Mideast shaking its head
CAIRO — In ordering more American troops into Iraq, President Bush said he was sending a message of hope to millions of Arabs and Afghans trapped in violence. But to many on the ground in the Mideast, the speech spoke volumes of a gaping disconnect between high-flown U.S. promises and a deadly, turbulent reality.
After long years of war and political disillusionment, Bush would have been hard-pressed to come up with any message that would please the Arab world. Analysts say public opinion of the United States has sunk to an unprecedented low, with no end in sight to the bloodletting in Iraq or the Palestinian territories.
Many here, long mired in bloodshed and sinking deeper into sectarian tensions, hold America squarely to blame for both.
Rather than sowing political progress, they say, the U.S. presence in Iraq has poisoned the mood so thoroughly that secular and moderate activists now stay silent for fear of being tarred as American agents.
"What the United States did for the region is destruction for the forces who believe in democracy, rule of law and human rights," said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. "We are the real victims."
The Bush administration has repeatedly portrayed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a boost, albeit a painful one, for Arab democracy and human rights. Victory in Baghdad will bring a brighter era to the entire region, U.S. officials have promised.
But after waves of outrage over torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, the spectacle of Saddam Hussein's trial and execution, and sectarian slaughter in the streets of Baghdad, few people here seem able to articulate what, exactly, the United States is even trying to accomplish.
"The U.S. should pull out its troops from Iraq because innocent people are dying every day, including U.S. soldiers," said Karim Salhab, a 25-year-old accountant in Beirut. "I don't think it's fair for the families of these soldiers that their kids die for nothing."
Conventional wisdom here holds that, because the U.S. invasion pitched Iraq into civil war, only an American withdrawal can set the shattered nation back on the road toward stability.
Bush "mismanaged and brutalized Iraq too long to even hope for stability while the troops stay," said Mohammed Sayed Said, an analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "The reservoir of violence and bitterness and agonies is so huge that hoping for stability in the immediate future is self-deception at best."
