2005 Tour of The Middle East
Starting with a September 26, 2005 stop in Egypt, Hughes went on a "listening tour" of the Middle East to speak with leaders and people from the region. This was a response to growing fears in America about rampant anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Hughes was the third person chosen for this task by President Bush, following unsuccessful attempts by Charlotte Beers and Margaret Tutwiler. For her tour, Hughes asked two Citizen Ambassadors to accompany her. Following an apparently non-selective process, Hughes chose a college student, Tina Karima Daoud, and William O'Brien, a retired high school geography teacher, as the first two Citizen Ambassadors. In her press briefing, Hughes detailed the process by which Ms. Daoud was added to the tour: "I have brought along with me on this trip, as a symbol of things to come, two citizens, one a young Muslim American, Tina Karima who met the very first week in my office when I asked to meet with a group of Muslim students from universities in the Washington area, and she came to that meeting and she followed up and sent me an email and said she was really interested in some of the things I said and could we have lunch? So we had lunch and I talked with her and learned more about her, and discovered that she was already working at the State Department on a small project -- she could tell you exactly what it was -- a fellowship project, but it was in something like -- it was very administrative. And so I said maybe we could get her to come help us with public diplomacy, and so she in fact is now working with us on public diplomacy on that fellowship and is traveling with us on this trip, but I think it's - to show again the importance of our own American young people reaching out to young people across the world, which I hope to foster more of."
On her September 27 stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia during a talk with female students, she expressed her wish that women could "fully participate in society" as they do in the United States. In response one of the women said "The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn't happy Well, we're all pretty happy.".
In a press conference in Jakarta, Indonesia Hughes incorrectly stated that Saddam Hussein "had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas." Conventional sources attest that Saddam did order the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis during the al-Anfal Campaign and other violent suppressions, but casualties from his infamous gas attack on Halabja numbered in the thousands.
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