Middle Eastern views of the United States: what do the trends indicate?

Telhami, Shibley ; Katulis, Brian ; Alterman, Jon B. 等

The following is an edited transcript of the forty-fifth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on July 20, 2006, in the U.S. Capitol Building, with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., presiding.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.: president, Middle East Policy Council

Today's topic is the subject of conventional wisdom. We all knew before 9/11 that we were admired and emulated by foreigners, including foreigners in the Middle East, and on 9/11 we learned that we were hated because of our values. Now, I think the American people perceive that, in fact, we are widely disliked, and our government is detested. There are many theories and very few facts in this area, and I suspect that, as always, the conventional wisdom is more conventional than wise.

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Sadat Chair, University of Maryland, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

I would like to begin by addressing the question of who cares about Arab public opinion. We have a lot of people in this town who say, what does it matter? Public opinion in the Arab world really doesn't matter much. They have a lot of evidence on their side, frankly. Arab governments have gone against their public opinion in the recent Iraq War and survived. Over 90 percent of Arabs didn't want the Iraq War, but many Arab states not only supported it tacitly, but actually cooperated with the United States. We had American military stationed on their soil.

Even now, when you look at this crisis in Gaza and Lebanon, you see where public opinion is. Public opinion in the Arab world, whether Sunni or Shia or Christian, is decidedly on the side of Hezbollah. We haven't had scientific public opinion surveys since the recent crisis began across the Arab world, but there has been a lot of evidence, not just reporting and anecdotal evidence, but some significant nonscientific polling like the one at al-Jazeera, where 200,000 people participated in an online survey. Ninety-one percent said they endorsed Hezbollah.

So what you have in this case is a huge gap between public opinion and governments, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and others that have been very bold in a way in going against that tide and taking the position that Hezbollah is at least in part, if not mostly, to blame for the Lebanese crisis. Clearly, the bet by governments is that they can ride out the storm of public opinion and prevail. They can make strategic calculations based on other issues. So why should we even be paying attention to where public opinion is on this issue?

Let me tell you why it still matters and why we cannot ignore it, before I tell you where it is. First, think about this gap. All of the discourse that followed 9/11 was initially about the political systems in the region: the absence of democracy is correlated with the strength of anti-American terrorism. It was conventional wisdom. When you look at this environment in which we operate, you see that our policies are widening the gap between governments and publics. Try to imagine how the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Jordanians tomorrow morning are going to be able to open up their political system when they have a strongly opposed public opinion.

In the short term, undoubtedly, this gap will exacerbate and increase repression. The only way you can control the tide of public opinion is by being more repressive, even if you have these electoral exercises that we've witnessed. By the way, when you ask people in the Arab world whether the Middle East is more democratic or less democratic than it was before the Iraq War, the majority say it's less democratic, despite some apparent improvements in the electoral process in a number of countries.

So, the first casualty of all of this most certainly will be any idea that democracy or a more participatory kind of political system will emerge as a consequence of this widening gap that can be addressed in the short term by insecure governments only through increased repression. If we understand this and are willing to live with the consequences, that is one thing.

Second, while it is true that we can actually pressure governments to accept positions that go against public opinion, the cost of doing business is much higher. It takes a lot more power to do that. Despite all of the weakness and expenditures that emerged out of the Iraq War, the United States is still the most powerful nation on earth. We have the capacity to prevail on any small issue. It is the cost of doing business that escalates. We pay too heavy a price, and that eventually becomes a complicating factor, at a minimum, down the road in terms of the exercise of American power.

Third, where you have public opinion going very strongly against you, it is very hard for you to fight your enemies. More people think you are the enemy. For example, let's say you are trying to get the Pakistani security services and military to be wholeheartedly dedicated to the eradication of al-Qaeda in Pakistan. If they, deep in their hearts, think this is an American war and they don't like America, even if they don't endorse al-Qaeda, the extent to which you are going to have full cooperation--that is, the public telling you where they are hiding--is going to be significantly diminished.

