In her “Irritating Muslims 2005 Tour,” U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes has lived up to our expectation that absent any substantive policy changes, her repackaging would do little good. After a largely counterproductive trip to Egypt, Hughes tried her luck in Indonesia:

At a public debate with university students in Jakarta, she was repeatedly criticized over Washington’s original stated rationale for the war in Iraq — Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were discovered.

“The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat,” Hughes said.

“After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” she told about 100 students in a small auditorium. “He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.”

Every death is a tragedy, but is Hughes serving her country by exaggerating the numbers? 5,000 were gassed, not “hundreds of thousands.” But then again her boss thinks that we have 250 million years worth of coal, so it’s all relative.