The difficulties have been especially acute over the Middle East. Americans can say with truth that many Europeans have taken positions on the Middle East that are cowardly, cynical, and corrupt. But America’s European friends can reply that it does no good for the United States to be idealistic if it is also perceived to be arrogant, peremptory, and obstinate.

 

After all, no matter how cynical Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder may be, there is a real and important difference between American and European interests in the Middle East: Europeans--and especially Italians--live next door to the Arab world; you have large immigrant populations from the Arab world; and you are uniquely vulnerable to upheaval in the Arab world. Americans may want to change the Middle East; Europeans are understandably concerned about being changed by the Middle East.

 

So it has never been more important for the United States to make its case on the Middle East well – not only for the sake of American policy in the Middle East, but for the sake of America’s relationships in Europe.

 

It is therefore big news that U.S. President George W. Bush has named Karen Hughes as his new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. But is it good news?

 

Nobody is closer to this president than Hughes. I wrote about her in my 2003 book on the Bush presidency, The Right Man:

 

"[Karen] Hughes was the only person in the White House who could criticize Bush. She would tell him that he had done a poor job at a speech practice session or at a press conference, and he would react with none of the angry defensiveness that criticism from a less supportive person could provoke ... In turn, her praise mattered more to Bush than that of anyone else on the staff."

 

The appointment of this intimate counselor as, in effect, Bush's ambassador to the world signifies that public diplomacy will--at last--receive the attention it deserves. The Bush administration has not consistently done a good job explaining itself to the rest of the world, and for this failure, the United States has paid a heavy price.

 

Hughes's arrival on the job constitutes a major statement of presidential rededication to the job of global communication. The new undersecretary--who is incidentally also an extremely close friend of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice--will have the President's ear and the power to get things done.

 

But what things will she choose to do? And are they the things that in fact need doing?

 

Hughes is an exceptionally gifted crafter of political messages for the U.S. audience. With her help, George W. Bush has won four consecutive elections for governor and president.

 

Can this record be carried over into the international realm? There are serious reasons to worry.

 

Communications professionals in the Western world take for granted a certain kind of media infrastructure. Politicians speak knowing that their message will be repeated more or less as it is delivered. Though the media may be swayed by unconscious biases, a politician does not have to worry about deliberate deceit or active misrepresentation.

 

So nothing could be more natural--more unavoidable almost--for an American media profession than to think of her job as speaking through the media. That is precisely how Hughes did think when she was running America's international media campaign from the White House from 9/11 until her departure in 2003. She would search out attractive, presentable Americans of Arab or Muslim background and send them on to al-Jazeera or al-Arabiyya, or on overseas speaking tours to make the case that America was not hostile to Islam, was not a country of hedonistic infidels, etc.

 

In 2002 and 2003, that approach failed, and failed badly. In the Middle East, most important indigenous television broadcasters are actively managed agencies of governments. (Including, in the case of the new satellite station al-Hurra, the U.S. government.) The media in this part of the world are not more or less neutral channels of communication. They are weapons in an undeclared war. They are not there to be used by the West. They are there to be used against the West. Instead of trying to speak through the local media, an effective communications strategy in the Middle East has to find ways to speak past them.

 

The locals know that. When Lebanese patriots bring hundreds of thousands of flag-waving demonstrators into the streets to demand that Syria free their country, they are sending a message that not even al-Jazeera can pervert.

 

It is hazardous in today's Middle East to equate communication with words. This is a region in which words have been systematically corrupted, where dictatorship is called "nationalism," where stealing is called "socialism," and where murder is called "martyrdom."

 

And to the extent that words do resonate, they ring in tones that may not be readily audible to those from different cultural traditions. Let me offer just one example.

 

Osama bin Laden calls his terrorism a "jihad." Should we do likewise? Some tough-minded Westerners agree that we should--and that we should then press the Islamic world to repudiate both word and act.

 

On the other hand, the word "jihad" carries deeply positive meanings for those raised on the Koran. There's a real risk that by accepting bin Laden's language, we may inadvertently strengthen him. Some Western Muslims insist that "jihad" should be understood as a purely peaceful activity, the struggle of the conscience against evil inclinations. This reinterpretation of "jihad" is deeply unhistorical--but maybe we ought to be going along with it anyway. One knowledgeable friend argues that we should make a point of describing Osama bin Laden's terrorism as hirabah, or unholy war.

 

Is this a smart suggestion? I can't know--and neither, I fear, can Karen Hughes. That fear makes me wonder whether the President might not have done better to have chosen somebody more naturally fluent in the idiom of the part of the world to which America needs to speak.

 

Somebody like, say, Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami, a Bush advisor and long-time champion of reform in the Arab world. Doesn't anybody at the State Department have his phone number?