Finally, the challenges facing many countries, but particularly the United States, are primarily challenges that come from nonstate actors much more than from states. Iran is still a deterrable country, as is Syria. Contrast the insurgency in Iraq with the stability in the relationship with Syria despite the fact that the United States and Israel don't like Syria, and Syria can be a menace. It still can be deterred. When it comes to nonstate groups, public opinion matters a lot. These groups are connected to the public. That is where they draw their support; that is where they draw their power. In this sense, public opinion matters a lot, despite the fact that most people are probably not going to take on their governments.

Revolutions are rare in history, and the chance that they will happen in the Arab world because of this gap remains small. In modern times, we have only had the example of the Iranian revolution. It is always a possibility, but the chance of it is small. But these trends do matter in the pursuit of al-Qaeda and others.

Let me very quickly tell you what the trends have been over the past five years. I have been polling in six countries--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon--for the past five years with Zogby International to look at a variety of attitudes, not only attitudes toward the United States. If you ask me what has changed, I wouldn't say that it's the fact that many Arabs don't like American foreign policy. Many Arabs didn't like American foreign policy even when it was a little bit more balanced from the point of view of the Arab world.

Two things have happened over the past five years. One that we began detecting in 2000, 2001, after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians was the decline in trust in the United States. Trust is different from the question, do you like our foreign policies? Do you have confidence in the government? What we have seen is a dramatic decline in the confidence measure, particularly after the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. These continued to decline after 9/11.

Second, in the most recent survey, the United States is now seen as a primary threat. It's not just that they don't like America; the United States is seen as a primary threat in the Arab world by a majority of the public. In an open question that I asked--name the two countries that are the most threatening to you--the vast majority of people in every country named the United States and Israel as the two countries that are most threatening to them. Iran, you would think, would be seen as a threat, at least in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. However, those who identified it as a threat were in the single digits. This tells you, again, that the Iraq War has become a new prism through which Arabs are looking at the United States and the Middle East.

Let me just give you two more examples pertaining to this. When you ask people, in a world where you have a single superpower, which of the following countries would you like that superpower to be, the United States is at the bottom of the scale, together with Russia. France, by the way, surprisingly remains number one, mostly because of its position on Iraq and nothing else. But China and Pakistan score pretty well, fight after France.

When you ask people, do you believe that Iranians are developing nuclear weapons, a plurality of Arabs--nearly half--believe that Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons. If you ask them, do you think the international community should pressure Iran to stop that, a majority say no. Again, they see this mostly through the prism of the American threat, and therefore they are willing to bypass even this perceived threat. This is separate from governments; obviously the governments in the Gulf see Iran as a threat and have a different kind of strategy. We're talking about public opinion.

I think a lot of people have misunderstood this rise of frustration with the United States as being an endorsement of al-Qaeda's agenda in the region. They have used all of these seeming trends--the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Palestinian areas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and so forth--as examples of this rising tide that endorses a pan-Islamic agenda. The evidence is not there. On the contrary, al-Qaeda has not been able to win hearts and minds. Most people have not endorsed its agenda. In fact, when asked what aspect of al-Qaeda do you sympathize with most, only 6 percent say they sympathize with their advocacy of a puritanical Islamic state. Only 7 percent say they sympathize with their methods. A plurality say they like the fact that they are standing up to the United States. This is a negative, not a positive. If you look at these other Islamic groups and also at the positions of the public on social issues, you find that they are rejecting the agenda advocated by al-Qaeda, but they win by default because of the anger toward the United States.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think you have made a pretty clear case that public opinion does shape the environment in which the United States and other countries defend their national security or attempt to address the relevant issues. I knew we wouldn't be able to avoid the topic of the day, and I don't think we should, although we are talking about something broader than the effort by Israel, backed by the United States, to once again try to flog the Arabs into docility--an approach that has been tried on many occasions over many years and has never worked. Perhaps this time will prove to be the miraculous exception.

