Missing The Point
Thanks to Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog I don’t have to go looking for NPR’s interview with Karen Hughes, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy yesterday on All Things Considered.
Hughes says she’s trying to convince foreigners about the positive aspects of U.S. policy.
“One of my frustrations as a communicator is that a lot of times people don’t even know what we’ve done.”
Au contraire, Ms. Hughes, the problem is that people do know what the US has done in their area for more than a half century during the Cold War, and while the actions may have been in accord with the goals of the US at the time, they have not been universally beneficial to the local inhabitants.
The local people know:
The US and UK removed a democratically elected government in Iran with Operation Ajax;
The US supplied Saddam Hussein with weapons and helped him create WMDs during the Iran-Iraq War; and
Most of today’s “terrorists” were created by the US financed Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Painting schools or rosy verbal scenarios are not going to negate what people know.
2 comments
Agreed, you just can’t spin this stuff.
No one in this administration has taken the time to read the history of the area. They don’t understand that we have done things that these people are not going to forget.