[Dialogue] Karen Hughes' Indonesia Visit Underscores Bush Administration's PR Problems

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, I thought you might like to see this. Peace, Harry 
  _____  




Published on Saturday, October 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org 

Karen Hughes' Indonesia Visit Underscores Bush Administration's PR Problems 

by Stephen Zunes 

It is doubtful that the Bush administration will be very successful
advancing America's image in the Islamic world as long as its
representatives have such trouble telling the truth. 

A case in point took place on October 21, when U.S. Undersecretary of State
for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes was talking before a group of university
students in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim
country. As she has found elsewhere in her visits in the Islamic world,
there is enormous popular opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the
ongoing U.S. counter-insurgency war. 

To justify the U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country, recognized in most of
the world as a flagrant violation of international law, Ms. Hughes falsely
claimed that "The consensus of the world intelligence community was that
Saddam was a very dangerous threat." In reality, however, the vast majority
of the world's intelligence community recognized that the government of
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been severely weakened and successfully
contained through the UN-supervised destruction of its weapons of mass
destruction and offensive delivery systems during the 1990s and the
UN-imposed sanctions which prevented Iraq from rebuilding such an arsenal. 

Ms. Hughes also noted that Saddam Hussein "had used weapons of mass
destruction against his own people," neglecting to mention that the Iraqi
regime's use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq
took place back in 1988, before the UN disarmament program eliminated these
weapons and a full fifteen years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion. 

She continued by claiming Saddam Hussein "murdered hundreds of thousands of
his own people using poison gas," and, when later asked by foreign
journalists about that claim, she stated that the figure was "close to
300,000." While the use of chemical agents to massacre civilians is a
serious war crime in any case, this is about sixty times the figure most
observers give for the civilian death toll from such attacks by Saddam's
regime. 

The total number of violent deaths inflicted on behalf of Saddam Hussein
over his quarter century in power may indeed come close to 300,000.
Virtually all those killings, however, took place more than a dozen years
prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003. Thanks to unprecedented restrictions
imposed by the United Nations Security Council which prevented the Baghdad
government from deploying its armed forces over most of the country,
combined with the UN-supervised disarmament program, Saddam Hussein's
ability to inflict such terror on the Iraqi population subsequent to 1991
was severely limited. 

While a strong case could have been made for military intervention in Iraq
under the genocide convention during Saddam's Anfal campaign against the
Kurds in the late 1980s, this is no justification for an invasion fifteen
years after the fact. Ironically, the United States was actively supporting
Saddam Hussein's government during this period, supplying his regime with
military aid and generous loans. 

As a result, the Bush administration's justification of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq on humanitarian grounds is as disingenuous as the claims that it was an
act of self-defense. Indeed, the number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq
in the two and a half years since the U.S. invasion is much greater than in
the two and a half years prior to the invasion and is a major source of
anti-American sentiment in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world. 

It is ironic that Ms. Hughes attempted to justify the invasion on the
brutality of the Iraqi regime while she was in Indonesia, a country which
suffered for more than three decades under an even more brutal dictatorship.
General Suharto, who was ousted in a largely nonviolent popular uprising in
1998, was responsible for a far greater number of civilian deaths than was
Saddam Hussein. 

Soon after seizing power in 1965, Suharto slaughtered over half a million
alleged supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party. His invasion of East
Timor in 1975 resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 civilians, nearly
one-third of that island nation's population. Many hundreds more died in
massacres in Tanjung Priok in Jakarta's port area in 1984, in Lampung on the
southern tip of Sumatra in 1989, and in Dili, East Timor in 1991. 

Throughout this period, rather than threatening an invasion or even
sanctions, both Republican and Democratic administrations sent billions of
dollars worth of U.S. taxpayer-funded armaments to prop up this bloody
dictatorship. 

Unlike Saddam, who went on trial the same week of Hughes' visit to
Indonesia, Suharto lives comfortably in retirement and remains active behind
the scenes. Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has visited the
ex-dictator at his Jakarta residence to pay his respects and Suharto
continues to appear at major functions. The Bush administration has never
expressed any objections to Suharto's impunity nor have they called for
bringing this mass murderer to justice. 

As long as the U.S. government continues to display such a lack of
integrity, no amount of public relations spin by Karen Hughes or anyone else
can improve America's image in Indonesia or anywhere else in the Islamic
world. 

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus
<http://www.fpif.org> , where this article first appeared. He serves as a
professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of
Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512267/commondreams-20/ref=nosim
/>  (Common Courage Press, 2003). 

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