One question I hope we will get to in the course of the discussion is, to what extent is opinion in the region still making distinctions between the United States and Israel. We have become totally identified with the Israelis and their policies, and this has practical consequences. I'll just mention one obvious one. When we planned a noncombatant evacuation from Lebanon, we couldn't use the normal method that you have all seen over the years elsewhere. The Marines couldn't go ashore and secure a perimeter and safely escort people out because they would very likely have been seen as allies of the Israelis and treated accordingly. Therefore, the Lebanese Army secured a beach, and a very small group of lightly armed Marines assisted passengers onto a landing craft.

So public opinion and the distinctions it makes ultimately do create environments, even for military operations. Various theories about public opinion are constantly tested. In Lebanon at the moment, the entire Israeli strategy rests on a theory of public opinion: if you terrorize Lebanese sufficiently, their government will go into south Lebanon and do what the Israeli ground forces really can't do at acceptable costs--namely search and destroy, collect the weapons that Hezbollah has. We have a very odd strategy. Having failed to do anything to build the capacity of the Lebanese government to enforce its sovereignty, we're now destroying Lebanon in order to extend its sovereignty. We hope the Lebanese, who don't have the capacity to go into the south and enforce their sovereignty, will somehow be empowered by bombing to do that, and all will end well, and there will be no Hezbollah in the south. This rests on a theory about Lebanese public opinion and what it will force the government to do. I find it a very questionable theory, but who knows. This may be the exception that proves that the previous 49 attempts that failed were the exception, and that this time it will work.

BRIAN KATULIS: Director of Democracy and Public Diplomacy, Center for American Progress

I don't necessarily disagree with all of that. At the outset, I would like to come clean and expose my own biases. We all have our biases, and I think a full disclosure is in order. I have a very strong bias for empirical evidence and grounding perspectives in reality. This may seem like stating the obvious, but I raise it for two reasons. First, for the complex issue of Middle East views of the United States there is a flood of impressionistic analysis, colored by the subjective views of analysts who are often personally disconnected from events and the people on the ground. All too often, analysts project their own paradigms on what people in the Middle East are thinking, without sufficient empirical evidence. We got a great example this morning. Shibley has said that the public strongly supports Hezbollah. Another Middle East expert, somebody who worked in the Clinton administration and is a prominent figure in policy, whom I was in a discussion with a few nights ago, said the Arab public has rejected Hezbollah's provocative actions.

We have a lot of subjective analysis going on. You see it in the media; you see it in some of the op-eds. We need a bit more empirical evidence. In the case of Hezbollah, I think the reality actually lies somewhere in between. It may be a little of both favorable, unfavorable, and we need to delve into the nuances. That is why I have a great deal of admiration for the work that Dr. Telhami has done in terms of polling, and in the work that Jon Alterman and Milton Viorst have done in terms of providing us the historical and political context.

The second reason I think we need sound empirical evidence relates to current U.S. policy in the Middle East and the inclination among our top leaders to reject most measures of public sentiment. I have been told by several analysts currently working in the U.S. government who prepare assessments for our leaders that when they try to incorporate polls and the broader views of the public, the reaction from the highest levels is, I don't care and I don't want to know.

There is a disinclination at the very senior levels to listen to what is going on. We have been operating for the past several years with a faith-based Middle East policy led by a leader and experts who see the world as they wish, dream and hope it might be rather than the grim and complex reality. For America to make the adjustments in its policy in the region, a policy that has gotten us so far off track, I think we need to broaden our knowledge and have a dose of reality. There is no excuse for sticking our heads in the sand; the ignorance and naivete of our current leaders have been part of what has gotten us into the mess in the Middle East.

