Arab World

For many Americans -- as well as in the preponderance of media -- the Persian Gulf war is understood in stark terms: Bad guy Saddam Hussein invaded the little country of Kuwait, the United Nations coalition drew a line in the sand, gave the new Hitler an ultimatum and finally went in and forced him out.OK, so why is there still savage fighting in Iraq? We hear about at least four factions -- Kurds, Shiites, Palestinians and Saddam's Revolutionary Guard. What's the difference between them?

As a psychologist who has spent more than a year in the Middle East, I have been following with great interest the commentary following the massacre in Afghanistan by the U.S. soldier last Saturday ("Killings of 16 appall Afghans," March 12). Almost all of the opinions expressed by leaders, pundits and talk show listeners betray a fundamental cultural myopia. They seek to find the pathology in the individual and not in the wider society. We think that the soldier must suffer combat fatigue from multiple deployments or suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or another mental illness and rush to declare the incident an isolated one of a rogue soldier.

WASHINGTON -- On a recent tour of India, I was visiting with an Indian Muslim community leader, Syed Shahabuddin, and the conversation drifted to the question of why the Muslim world seems so angry with the West. "Whenever I am in America," he said, "people ask me, `Why do they hate us?' They don't hate you. If they hated you, would they send their kids to be educated by you? Would they look up to you as a model? They hate that you are monopolizing all the nonrenewable resources [oil].

Regarding your editorial "Obama and the Arab Spring" (May 20), your assessment that the president laid out a "pragmatic, nuanced approach to the region" is not borne out by the realities on the ground. The region is still embroiled in chaos and conflict. Most recently Coptic Christians and Islamists have clashed in Egypt. Libya seems mired in stalemate. Bahrain and Syria continue repression and murder of protesters on the streets. And Saudi Arabia's royal family is not even remotely ready for democracy.

DAMASCUS, Syria -- The rapidly escalating conflict in Lebanon has divided the Arab world, deepening the gulf between rulers and ruled and reinforcing in the public's mind the impotence of regimes that for two generations have been unable to produce a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, governments with ties to the United States have guardedly denounced Hezbollah for the attack on Israel that triggered the fighting - even as the people began tacking up posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the bearded, turbaned cleric who heads the Shiite militia group and has vowed to bring "war on every level" to Israel's door.

Within days of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush learned his first lesson about the difficulties of cross-cultural communication when he referred to the fight against terrorism as a "crusade." That word went virtually unnoticed in America and Europe but enraged people in the Islamic world where it is forever associated with bloody, racist wars as medieval Christians sought time and again to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. Was Christendom on the warpath again? Bush's press secretary issued an apology, and the word "crusade" has not cropped up again.

WASHINGTON - Amid grievances on both sides, President Bush will welcome one of America's most powerful Middle East allies to his Crawford, Texas, ranch today in hopes that discussions in a relaxed setting will bridge a widening rift between the United States and the Arab world. The visit of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia offers Bush a possible vehicle for seeking an end to the 19-month guerrilla war between Israelis and Palestinians. Bush has praised a peace proposal by Prince Abdullah, adopted last month by the Arab League, that offers Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal from land that the Jewish state occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But today's meeting comes against the backdrop of widespread Arab anger over U.S. support for Israel and mounting resentment in the United States over a failure by Arab leaders to condemn and combat terrorism against Israelis.

The most surprising aspect of President Barack Obama's speech Thursday on U.S. policy in the Middle East may have been his strongly worded call for a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on Israel's boundaries before 1967. Observers had been speculating for weeks about whether Mr. Obama would offer his own plan for a Mideast peace agreement as the White House scrupulously declined to comment on the subject. Yet the outline for peace unveiled by the president Thursday was surprising not so much because it was anything new but because, as the president acknowledged, everybody has known all along that's what ultimately has to happen - even though they've spent decades pretending otherwise.

WASHINGTON - President Bush defended yesterday Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Bethlehem, calling Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a "man of peace" who is trying to bring "killers" to justice. Speaking a day after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell returned from the Middle East without the cease-fire he had hoped to broker, Bush made clear that the U.S. peace efforts cannot move forward until Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and leaders in the Arab world crack down on terrorists.

The first crisis of united Germany is massive unemployment from collapse of the spy biz.The Arab world would have more moderate leaders if they didn't get bumped off with such frequency.

