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	Majority of People in Arab World believe Iraq War has brought less Peace by Jim Lobe Inter Press Service   December 3, 2005   While the past 15 months have brought a slight decline in anti-U.S. sentiment, public opinion in the Arab world about Washington"s policies and intentions in the Middle East remains overwhelmingly negative and deeply sceptical, according to a major new survey released here Friday.   Most Arabs continue to believe the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq has harmed prospects for both stability and democratic development in the region, as well as the welfare of Iraqis themselves, according to survey"s designer, Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.   "Iraq has become the new prism of pain through which Arabs are looking at the U.S. and the world," he said, noting that 80 percent of respondents said they based their views on U.S. "policies", rather than U.S. or western "values" or way of life.   The survey, the third in an annual series overseen by the polling firm Zogby International, was based on interviews with a total of 3,900 people in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates in the latter half of October. The results of a second survey conducted by Zogby at the same time are scheduled to be released by the Arab American Institute next week.   While the overall impression of the impact of the Iraq war remains overwhelmingly negative, the University of Maryland survey found a slight improvement in Arab perceptions compared to the last survey taken in the early summer of 2004, when anti-U.S. sentiment was at its height.   Thus, 81 percent of respondents said that the Iraq war had brought "less peace" (rather than "more peace") to the Middle East, compared to 92 percent in the 2004 survey. Similarly, 78 percent said the war had produced "more terrorism", compared to 84 percent in 2004; and 58 percent said it had produced "less democracy", compared to the 64 percent who made that assessment 15 months ago.   As to Iraq itself, 77 percent of respondents in the five countries said Iraqis were "worse off" as a result of the war, compared to 82 percent who said so in the summer of 2004. Only six percent said Iraqis were better off.   These relative improvements - however modest - were due less to a new appreciation for U.S. policies and intentions than to the effects of the simple passage of time on passions aroused by the invasion and some of the scandals, such as the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, that followed, according to Telhami.   The survey also found overwhelming scepticism in each country about U.S. intentions in Iraq and the region as a whole.   Asked to volunteer what they saw as the most important U.S. objectives in the Middle East, large majorities or respondents identified oil (76 percent); protection of Israel (68 percent); the "domination of the region" (63 percent), and the weakening of the Muslim world (59 percent), while small minorities mentioned more benign motives, such as preventing weapons of mass destruction (25 percent), peace and stability (8 percent), democracy, and human rights (6 percent each).   Asked specifically how they reacted to the Bush administration"s claims to be actively promoting the spread of democracy in the region, about two out of every three respondents (ranging from 59 percent in Jordan to 78 percent in Egypt) told interviewers that they do not believe that democracy is Washington"s real objective.   And of the 25 percent of respondents overall who accepted that democracy-promotion was indeed an "important objective" of the U.S. four in five said the U.S. is "going about it in the wrong way".   Hostility and distrust of the United States also showed up in other survey questions. Asked to name the two countries that posed the greatest threat to them, 70 percent of respondents cited Israel and 63 percent cited the United States. The next most frequently cited nation was Britain (11 percent), followed by Iran (6 percent).   Similarly, when asked to name the foreign leader they most disliked, two names dominated the answers -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (45 percent) and George W. Bush (30 percent). Bush"s staunch ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, grabbed third place with three percent.   Conversely, French President Jacques Chirac, who opposed the war in Iraq, was the run-away choice for most-admired foreign leader. He was cited by 13 percent of respondents, followed by the late Palestinian leader, Yassir Arafat (4 percent); and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (3 percent).   Chirac"s position as the favoured world leader was confirmed in a number of other questions. Asked to assume a world in which there was only one superpower and to choose which country they would prefer, a plurality of 21 percent of respondents chose France, which was followed by China (13 percent), Germany, which also opposed the Iraq war, (10 percent); Pakistan (ten percent) Britain (seven percent); the U.S. (six percent); and Russia (five percent).   The thread running through these preferences, according to Telhami, was respondents" support for or identification with countries and people perceived as defying the United States.   In that regard, he pointed to another question designed to probe respondents" attitudes towards al Qaeda. Asked what they "sympathised with most" about the group, only 13 percent voiced approval either of al Qaeda"s aim to create an Islamic state (6 percent) or its methods of operation (seven percent).   A majority of 56 percent, on the other hand, expressed admiration for the fact that it "confronts the U.S." (36 percent) or "stands up for Muslim causes" (20 percent). "They see (al Qaeda) as an instrument of anti-imperialism," noted Telhami.   The survey also found surprising support for Iran in its stand-off with the United States and other western countries over its nuclear programme. Sixty percent of all respondents said they opposed international pressure on Iran to curtail the programme, while only 21 percent said they approved. At the same time, 43 percent said they believe Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, compared to 32 percent who said they believe Tehran when it says it is merely conducting research for peaceful purposes.   In another setback to U.S. diplomacy, the survey found that al-Jazeera remains by far the most popular electronic source of international news across the region, particularly in the most-populous states - Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. Overall, 45 percent of respondents said they watch al-Jazeera most often, while another 20 percent identified it as their second preferred source.   It was reported last week that Bush was dissuaded by Blair in April 2004 from bombing the al-Jazeera"s headquarters in Qatar in retaliation for what the White House saw as its biased and damaging coverage of the U.S. assault on Fallujah.   Washington flatly denied the story, but the British government is prosecuting suspects who are believed to have leaked the contents of a memorandum recording the Bush-Blair meeting under the Official Secrets Act.   "Despite all its issues with the U.S., al-Jazeera is still number one," said Telhami who suggested that its performance was due primarily to its ability to express the opinions of its viewers.
	The challenge and the fear of becoming Enlightened by Pierre Tristam Stetson University   28 Nov. 2005   Since Sept. 11, we"ve been living under a "clash of civilizations" doctrine that can be summed up this way: Over there, dogma, orthodoxy, Islam; over here, democracy, pluralism, Constitution. Over there, dark continents, dark ages, terrorism; over here, enlightened West, enlightenment, freedom.   The doctrine has been used to justify two wars (so far) and a wholesale shift in the way the United States deploys its aims abroad and projects them at home. The doctrine draws its power from the language of freedom -- the language of enlightenment -- both in the way we"ve gone about defining ourselves as a culture and in the way we"ve gone about defending our right to fight the war on terror on our terms, but on other people"s turfs.   The doctrine is fatally flawed, and its consequences are lethal, both to American principles at home and to American interests abroad. There"s no connection between the language we"re using in defining ourselves and the reality being imposed at home and abroad. The language itself has become the mask of its very opposite. If you want absolutes, if you want black and white, if you want orthodoxy, look no further than the way American culture politically and legally has been evolving in the past several years.   That"s not to say that those orthodoxies don"t exist in the Muslim world. They do in spades. But the enlightenment ideal is not under attack from outside our culture. It is under attack from within it, in a context that increasingly fears pluralism, scorns dissent and erodes democracy. The very ideas of rational, critical thinking, of progress by way of challenging assumptions, is being replaced by a faith-based approach in policy-making and a fundamentalist approach in legal thinking (what some people call originalism) that is diametrically opposed to the ideals of enlightenment. If a battle for freedom is being waged, it is being waged on the wrong front.   ISLAM"S TOLERANCE   First, a look at Islam as a world supposedly so incapable of solving its crises that only western intervention can help. We should be honest. Islamdom doesn"t have a good reputation these days, and it brings a lot of the trouble on itself. But any religion in the wrong hands, beginning with Americans" own Christian creeds, can be violent, backward and evil. It so happens that few religions can lay claim to as much beauty of spirit, art, enlightenment and advancement of the human race as Islam did for the entirety of the Middle Ages, when nothing in Europe could hold a candle to Islamic civilization, when Islam was enlightenment before enlightenment was cool.   What was unique about Islam"s early and middle period was its great tolerance for people of other faiths, its love and wealth of learning, its antipathy for dogma, its realization of pluralism -- in the great Abassid caliphates of Baghdad from the 9th to the 12th centuries, in Spain during the same period, in India during the 16th and early part of the 17th centuries. It"s possible to see the Muslim Enlightenment literally as bookends, in time and geography, with Baghdad in the early period and the reign of Akbar the Great in the 16th and 17th centuries in India, who lived up to a famous verse in the Koran that speaks for all the potential pluralism in Islam: "There can be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from error" (which is actually a retelling of what Jesus said to his followers: "The truth will make you free.")   Akbar"s enlightened reign in India coincided with Europe"s bloodiest age of religious bigotry and warfare, when the Inquisition was murdering Jews in Spain and Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other everywhere else, when beheadings were the preferred method of Calvinists in sleepy Geneva for adulterous men, when Europe was to know nine wars of religion in three decades in a warm-up to the massacres and holocausts of the 17th century. The roads of religious intolerance are paved with the bones of that occasional oxymoron we know of as western civilization. And those same roads are conveniently forgotten by those who would point to a place like the Middle East and say things like, "Those people have been at each other"s throats for ever." Not quite true. Any notion that the Enlightenment was a western invention, or that barbarism is an eastern specialty, is a bit misguided.   But it is also true that everything is not relative. The Middle East today and much of the Islamic world is not a comfortable place to be. It is often not a defensible place. A United Nations report on Arab development noted that the 22 countries that form the Arab world translate about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece alone translates. The cumulative total of translated books since 9th century Baghdad is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in a single year. What that world needs is a dose of its own past enlightenment. So it"s a fair question: If Islam showed not only the potential but the reality of enlightenment over its history, why not now, and why shouldn"t the West be showing the way back to enlightenment?   Aside from the obvious fact that enlightenment doesn"t spring from the belly of a B-52, because what"s going on now in the Islamic world is exactly what should be going on: A reformation as momentous and violent as Europe"s reformation was 500 years ago. Islam is trying to reinvent itself. It is looking for a way out of its morass. The forces of reform and the reactionary forces of fundamentalism are literally at each other"s throats, the way Catholics and Protestants, and eventually religion and secularism, were at each other"s throats in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.   