I want to focus on two points this morning. What is the standing of the United States in the Middle East, and what should we do about it? From 2000 to 2005, I directed public-opinion research projects in about two dozen countries, first working with Stan Greenberg and then with many different organizations like Freedom House and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). After 2003, my projects focused on Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait and Morocco. But the central proposition I have about the United States and its image in the Middle East is that the Bush administration's strategy has not only undermined our image, as Dr. Telhami has demonstrated, it has weakened our vital national-security interests. The Bush administration's strategy for using freedom and advancing democracy to try to defeat terrorism has backfired in a dangerous way, in part because their definition of democracy focuses narrowly on elections. As a consequence, you have seen terrorists, rather than being defeated, being empowered and emboldened in groups that continue to use violence in Lebanon, Iraq and other places as a means for political change. As a result, the Middle East is not substantially more democratic or freer. You can look at the Freedom House scales and measures; there haven't been significant advances. The countries in the region continue to be plagued by many forms of terrorism, and the U.S. image has gone downhill. The returns have not been worth the investments and the losses.

The most vivid failure is in Iraq. The images of the purple fingers of Iraqi voters have faded rapidly in the months of bloodshed, increased sectarian violence, and possibly a civil war. In 2003, I saw up close the impact that U.S. policy was having on Iraqis. In June and July 2003, I went to Iraq and helped Iraqis set up a research structure to listen to Iraqi public opinion. This was for NDI with the goal of trying to understand Iraqi views on democracy, freedom and the efforts of the United States toward those ends. At that early stage, in June and July 2003, we concluded that we had already passed the point of being seen by Iraqis as liberators, if we ever were, and were seen as occupiers. Also, at that point, analysts here in Washington were saying that the lack of organization and planning for the post-war reconstruction was interpreted by most Iraqis with whom our researchers talked as perfect planning: that we were intentionally doing this to them. At that early stage, several Iraqis believed that the United States had planned the chaos.

This leads me to a broader theme that I think is terribly important in terms of what has happened over the last three or four years. A lot of Iraqis could not believe that a country that is as obviously powerful as America wouldn't be able to do what it wanted to do. Most Iraqis felt the United States was in the country for its own interests and not to help the Iraqis. At this early stage in the research, we had a Shia man from Najaf say, "Are they occupiers or are they not occupiers? That is my question. When Abdul Karim Qassim came and took over Iraq, he organized the ministries in 15 days, and he was an Iraqi. These guys are American and we are living in a new modern age. Why are these things going this way?" Even in the Kurdish areas, there was some skepticism. Though public attitudes are fairly favorable towards the United States, there was a sense of, what is the United States doing for us? Why are they still here? There must be a lot of hidden things. A very deep sense of occupation and a narrative of empire, occupation and imperialism was the consequence.

What President Bush aspired to be--a bold leader who brought transformational change to the Middle East, who sparked major advances in freedom--has directly undermined our interests in stability in the region and spread a narrative of imperialism and occupation even to other countries, as the research in Kuwait and Egypt has shown. When we listened to ordinary Kuwaitis and Egyptians, we were hearing things like "America wants to occupy the Arab world indirectly." In Egypt, a woman told us, these people make up any excuse, these Americans, to invade and occupy a country. So again, the stated intent of our leader was expanding freedom and democracy, but the perception in Iraq and in the region was the exact opposite.

I would propose that there is also perhaps a new narrative or a new paradigm, perhaps a hypothesis that Shibley can test in his polls. You see this in the press, and you hear this from opinion leaders. I heard it on my most recent trip to the Middle East--a new narrative of U.S. incompetence and indifference--in part because, after three-and-a-half years of so many mistakes in Iraq, people are trying to figure out why the United States can't get it right. Also, after Hurricane Katrina, you see a response in the Arab press and some of the cartoons--anecdotal information--in which this superpower does not have its act together. When I lived in the Middle East in the 1990s, the dominant narrative was that the United States is powerful and all-controlling. We may have already slipped somewhat.

A second narrative and a perception of the United States regarding what is going on in Lebanon right now is indifference and inaction--not being involved diplomatically--whereas in the past we had served as a prominent mediator to a lot of these disputes. We have unilaterally taken ourselves out of the ball game.

There are several things that we could do about this. I have three specific prescriptions for changing our image in the Arab world. It's terribly damaged and in need of serious repair; we can't talk ourselves out of this situation. I don't think we'll be able to do much in the short term to affect broader sentiment. This is a long-term, five-to-ten-year project that isn't just about sending Karen Hughes to lecture Saudi women about their rights. It is about making integrated changes in our policies and communicating them a bit differently. There is a lot of consensus that our image has been damaged. Some of those wounds are self-inflicted, and I think our country can do a lot better.

AMB. FREEMAN: You, like Shibley, refer to Iraq as a dominant factor in the shift in ideas of the United States in the region. I think that needs to be explored more directly in the discussion period in terms of what we do about it.

JON B. ALTERMAN: Director and Senior Fellow, Middle East Program, CSIS

I would like to go from the specific to the more general now and talk about some of the drivers of public opinion, and how they relate to government action and constrain it. I think we're losing sight of the dramatic change that a pluralistic media environment poses for the Middle East. It used to be that you knew basically what your government wanted you to know. When television arose in the Middle East in the 1960s and '70s, only national television stations were broadcast. They were controlled by governments and information ministries. You had bureaucrats deciding what the news was--a government employee reading a government script, often showing still images or file photos of the day's news. That was the news. Governments controlled it and didn't report things or did report things according to their governing agendas. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saudi television took three days to report it because they didn't know how to report it.

Those days are gone; there is no going back. There is now a much more diverse media environment, and governments have a much more difficult time setting the agenda. Governments, in general, continue to back virtually all of the television stations in the Middle East. Hezbollah's al-Manar is an exception, in that there is not a real government behind it. But if you look at stations like al-Arabiya, al-Jazeera and the others, they all generally have government backers. But the important thing is this: the backers are not your own government. If you're an Egyptian, the Egyptian government doesn't control everything you can see. If you're a Saudi, the Saudi government doesn't control everything you see. An individual's government no longer dominates the news he or she gets. It is a new game. Add to this game the Internet--still very small, but important among elites and increasingly significant as people photocopy things they saw over the Internet and pass them around. Everybody doesn't have to be on the Internet to be affected by it. Iraqi insurgents have been using the Internet as a way to distribute extremist materials, not because everybody has access, but because people can reach into a central server and pull off pamphlets, videos and those sorts of things.

What all of this means is that governments no longer have the agenda-setting power that they had not very long ago. The government information bureaucracies are being dismantled because people are no longer paying attention to what they say and do. I don't think this means that governments no longer have influence or control; they do. But suddenly they have to compete for attention; they have to compete to set the agenda. And they have to do this in a competitive environment, whereas they used to be able to do it in a monopolistic environment.

This means that audiences determine what is important and what people pay attention to. And I think it's important in this regard not to think about political issues only in terms of political programming. Because we are political nerds, we all pay attention to politics narrowly. We all watch CNN or Fox or something in the United States and al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya in the Arab world, and we think that the news environment is everything; that is what is shaping the politics. But there is an important aspect of this that is not being shaped by the news programs. It is being shaped by entertainment programs, social programs and religious programs, many of which address the question of Arab identity. Do you have to be a Muslim to be an Arab? Do you have to be an observant Muslim to be an Arab? Who gets to determine what is observant or orthodox Islam? And who is part of this game? Do you have to be anti-American to be a good Arab? Do you have to be antisemitic to be a good Arab?

This is a discourse that is not limited to al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya. It's all over the media. Governments have influence, but they no longer set that agenda or control it. That is what we see when we look at the conflict going on today. Is this something that gets to the core of people's identities, or is this something that is happening somewhere out there? Do viewers have a role that extends beyond watching the images on the screen and listening to the words? How does that participation fit in? How does what audiences see and hear affect what they do? When people start doing things, how does that affect their attitudes?

This leads to the question of mobilization. When governments lose control of the information space and the agenda space, are people able to mobilize against the wishes of governments? By my count, there have been more than a dozen protests in the Arab world in the last couple of weeks. Some of them are clearly government orchestrated, like the ones in Damascus. Others, such as the apparently spontaneous gathering of 600 Lebanese in Dubai Media City, seem to be much more spontaneous. And then there are some that are harder to figure out, like the thousands of people in Oman and Yemen. Where does all of this come from? How does it all fit in? I don't want to give the demonstrations more credence than they deserve, but I think it's very important that we not just dismiss them.

