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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Thanks to Bush's neocon cabal, the Arab world now hates the U.S. as much as it does Israel.
May 7, 2004 | It is hard to sleep while traveling in the Arab world, not because of the ubiquitous street noise of Cairo, the deafening quiet of Doha, or the searing heat and humidity of Bahrain but, rather, because of the images on Arab news networks. Two stories in succession: soldiers entering a home in the middle of the night ... terrified women and children ... all the men of the household rousted from their beds, handcuffed, blindfolded and led away to detention. Bethlehem? Ramadi? What difference does it make to viewers of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya? In Arab eyes, the United States and Israel are now one.
To the neoconservatives, the fact that there is little, if any, daylight between Washington and Jerusalem is largely a good thing, and the overwhelming anti-Americanism that the U.S.-Israeli relationship seems to produce among so many in the region is the fault of Al-Jazeera, not U.S. policy. The level of denial about what is wrong in the Middle East is so strong and pervasive within the administration that from the State Department and the Pentagon to the Old Executive Office Building and even commanders in Iraq there is an effort underway to lay blame for Washington's current dismal image in the region at the doors of the Al-Jazeera studios. To be sure, there is plenty on Arab TV networks that distorts U.S. actions and intentions, but couldn't the same be said of Fox News?
The fact remains that the "new Arab media" is not Washington's problem. Rather, the combination of the way the United States handled the run-up to the war in Iraq, the occupation of that country and the Bush administration's close identification with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compromises Washington's ability to manage its relations with the Arab world -- and has contributed to unprecedented anti-Americanism throughout the region. Even among the few Arab liberals and reformers, the United States is no longer a beacon of freedom and justice, but a purveyor of cynical double standards and a self-interested supporter of repressive authoritarian regimes. "I have lost faith in the United States. We don't have democracy because Washington supports this terrible regime," laments one liberal opponent of the Egyptian government.
To have a good foreign policy, one needs good assumptions about the world. When it comes to the Middle East, those at the policymaking level of the Bush administration seem to have strong views about the region, but they have precious little grasp of its politics, history and culture. For example, throughout 2002 and early 2003, the American public was told that Iraqis would celebrate with U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad when Saddam Hussein fell and that the Iraqi people would assist in a relatively smooth rebuilding of the country. There were, of course, stirring images of U.S. Marines helping Baghdadis pull down the statues of Saddam in Firdous Square on April 8, 2003, but there were no large-scale celebrations. Not because Iraqis were unhappy to see Saddam go but because of their manifest mistrust of the United States. Why would anyone expect Shiites to celebrate and assist the United States after the first Bush administration abandoned them to Saddam in the spring of 1991? Was it realistic to believe that the Sunni population -- a minority that prospered in Iraq under Saddam -- would help the United States raze the very institutions that had privileged this group since the founding of modern Iraq?
