Musandam Peninsula, Oman. I
did not travel 6,500 miles away from home just to see the deserts, oil
wells, and mosques along the Persian Gulf. I have been here before.
Regrettably, however, to understand the problems of the Middle East,
one cannot safely rely on America's news producers because most of them
only reinforce the prejudices prevalent on Capitol Hill and in the White
House.
That's why I wanted to check again how people in the Middle East feel
about America, about the attitudes and policies of the Bush administration,
about the Al Qaida conspiracy against America, about Saddam Hussein
and the projected war to get rid of him.
The short answer is that little has changed: Few Arabs say they hate
Americans, but many of them will eagerly tell you that they are fed
up with the grossly unfair and insensitive policies of the Bush administration
toward Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Upper and middle
class Arabs tend to volunteer their condemnation of the crimes of Muslim
terrorists. They ask, however, why Congress and the White House show
no compassion for the thousands of Palestinian civilians whose lives
and properties have been destroyed by Israeli occupation forces, and
no compassion for the Iraqi victims of 12 years of intermittent American
and British bombings.
There is widespread agreement in the Arab Gulf countries that the weapons
Saddam Hussein may still have are not an imminent threat to Iraq's neighbors
and hardly to Americans 6,000 miles away. Why, I have heard Arabs ask,
do the Iraqi people have to pay with another war for the failure of
the first Bush administration to drive Saddam from power? One Arab commentator
suggested that President Bush seems to have a knack for alienating everybody
who disagrees with his uncompromising demands. Why would the United
Nations become irrelevant, as Mr. Bush warned, just because most of
its members do not share his agenda in the Middle East?
One wished the Arabs who raise those questions could ask such experts
as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice for the answers. Why,
I have been asked dozens of times, does America not use its big military
and financial clout to settle the Israeli conflict fairly and fast?
As long as Mr. Bush takes his clues from Ariel Sharon and Bibi Netanyahu,
peace will only come if all Palestinians are evicted from the West Bank.
And that would provoke even more anti-Israeli and anti-American terror.
While Arabs certainly have their justified questions about the destabilizing
American interference in their region, there are just as many bewildering
and embarrassing questions I have been asking them. Why do they have
so much trouble getting along with each other, particularly the richer
with the poorer countries? Why do they allow so much autocratic government
and so little personal freedom in their societies? And then the most
troubling of all questions: How was it possible for the Muslim extremists
of the al-Qaida conspiracy to develop into a worldwide terrorist mafia?
There are plenty of distressing questions that Muslims, Christians,
and Jews have to ask themselves if there ever is to be peace in the
Middle East.
For Americans, however, Bob Herbert stated the fundamental problem as
clearly as anybody and as far back as December 3, 2001, in the New York
Times: "We have a choice. We can fight and win a just war against
terrorism. ... Or, we can win while running roughshod over the principles
of fairness and due process that we claim to cherish, thus shaming ourselves
in the eyes of the world and--eventually, when the smoke and anger finally
clears--in our own eyes as well."