Chief of US public diplomacy post resigning

WASHINGTON - Karen Hughes, one of the last of President Bush's dwindling circle of Texas advisers, said yesterday that she would step down this year as the State Department's head of US public diplomacy.

She is credited with energizing efforts to improve the American image abroad - more actively spreading good news about the United States while more aggressively confronting the bad. But Hughes herself has said that hers was the "work of generations," an imposing challenge at a time when the United States was fighting wars in two Muslim countries and when words like "waterboarding" and "Abu Ghraib" had entered the world's vocabulary.

Opinion polls indicate that the image of the United States in Muslim countries - the chief objective of Hughes's labors - has not improved and in some cases has deteriorated since she took office two years ago.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in announcing Hughes's plan for departure, praised her warmly for making public diplomacy "strong and central" to American foreign policy.

Public diplomacy efforts toward the Muslim world, propelled to prominence by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, got off to a slow start.

One of Hughes's predecessors, Charlotte Beers, came from the advertising world and had scant foreign experience. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican foreign policy leader, said in 2003 that US efforts to improve the American image among Muslims had been "all thumbs." Beers's successor, Margaret Tutwiler, a former State Department spokeswoman, lasted five months.

Hughes herself lacked extensive foreign experience, though she speaks some Spanish, learned as a child when her father was governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

But she was considered to have one major advantage over her predecessors: her close ties to Bush, forged when she was director of communications for him when he was governor of Texas and strengthened further when she accompanied him to the White House as counselor and communications adviser. She left that job in 2002 to spend more time at home with her family, though she continued advising Bush from afar.

She returned to the administration in mid-2005 to take on the post of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Sensing that bad news and sometimes baseless rumors about the United States were being allowed to spread unchallenged among Muslims while good news was not actively presented, she sharply increased the number of interviews by US officials, including Arabic speakers, with Arabic news media. She said she was tired of seeing the president presented as a "caricature."

Hughes established rapid- response centers to react to unfavorable news overseas. The public diplomacy budget swelled, nearly doubling to $900 million a year. She promoted cultural and educational exchanges, added summer camps and English classes for Muslim youths in 44 countries, and traveled tirelessly, telling all who would listen - particularly women - that Americans were people of faith.

But her travels had mixed results. She was credited for her vigor, empathy, and the sweep of her efforts. But she was mocked at times for gaffes or misreadings of local sentiment.

Shortly after taking her job, she told an audience of 500 Saudi women that she hoped someday they would be able to drive and "fully participate in society" as American women do; but many of the women expressed resentment at the American assumption that everyone wanted to live like them.

The overall gains in public diplomacy are difficult to assess. Perceptions abroad of the United States are formed most frequently by wars, foreign policy, contacts, and popular culture. But opinion polls, at least, show little progress from 2005, when favorability ratings toward the United States were in single digits in many Muslim countries.

"Over the course of her term, the image of the United States has not improved among Muslim countries and, in fact, in some Muslim countries, particularly Turkey, it has become markedly less positive," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. He was quick to add that "this may not be a measure of her lack of competence, but how little, in the end, public diplomacy can do when the issue, in the end, is big events."

Hughes told the Associated Press that in her travels, Muslims and Arabs generally raised the Iraq war only after bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She said she had advised Bush and Rice that resolving that conflict would do more than anything to improve US standing.

Two other members of the president's Texas inner circle left the White House this year: Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove.