The article is too big to post. I am only posting/pasting the Mid-East Section Full article can be read see the URL. This compliments the other post “Blame US easy scapegoat”. Draw your own conclusions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/weekinreview/16cohe.html
CAIRO — At large in the Arab world, my daily banter with taxi drivers, bazaar merchants, waiters and the like flows amiably enough until they ask, as they invariably do, where I am from.
“New York,” I usually respond, waiting to see how long it takes to register that that means “American.” Then it is often like watching a shutter clang down: their chitchat halts, their eyes suddenly avoid mine, and the transaction at hand is brought to a hasty conclusion.
To a certain extent, these everyday encounters suggest the broader state of Arab-American relations today. On every important issue, the region simmers with resentment of the United States and its apparent disdain for the Arabs.
Yet as pervasive as the can’t-live-with-them feelings about America have become, the more pragmatic Arabs realize that can’t-live-without-them is the only realistic approach. Nabil Fahmy, Egypt’s ambassador to Washington, captured that view in a speech at the American University in Cairo:
“I cannot succeed in pursuing my domestic objectives, economic or political; I cannot succeed in pursuing my regional objectives, for peace, stability, you name it, in the Middle East; and I cannot succeed in pursuing my global objectives in trying to add my agenda to the global agenda - be it on social issues, on arms control issues, on economic issues - without engaging America,” the ambassador said. “Agreeing is another issue, but we cannot afford, as Egypt, to pursue any of our national interests and expect to succeed, unless we engage America. Neither side has the option in the near term, nor in the medium term, of ignoring the other.”
The issues of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominate Arab-American relations; in many Arab minds, they are twin ills that the United States prolongs. What the Arab world wants from America now is to find some modicum of stability in Iraq and to return in earnest to the search for a solution in the West Bank and Gaza.
While Middle Eastern regimes undoubtedly have exploited the Palestinian question for decades to justify all manner of domestic repression, solving it would remove a taproot for violence and extremism. Arabs universally find the Bush administration appallingly uncritical of Israel, but the lack of engagement is equally troublesome.
On Iraq, there has always been ambiguity. Arab governments, in particular, did not want to see America either succeed or fail there. A successful democracy would have meant pressure to open their own societies, but a failure would probably mean a horrific civil war, fanning Sunni-Shiite hostility and giving concrete form to Kurdish nationalism, a prospect no neighbor relishes.
Ultimately, those who have not lost all hope in the United States wish fervently that it and the Arab world had one prominent shared enterprise, some proof that being friends with America is worth something.
“We need a success story, be it Iraq, be it in the Middle East peace process, be it on issues of some humanitarian exercise, wherever,” said Ambassador Fahmy. “We need to do something that clearly indicates to both sides that we are working together.”