The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

In the weeks and months before the March 19, 2003, invasion, dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by Washington, the Bush administra- tion’s assertion that Iraq was deter- mined to produce weapons of mass destruction and still possessed such weapons was touted to justify the war against Iraq. These claims were met with skepticism in the Middle East, where America’s decades-old pro- Israel attitude had already under- mined trust. Now the worst-case scenario has presented itself. As Iraq’s WMD program gradually moved from what Washington paint- ed as an unquestionable fact to a fiction in the eyes of many, and a deliberate fabrication in the eyes of others, that which Arabs and Muslims both believed and feared has proved true: the world’s only superpower was lying. And if the world’s superpower was lying in its justifi- cation for invading Iraq, this line of thought goes, it must be lying now while running Iraq and reshaping its future. And it may lie again to justify another invasion of any country apparently hostile to U.S. policies, coun- tries such as Syria or Iran perhaps. Simply put, the war against Iraq has greatly exacer- bated an already widespread mistrust of the U.S. in the Arab and Muslim worlds. A Growing Debate While anti-war sentiments predominate in most Arab countries (with the exception of Kuwait), the past months have witnessed a growing debate on what hap- pened, why it happened and what may happen to the Arab region in the coming years. After all, Iraq has always been a key Arab player. Egypt, the most populous Arab country, saw massive anti-U.S. demonstrations in the run-up to the war. Organizing a rally in Egypt is not a free pass, whatever the cause. The Egyptian government puts tough restrictions on the expression of angry sentiments in public. Aware of the degree of anger during and after the war, how- ever, the government allowed anti- war demonstrations — to avoid a worse, anti-government explosion. At one point, the ruling National Democratic Party organized anti- war demonstrations of its own as proof that the government’s senti- ments were with the people. A year later, opposition to the war on the streets of Cairo is still intense. True, no massive demon- strations have been organized re- cently in the Egyptian capital, but the U.S. occupation of Iraq remains a sensitive subject for the public. We do not find this clear consensus, however, among the elite. The Egyptian political scene has witnessed a tense clash between the liberals, who tacitly, and some- times openly, backed the use of force in Iraq, and the leftists, nationalists and Islamists who vehemently opposed the war. “While keen on expressing its opposi- tion to military action, the Egyptian government always drives the point home that Saddam Hussein’s regime is to blame for the regional complications,” says Hazem Mounir, an Egyptian journalist. “[And] liberals, on a massive scale, maintain that removing Saddam Hussein from power was impossible without outside interven- tion.” The war critics dub the war a flagrant American attempt to control oil resources in the Gulf region, reshape the Middle East according to its terms and serve Israeli interests. The high-sounding moral ideals of the Bush administration have never made sense or carried weight among the war critics in Egypt, or for that matter in the Arab and Muslim worlds at large. What About Reform? “One year after the invasion, there has not been a lot of change on the political stage in Egypt vis-à-vis the U.S. presence in Iraq,” says Mounir, who works in the Cairo Bureau of the London-based Al-Hayat , a leading Arabic-language newspaper. “There is no daylight among politicians and commentators of different ide- ologies on the need to end the occupation.” Mounir, F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 At one point, the ruling National Democratic Party organized anti-war demonstrations of its own as proof that the government’s sentiments were with the people. Khaled Abdulkareem is the Washington correspondent for Egypt’s Middle East News Agency. The views reflected in this piece do not necessarily reflect the posi- tions of MENA.