Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on her nomination…she was easily approved.

George Bush’s appointee for foreign propaganda is one of the advisors who decided to sell him as a Texas good ol’ boy living on the family ranch — which he bought in 1999.

Unfortunately, Hughes’s most important constituents aren’t going to respond to engagement and empowerment, let alone exchange and education, unless the latter involves those flight schools where they don’t teach you how to take off or land. It has become clear in Iraq, if it wasn’t already, that what we call the “war on terrorism” is in fact a small part of a larger intellectual and religious struggle within Islam, between moderates who want to live in modern countries, and radicals who want to impose their extreme interpretation of sharia, or religious law.

To fight these ideas, friendly state visits from Laura Bush will not suffice. Neither will more Britney Spears songs for Muslim teenagers, which is what we play on U.S.-funded Farsi and Arabic radio in the Middle East.

Anne Applebaum’s article in the Washington POST points out incompetence and hypocrisy; but, doesn’t examine the larger contradiction. Bush and Blair hope and believe that problems can be solved by throwing propaganda at them. That may work at winning elections. After all, people both sides of the pond are brainwashed from birth to believe in advertising — even when we end up with Edsels and Microsoft Bob and the Millenium Dome. It’s a little more difficult to convince people that all those dudes with guns who don’t speak your language are shooting up your neighborhood to make your life better. Just like the dudes with guns who do speak your language. Especially when some of them — the Brits — are back for the third time in living memory.

We’ve started a civil war. The best-known modern example of “victory” won with outside troops involved Hitler and Franco.