I began by talking about government's agenda-setting role, and it seems to me that one of the remarkable and undiscussed aspects of all of this is that all of Israel's neighbors have basically signed on to the idea of coexistence. Governments have decided to live side by side with Israel. It's among the populations that those attitudes lag.

Then, you have this whole question of whether people can affect the equation. Can people affect what their governments do? You can lose a lot of money betting against the governments of the Middle East. This is what they do best; they can control. They let things flare up, they tamp them down. But as the game changes, as the governments lose their agenda-setting role, as people become more entrepreneurial and transnational, how does that create opportunities and possibilities? How does that change the way governments as well as nongovernmental groups react?

The fact is, we don't know, but we have to look hard at what is happening on the margins. What kinds of websites are being set up? What kinds of text messages are being sent around? What kinds of things governments don't want to have happen are happening? Where do governments start losing control? This is a process. Brian talked about how the process of rebuilding American trust in the region is a five- to ten-year process. We're in this process of dynamism and adjustment on the parts of both governments and nongovernmental leaders that is also going to take five to ten years or more. But this is where Middle East politics really start to shift. This is where the possibilities are for a whole different game. It is not necessarily a better game. It is not a game in which everybody comes out loving the United States. But it is the new game, and if you don't play, you're going to lose.

My bet is that most Arab governments are going to learn to play this game successfully, but I think some won't. Over the same five- to ten-year period, some very interesting things will be happening, not because governments want them to happen, but because the multiplicity of creative entrepreneurial people, using different kinds of tactics, is going to be able to actually affect the way Arab politics has worked for the last 60 years.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think that by focusing us on the change in the information environment and the loss of control over public opinion by governments, you're restating the theme that Shibley began with: There is a gap between government and public opinion, and this gap, along with the demands of the United States and others that governments support or at least not oppose our policies, leads to repression. If there has been a kind of democratization of public opinion, or if there is a growing freedom to incite and mobilize politically, whatever the government says, then governments either have to learn, as you say, to control that, or we will see some interesting consequences.

We're not talking about contemporary events today, but I think this is a useful reminder that, whatever the view of Hezbollah's actions on day one, this is a dynamic situation. If Israel does overplay its hand--and it may already have done so--it can very rapidly shift opinion from a condemnation of Hezbollah as a rash, uncoordinated, adventurist group whose actions are contrary to the overall Arab interest, to the view that Hezbollah started out to make: namely, that while everyone else talks, they act--out of solidarity with the Palestinians.

MILTON VIORST: author, Storm from the East

The more I have covered the Middle East--for some 40 years, in one form or another--the more I have been drawn back to understanding something in the history of this region. I really do believe that we have here two civilizations that we have to understand. The war in Iraq is simply the latest eruption in a conflict that has lasted since the time of Muhammed nearly 1400 years ago. Unless we understand more about the differences in ideas, values and all the rest, we're not going to get it. Certainly, we have a government now that isn't getting it either.

I love this New Yorker cartoon which I cut out quite a while ago. It's a picture of two couples sitting around in bikinis smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis with a palm tree swaying above them. And one of them says, "I think that if these Islamic fundamentalists got to know us, they'd really like us." I don't think that's true.

I think we have to understand this thing, as my latest book argues, as a long-term conflict between Christian civilization and Islamic civilization, neither one necessarily superior but each profoundly different and having particularly different ends. It began when Muhammed and his successors didn't simply conquer the whole Mediterranean basin. The Mediterranean basin that they conquered was a Christian basin. The lands they overran in North Africa, Spain, and then northward into Byzantium were Christian lands. So what we had here was a replacement of a Christian civilization in the Mediterranean with an Islamic civilization, creating a tension lasting to this very day.

