ISTANBUL: When Karen Hughes met Egyptians on a boat floating on the Nile River on the second day of her Middle East tour, she wore a piece of jewellery she had just purchased from noted Egyptian designer Azza Fahni — a pearl necklace with a medallion inscribed with the Arabic words for ‘Love, sincerity, friendship’.

The inscription echoed the relentless themes that Hughes — the undersecretary of state and Bush confidant charged with burnishing the US image in the Muslim world — stressed at every public forum during her five-day trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Hughes focused on common love of family, her sincere effort to reach out to bridge gaps in perception and the long history of friendship and exchanges between peoples.

Indeed, Hughes brought the tactics of a US political campaign to the world of diplomacy, mixing evocative images with simple and sometimes hokey lines — ‘I am a mom and I love kids’ — designed to strike an emotional chord with Muslim audiences.

But as Hughes completed her trip and flew back to Washington on Thursday, the vastness of her task loomed even larger than when she left. The local media attention, which appeared to grow in the course of the week, mixed pictures of her holding smiling children with sceptical and dismissive reports. Her audiences, especially in Egypt, often consisted of elites with long ties to the United States, but many said the core reason for the poor American image remained US policies, not how those policies were marketed or presented.

Abdel-Rahman Rashid, a prominent writer and head of Al Arabiya satellite network, wrote in the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that, in the Arab world, the United States “resembles a woman of ill-repute whom everyone wants to court but only in secret”. He said Hughes “will face an important decision: repair the US’s reputation, which is nearly impossible, or modify the country’s policies, also almost unfeasible”.

For many in the region, the United States is considered both scary, because of the war in Iraq, and hypocritical, because the administration calls for democracy while funnelling $2 billion a year to an autocratic regime like Egypt, with much of that devoted to the military and infrastructure projects.

Aly Abdel Fatah, an activist in the Muslim Brotherhood — which is officially banned by the Egyptian government — said in a telephone interview that if Hughes had met him, he would have asked her to “support real reform in the Middle East, not a cosmetic one but a real one that would allow the people to participate”. He added that the United States needed to be an ‘honest broker’ in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and let the ‘Iraqis govern themselves’.

Hughes, assessing the trip for reporters travelling with her, said she was not taken aback or surprised by the tough criticism of US policy.

“I heard a lot of heartfelt concerns,” she said. “I think it is important to talk about those tough issues.”

Hughes said it struck her that in Egypt and especially Saudi Arabia, people were worried that Americans hold a low opinion or distorted perspective of their own cultures, which she said was an important issue. Hughes said she is pressing for a significant boost in funds to promote exchange programmes between the Muslim world and the United States.

She also said she hadn’t realized how people overseas can get so riled by US television programmes or newspaper columns that have nothing to do with the administration. In Turkey, for instance, a number of people told her they were very upset about a recent newspaper opinion article critical of Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.

Hughes met a range of pre-selected audiences — female Saudi students, working mothers in Istanbul, former exchange students in Egypt — but generally had few encounters with people in the street, except for the occasional child she would stop and talk to. She said on future trips, such as her trip to Indonesia in October, she wants to reach out to a broader range of people. Former President Bill Clinton elevated the ‘public diplomacy’ post to one of the top levels of the State Department in 1999, and Hughes is the fourth person to hold the position. But it has had an unhappy history in the Bush administration, and was largely unfilled for two years. Hughes’ close association with President Bush has given the job new visibility and helped her arrange meetings with officials far above her rank, including the Egyptian prime minister and the king of Saudi Arabia.

Hughes, who was instrumental in Bush’s 2000 campaign, demonstrated the tools of an experienced political operative during the trip. She even took along two ‘citizen-ambassadors’ — a Muslim American intern at the State Department and a Democratic school teacher from Wisconsin — to demonstrate the diversity of the United States and the bipartisan nature of her mission.

In her public statements, she stressed common support for goals — such as a Palestinian state and ending the violence in Iraq — while ignoring or downplaying deep concerns over US tactics to achieve those objectives. And Hughes used the power of repetition, saying almost the same thing, word for word, in almost every interview and public forum. Sometimes the result was banality: In Ankara, she gushed: “I love all kids. And I understand that is something I have in common with the Turkish people — that they love children.” Hughes repeatedly said — such as three times during a brief interview with the Al Jazeera satellite news network — that Bush was the ‘very first president’ to support a Palestinian state. Hughes told reporters travelling with her that she was surprised Bush didn’t get more credit in the region for calling for a Palestinian state. But several people who met Hughes said they consider the Bush administration to be biased in favour of Israel and that it has done little in five years to support the goal.

Hughes, a former television journalist, also kept an eye on the media images. After a tense confrontation with Turkish women over the Iraq war, for instance, she overrode her security detail to stroll through the cobblestone streets of old Ankara. The result was video of her entering stores and greeting shopkeepers, the perfect antidote to the clash that had just occurred.

In Egypt, when she asked for a show of hands by college students who had voted in the recent presidential election, only one hand shot up. Yet by the next day, she had worked into her standard speech a heartwarming story about meeting someone who had participated in the first multiparty election in Egypt’s history. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service