One of Ours

...Do Arabs really hate Americans more now than ever before? Maybe, but it's hard to know for sure. In liberal democracies, the most effective way of quantifying public opinion is through popular elections. But there are no free elections in the Arab world, because Arab leaders do not want to give Arabs a voice in their own governance. So, when an leader like Mubarak conveys the message that Arabs hate Americans, we should remember that he is not a pollster but a dictator, and when he wants to know what his people think, he will tell them what to think. Right now, it is convenient for Mubarak and his ilk that Arabs should think all of their problems stem from Americans...

...Arab displeasure with U.S. leaders hardly started with the Bush White House...President Eisenhower talked about the "hatred against us [in the Arab world]" way back in 1958...

...what drives anti-Americanism? The Arab world complains that the United States supports corrupt and oppressive Arab regimes. This is true...once Washington got the United Nations to impose sanctions against Iraq, Arabs held the United States, rather than Saddam, responsible for starving Iraqis to death. And as President Mubarak is likely to remind us, when the United States deposes a corrupt and oppressive leader like Saddam, it only makes Arabs hate the United States...

...there are also really bad U.S. policies in the Arab world—none of which seem to trouble most Arabs...

...Washington has sacrificed Lebanese self-determination in the fanciful hope that appeasing Syria's authoritarian regime will win Israel security. It is an awful policy, and yet there are very few Arabs outside of Lebanon who dislike it..

...When the United States has made noise [about massacres in Sudan], the typical Arab response has been that Washington has no business interfering in the affairs of a sovereign state—unless of course that state is Israel.

Of course, it is because of Washington's ostensibly unbalanced support of Israel that the United States is genuinely loathed in the region...the Arab and European outrage over President Bush's announcement that Palestinians have no "right of return" suggests that many people outside of Israel and the United States do not really believe in a two-state solution, even if they say they do...

...Americans have operated under the (correct) belief that peace is in the interests of the Palestinian people. The problem is that peace is perhaps not in the interests of the Palestinian leadership.

The difference between Arab leadership and the Arab people is the key to understanding Arab anti-Americanism. When Arabs say that they like Americans but not American policies, they are saying they do not understand the basic principle of representative government: The American people are their government...

...Anti-Americanism is how Arab leaders play the Arab people and the United States against each other to preserve their own hides. There is no incentive to be anything but anti-American, and it is very dangerous not to follow the pack. In Iraq, Arabs who work with Americans to rebuild their country are targeted for death. Anti-Americanism is the coin of the realm and has been for many years now. It is not growing. When Americans talk about rising Arab anti-Americanism, we are saying we do not understand how Arab regimes work. In effect, we are collaborating with dictators who will not allow Arabs a voice in their own governance...

...Arabs whose admiration of the United States as an embodiment of justice and liberty is so idealized that it sometimes seems to bear no relationship to an America that, as we admit, has made many errors around the world.

For instance, a Syrian friend CCs me on e-mails he writes to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus or to American officials here in the States. This came from him last week after Ted Kennedy compared Iraq to Vietnam:

Dear Senator Ted Kennedy,
I am a pharmacist from Syria and I am 56 years old. I still remember when your brother was assassinated in 1963 and we all cried. He had a dream for the whole world not just for America. We suffered under totalitarian regimes in the Middle East for the whole of our lives. We look for America as our Savior. Please Mr. Kennedy you have to know that America has a burden in freeing the other peoples of the world from tyranny. I have no right to comment on internal U.S. issues but as a citizen of the world I have the right to ask the American legislators to help other peoples in the world because this is the principle that America stands for.

Arab anti-Americanism is easy to get used to—it's been around for close to half a century. What's hard is living up to the Arabs' best expectations of America.