With radical bombers in New York and Saddam Hussein dodging Tomahawk missiles in Baghdad because he tried to kill George Bush in Kuwait, chances for normal developments of local economies and U.S. relations with the Middle East look particularly grim at the moment.
Some U.S. experts, including former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, say conflict is inevitable between the United States and the world of Islam. And Sunday talk shows dismiss the Arab world as irrational. "They just hate us, don't they?" chirped commentator George Will.
But that's fear-mongering nonsense. Reality in the Middle East is more optimistic, say experts on the area. And Americans should be aware that there is no inherent conflict between Islam and free markets or a democratic system. Yes, Islamic fundamentalists are implacably opposed to democracy and the West. But they are still a fringe movement. The great majority of Muslim people in the Middle East are impatient only for the economic development they now see in countries of Asia that used to be as poor as they are--the kind of development going on in Malaysia and Turkey, Muslim states with modern, growing economies.
The truth about the Middle East matters to Americans, who fought a war there, whose oil comes from there, whose foreign aid goes there. (Israel and Egypt are the chief recipients of U.S. aid.) Also, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States is the unquestioned power in the region. That's one reason America attracts venom from the crazies. But that is also why U.S. efforts could convene peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Jordan and Syria. After almost two years, those talks may be nearing agreements.
Peace would be a boon, says William Quandt, a Middle East scholar at the Brookings Institution. It would encourage economic development in Syria, Jordan and Egypt, one of the area's largest countries, and in Israel as well.
Quandt, who visited the region four times in the last year, reports that in every country generations of men and women are impatient for change. The promises of post-colonial governments beginning in the 1960s and of oil wealth in the 1970s have gone unfulfilled. Arab and Iranian people see changes in Asia, in the Soviet lands and Eastern Europe, in Latin America. Yet in the Middle East there are only the same old leaders and the same lack of opportunity.
