Iraq conflict has fueled Arab anti-U.S. passions

Charlene Gubash Producer

CAIRO — Three years after the American-led invasion of Iraq, the views that most Arabs have of the United States does not provide a pretty picture.

The vast majority saw the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as unjust and illegal from the start. This, added to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and lack of proven links between al-Qaida and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — the original U.S. justifications for war — have only deepened their mistrust.

And for the minority who initially supported regime change in Iraq — and the premise of spreading democracy across the Arab World — their hopes have foundered on the failure to stabilize Iraq, a steady stream of human-rights abuses (both by foreign troops and the Iraqi security forces) and the lack of significant democratic reform in other Arab countries. 

"America may have been well-intentioned but created many blunders, such as Abu Ghraib, and their failures and scandals to date have created frustration among the people," said Khaled Al -Maeena, Jeddah-based editor-in-chief of the Saudi Arabian English language Arab News newspaper. 

Gamal Abdul Gawad, head of the International Relations Unit of the Al Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies in Cairo said that even people who had been optimistic about the potential of American success feel a sense of defeat.

"Those who at the beginning thought it was a good move to allow for ridding dictatorship and building democracy felt disillusioned by the American failure there,” he explained. 

“People at the very beginning were ready to defend or justify it in favor of modifying democratizing the Arab World," Gawad added. "They thought about the American grand design to transform the Middle East, but now they realized it is not there.”  

Blame clearly assigned
The blame for a string of failures in Iraq has fallen squarely on the shoulders of the U.S.

"The failure, the deaths, the terror, the inability of Iraqis to get anything done is blamed on Americans and the sectarian setup," said Mostafa Hamarneh, director of Jordan University's Center for Strategic Study. “The war was never popular, but had Iraq been a success things would have been different."  

This has added to the widespread belief, often reinforced by editorials in popular publications, that the U.S. invaded Iraq primarily to control oil reserves and in addition set out to intentionally divide Iraq in order to achieve that goal.

"U.S. forces focused only on controlling oil resources,” read the headline on an editorial in the pan-Arab Sharq Al Awsat newspaper, which went on to opine that, “The U.S. is spreading the culture of division and sectarianism by allying with one sect against the other." 

An opinion piece in the al-Jazeera Web site site took much the same view: "The Americans have proved incapable or unwilling to provide security…. After three years of occupation and innumerable experiences, American negligence is nothing short of conspiratorial."

Questions about commitment
Some now fear that the U.S. is incapable, and probably unwilling, to prevent a civil war in Iraq or bring it to an end. 

An editorialist for the pan-Arab Sharq al Awsat newspaper purportedly quoted U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a column to back up his paper's view that the Americans have no intention of getting involved in the resolution of an Iraqi civil war: “As Rumsfeld said, 'If civil war breaks out in Iraq, the Iraqis must deal with it.’"

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