It"s not black and white. The camps aren"t neatly divided between progressives and reformers. Nor is the presumption true that the moderates are looking to adopt Western ways. The struggle is within Islam, for a solution for Islam, not to please the West, look like the West or get closer to the West. Who will win in Islam is anybody"s guess. Any way you look at it -- in Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon -- where you have elections, the moderates are losing big at the moment. But at the same time it"s also true, as the Iranian scholar of Islam Reza Aslan argues in a new book on Islam"s evolution, "the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world today readily accept the fundamental principles of democracy." It just isn"t American-style democracy they necessarily want or need.   So far as the West is concerned, this, as Aslan argues, is the most important lesson to learn: We are bystanders in this battle within Islam. We are not players. We are not wanted as players. We should not so arrogantly pretend to be players, or to think we have the right or the means to be players. How can we even think something like that with Sept. 11 behind us? Because the Sept. 11 attacks were not a declaration of war on the West, the way the lock and load warriors in the neo-con brigades like to see them.   The attacks were part of that "internal conflict between Muslims," and they made us, in Aslan"s words, "an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story."   Let"s not play into the hands of the fanatics, or confuse the spectacular with the successful. The best we can do is what Islam did in its glory period of conquests: Show the light by example. Live up to our own enlightenment ideals.   What we are doing instead is the very opposite. Through such things as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the secret prisons around the world called black sites, the bloody occupation of Iraq and the seemingly endless occupation of Afghanistan, we are only proving to the Islamic world that the secular West is diseased, that the Crusades, the Colonial period and the broken promises of the post-colonial 20th century were not a fluke but a pattern.   In Islam"s eyes, the West, the secular West especially, doesn"t save. It mucks up. As long as the United States insists on crusading for freedom in Islam"s lands, it will be retarding the more enlightened movements for reform there.   For all his good intentions, George W. Bush has been fundamentalist Islam"s best friend, and has probably set back the progress of Islamic Enlightenment for many, many years.   Osama bin Laden might as well pray facing the White House every day, because without this White House playing right into fundamentalist Islam"s recruiting drives, Osama might well have been nothing more than a bag of bones attached to a dialysis machine by now, and the tyrannical Arab world might well have been on its way to following in the steps of the Soviet Union"s disintegration at the end of the 1980s. Instead, we have a disintegration of our own to worry about.   DUAL TRANSFORMATIONS   The world of Islam is going through a great reformation. But in some ways, so is the United States. The world of Islam is divided between the forces of modernity and the reaction of fundamentalism. But so is the United States, and I don"t mean just because evangelicals are pulling a few political strings.   The Islamic world is trying to redefine its identity, with the Koran in the center of the battle. But so is the United States, with the Constitution, which has always been synonymous with American identity, at the heart of the battle -- and the Bible trying to make its way back in there. So what we have between East and West are two distinct struggles for identity. We delude ourselves into thinking either side can affect outcomes in the other. The irony is that while the president is warning us about this ragtag bunch of Islamic nut cases trying to "destroy our way of life," we"re being distracted from a very serious struggle happening right here that is changing our way of life.   The more we talk about doing battle for liberty in the world, the more we are losing it at home by not paying attention to what"s happening at home. The more we continue to ignore that the country is in the middle of its own identity crisis, the more the forces of reaction and fundamentalism can redefine the political climate their way, not even by stealth, but by using the language of enlightenment as a Trojan horse: Trust us. We are doing this for freedom"s sake. We are "the light of the world," and "whoever follows (us) will never walk in darkness." That"s a quote from the Gospel according to John of course, but it"s also a visual quote from Bush"s campaign ads in 2004, if you remember the famous "wolves" commercial that warns of "an increasingly dangerous world" and shows a bunch of wolves ready to attack - if you don"t vote for the Bush-Cheney ticket.   Seventy-two years ago Franklin Roosevelt told us the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. These days we"re told the only thing we have to fear is safety. The state of fear is our friend. Perpetual war is our condition in whose name anything goes. And all the while, freedom is being redefined as an instrument of state rather than an individual pursuit guaranteed by state protection.   That sounds strangely familiar. The fundamentalists and the reactionaries in the Islamic world, are looking to impose a regressive, power-centered society of control and submission. But what the reactionaries are doing in the United States isn"t that ideologically different. We are replacing the notion of an enlightened, progressive society with the notion of a defensive, reactionary society..   (The essay is adapted from "The Language of Enlightenment," a lecture presented as part of Stetson University"s Values Lecture Series. Published by the Daytona Beach News Journal).   Click on the link below to access the rest of this article. Visit the related web page
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