Laura Bush in Jordan. (Reuters)

Dead Sea (Jordan), May 21 (Reuters): US First Lady Laura Bush called for greater rights for women in West Asia today and said the US respected all faiths during a tour to counter anti-American sentiment in the region.

One of the White House’s more popular envoys to the outside world, the First Lady had started her solo diplomatic mission yesterday by talking frankly about America’s serious image problems here, singling out abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

At the World Economic Forum today, Laura Bush stuck more closely to the administration’s message of hope, citing elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, a newly-elected president for Palestinians, and women being given voting rights in Kuwait. “Women who have not yet won these rights are watching,” the First Lady told a conference room on the shore of the Dead Sea.

“Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression,” she said. “It’s the right to speak and vote and worship freely. Human rights requires the rights of women.”

She did not name Saudi Arabia ? one of the few countries in the world that bars women from voting or standing in elections. This time, she also did not mention revelations about detainee abuses in Afghanistan or Iraq, or the violent backlash over a retracted magazine report that the Quran was desecrated by US interrogators.

Instead she said: “In the US, we respect the traditions of all faiths.”