days as Bush's communications director.

Even if that were so, why would anybody assume that she is the one to do the face-to-face spinning? Wouldn't it be better to find someone who -- oh, I don't know -- speaks the language, knows the culture, lived there for a while, was maybe born there?

Put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented "Good morning." Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding ("I'm a working mom") and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, "Yes, we know, that's why he's relaunched the Crusades").

See also this, and this, this, and this.