Laura Bush on ME tour

US first lady Laura Bush started a goodwill tour of the Middle East yesterday acknowledging America's image in the Muslim world was badly damaged by a prisoner abuse scandal and a retracted magazine report that US 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 US 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 US-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.