The most surprising aspect of President Barack Obama's speech Thursday on U.S. policy in the Middle East may have been his strongly worded call for a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on Israel's boundaries before 1967. Observers had been speculating for weeks about whether Mr. Obama would offer his own plan for a Mideast peace agreement as the White House scrupulously declined to comment on the subject. Yet the outline for peace unveiled by the president Thursday was surprising not so much because it was anything new but because, as the president acknowledged, everybody has known all along that's what ultimately has to happen - even though they've spent decades pretending otherwise.

In response to the op-ed piece by Kimberly Katz ("Nonviolent protest nothing new in the Middle East," March 7th) I would point out that there is nothing new in her misrepresentations of the Middle East situation. If she were to check original sources and data rather than unquestioningly repeating the unverifiable "Palestinian as victim" ideology, she would learn among other things that: • "Israel's brutal occupation" is actually Israel administering territories captured in an Arab war of aggression against Israel.

Sit in on an Arabic Express class at Howard Community College, and you'll learn much about the current protests in the Middle East and North Africa. Tony Rahi, HCC Arabic Express professor, scribbled an Arabic word on the white board, which he later said would be spelled "jorthan" in English. The word means "rats. " "This is what [Moammar] Gadhafi called the protesters today," Rahi said during a recent class, referring to the Libyan leader whose 40-plus-year reign is being challenged by the types of political protests that have been seen this year in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region.

The current revolutionary mood sweeping the Middle East is looking very much like another real-life example of philosopher Auguste Comte's observation, "Demography is destiny. " At the turn of the 19th century, Westerners made up roughly 30 percent of the people on this planet. By the middle of this century, extrapolating present trends, Muslims will be about 30 percent of a much more crowded human population and Westerners reduced to less than 10 percent. This has all sorts of implications, laid out thoroughly by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in their book, "Financial Reckoning Day. " But I want to focus on just one: how a population explosion in the Arab world, stretching from Morocco through the Levant, has set the stage for the revolutionary fervor we've seen on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Amman and elsewhere in the last couple of weeks.

With another mass demonstration planned in Cairo and other cities today, and opposition to the nearly 30-year rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak coalescing around Mohamed ElBaradei, debate in the United States is centering around the question of whether, how and when President Barack Obama should call on the dictator to step down. After nearly a week of steadily escalating public protests, it seems clear that Mr. Mubarak's attempt last week to answer calls for his resignation by reshuffling his cabinet and appointing a new vice president from his inner circle are unlikely to delay his exit much longer.

Tunisia, January 2011. Romania, December 1989. The similarities are eerie. Each country was governed for 21/2 decades by an autocrat. In both countries, the people, not the elite, launch the revolution. Soldiers allied with competing factions are shooting at each other. Common people are outraged to see the palaces of the dictator's family. French is the second language of the elite. Democrats around the world are cheering the revolution while security professionals in Western governments fret about stability.

WASHINGTON -- While a deeply divided nation and its candidates for president and vice president debate the issue of who or what is to blame for why America is hated in the world today, the real work of bridging the divide between the United States and its enemies goes undone. Regardless of who becomes president in January, we have to communicate better with large parts of the world, particularly the Arab and Muslim world, where skepticism and disdain for the United States run deep. And we must figure out better ways to support citizens of the Arab world who need access to information about their lives and about the globe on which they live.

WASHINGTON - No Al-Jazeera sign will hang outside the network's new offices on K Street. Instead, staffers will enter "Peninsula Productions," the channel's American video production company. Experience has shown them that the Al-Jazeera name tends to attract the wrong kind of attention here. As a result, the controversial satellite network that is the dominant news source for the Arab world has learned to play a political game worthy of its Washington address: It is keeping fairly quiet about the $7 million Washington digs.

Barack Obama gave perhaps the most important speech of his young presidency Thursday, offering a stirring reminder of the oratorical gifts that propelled a young African-American of limited political experience to the leadership of the United States and the free world. Speaking from the heart of the Arab world and touching on a wide range of critical issues, from religious extremism and nuclear weapons to women's rights and economic development, Mr. Obama returned time and again to the theme of shared purpose and the quest for common ground.

BEIRUT -- I had a very unusual experience recently as I was going through my pleasant early morning routine while sitting in my easy chair on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea: reading the newspapers, drinking coffee, listening to the BBC radio news. The unusual thing was that there was not a single item about the Middle East on the BBC radio news. I do not exaggerate when I say that it may be the first time in around 36 years of regular listening that the morning bulletin did not carry Middle East news.