DOHA, Qatar — On what looks like the eve of war in Iraq, there is evidence of a vast gap between the way the United States and the rest of the world view the crisis.
What Americans see largely as a campaign to eliminate one Middle Eastern dictator -- Saddam Hussein -- is viewed by many in Europe and especially the Arab world as nothing less than a watershed in global affairs.
They worry that America's self-declared right to launch preemptive wars, its willingness to dismiss the United Nations, to shuck allies and make plans to invade and occupy another country -- all amid talk of remaking the Mideast -- are the beginning of the end of the post-World War II order and the start of an American Imperium.
Indeed, for a growing number of observers outside the United States, the central issue in the crisis is no longer Iraq or Hussein. It is America and how to deal with its disproportionate strength as a world power.
What the Bush administration describes as a war of liberation is widely seen abroad -- even by those who condemn the Iraqi president -- as a war of occupation.
"A simple truth has been withheld from the American people," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. "In the eyes of most Arabs, America lacks the legitimacy and moral authority to impose itself on Iraq."
Added Sabah Mukhtar, the Iraqi-born head of the Arab Lawyers Assn. in London: "Arabs and Muslims are just like anyone else in the world. They don't like invaders, even if they come as liberators. There's a serious belief the United States wants to redraw the map of the Middle East to favor Israel."
Even President Bush's announced decision to unveil a so-called road map for Middle East peace has been dismissed in the region as little more than a public relations trick -- a last-ditch effort to build support for war among Arabs.
"The timing will make people across the Arab world look at it as part of the preparation for war," said Hamad Kawari, Qatar's ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s and, later, to the United States. "They won't take it seriously."
Ironically, the 1991 Persian Gulf War was also seen as a watershed in world affairs -- but a very different one. As the first major conflict of the post-Cold War era, it unfolded against a backdrop of Soviet-American diplomatic cooperation, a rejuvenated U.N. and a broad, American-led coalition of nations. The era was one of high expectations, in which America, standing triumphant amid the wreckage of communism, perhaps was never more admired, never had more friends.
