US first lady starts Mideast tour citing image woes
Reuters
Date: 05-20-05
By Adam Entous
AMMAN, Jordan (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Laura Bush started a goodwill tour of the Middle East on Friday acknowledging America's image in the Muslim world was badly damaged by a prisoner abuse scandal and a retracted magazine report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran.
Laura Bush said she hoped her five-day mission to Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Egypt, on which she will stress the importance of giving more political freedom to women, will help repair that damage.
She also acknowledged the difficulty of restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and called for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to set an example to the Middle East with fair elections.
"I hope that the Middle East, the broader Middle East, get to know Americans like we really are," Laura Bush told reporters before arriving in Amman, her first stop.
"I don't think they really have the sense of Americans being religious ... being tolerant of every religion."
The White House has called on Newsweek to help repair damage caused by the Koran report, later retracted by the magazine, that interrogators at the U.S. military prison in Cuba had flushed at least one copy of the Muslim holy book down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.
With anti-American sentiment already strong in the Muslim world because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the report sparked violent protests -- in Afghanistan, where 16 people were killed and more than 100 hurt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza.
The first lady said Newsweek made a mistake but was not entirely to blame for what ensued.
"Of course I think it was damaging, but in the United States, if there's a terrible report, people don't riot and kill other people. And you can't excuse what they did because of the mistake," she said, adding, "You can't blame it all on Newsweek."
Instead, the first lady blamed "terrible happenings," including the Abu Ghraib scandal, for having "really, really hurt our image."
Beginning with a speech at the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea, Jordan, on Saturday, the first lady said she would press for expanding women's voting rights in the Middle East.
"In a democracy, everybody has to participate or it won't work," she told reporters, but added: "I want people in the Middle East to know, too, that we don't think we have every answer, that we're not trying to answer every question for them."
Ahead of her visit to Jerusalem and to Jericho in the West Bank, Laura Bush acknowledged the difficulty of making progress under a U.S.-backed "road map" for peace, saying "for every step forward ... we have, you know, one step back."
"But I really, truly believe that we're as close as we've ever been to peace... So of course I want to encourage both sides to continue on the steps."
The first lady's message to Mubarak blended praise with gentle prodding.
"President Mubarak is very popular in Egypt, he's very well liked, and it's very important for him, as well as for the country, as well as an example for the rest of the countries in the broader Middle East to show that Egypt can have free and fair elections," Laura Bush said.
The Egyptian Parliament voted last week to change the constitution to allow for direct presidential elections with several candidates.
But the opposition says the conditions rule out any serious challenge to Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981 and is widely expected to stand in September.
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