One of the arguments I make in the book is that what we are dealing with a deep-seated historical memory on the part of both of these peoples. Historical memory is not the same as history; history is reasonably objective, a search for truth. Historical memory is what we, on both sides, selectively recall and factor into our minds; it's the DNA by which civilizations function. It is why Arabs behave in very large measure like Arabs and Westerners like Westerners. When, for example, the great historian Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you could feel his fear, Western fear. Gibbson said that if Arabs had won the Battle of Poitiers in 732--the furthest point north that Muhammed's Arab armies reached in an effort to conquer Europe--the Quran would now be the basis of teaching at Oxford, not the Bible.

We are dealing with deeply rooted ideas here, and I suspect that the ideas are nowhere more deeply rooted than in the mind of George Bush and some of the people around him. Kevin Phillips in his last book tells us that, in the month prior to sending the troops into Iraq, Bush boasted to his entourage that he read every morning from the sermons of an evangelical Scottish preacher who accompanied the British Army on its march on Jerusalem in 1917. As Americans, most of us are secular and uncomfortable talking about conflicts between Christianity and Islam. But, until we understand this conflict, we understand what is happening in the Middle East today imperfectly. George Bush probably understands it better than those of us who take pride in the secularism of our thinking.

The struggle that began in the seventh century re-erupted at the time of the French Revolution, when Napoleon, for the first time in 700 years, sent a western army into the Islamic world. This was the beginning of the movement that we call imperialism. For almost a century, Britain and France, the two great imperial powers, yearned to reestablish Europe's dominance of the Middle East, but the Ottoman Empire stood in their way. When the Ottomans fell in World War I, the region opened up once again to the West. But, "west" is simply a geographical term. It is more accurate to say the Christian West, or the civilization with Christianity at its foundation.

The end of World War I was a moment when American democratic values had an opportunity to assert themselves. Woodrow Wilson, in entering the war on the side of the British and French, beguiled the Arabs with what the British and the French had promised them but clearly had no intention of delivering. The United States promised self-determination of the Arab peoples. American default on this promise is deeply imbedded in the historical memory of the Arabs. They don't forget the betrayal of Britain and France, with American complicity in setting up so-called mandates, an imperial system in the Middle East. They can't forget the fact that the United States wasn't there when they needed us.

A second opportunity occurred after World War II, when we again promised an end to the imperial system. But, at that point, the Cold War intruded itself, with higher priorities. The architect of the Cold War was a powerful secretary of state who was remarkably like George Bush in his beliefs: John Foster Dulles established our Cold War policy in the Middle East. The Arabs pleaded with the United States, "Look, imperialism is over. We need time to build our institutions of government. We have not been a free people for a thousand years. We need a period of calm to create nations." And Dulles replied, "Your concerns are not relevant to us. We are engaged in a struggle of good against evil. It's us against the Soviet Union, and you're either with us or against us."

So we went through a horrible sequence of events, marked by names like the Aswan Dam Crisis, the Suez Invasion of 1956, the Baghdad Pact. With each one, relations between the Arabs and the United States became worse. In all of these, we told the Arabs, there is no such thing as neutrality. You have no right to be concerned with your own problems. What you have to do is follow us. Well, it didn't work. And when the Cold War ended and the United States emerged as the world's single superpower, a smaller opening occurred, but we did not use our power to make amends to the Arabs but to make sure we controlled the oil resources of the Middle East so they did not fall into the hands of Saddam Hussein. It was another lost opportunity for making friends--if, indeed, we thought it was of any importance to have the Arabs not be our enemies. I think the three speakers who preceded me have made a very compelling case that their enmity is contrary to our interest.

Let me just read one brief quote from my book because it indicates what Shibley, Jon and Brian have pointed out to us in a more contemporary context. At about the same time that President Bush was parading on the deck of the aircraft carrier proclaiming "mission accomplished," he had a meeting with French President Chirac. Chirac had fought against the Arabs during the Algerian war of independence, and he tried to persuade the president that the game wasn't yet over. Chirac said that Arab nationalism was a rising danger, which the United States had failed to take into account in Iraq. It was not going to let us go. The president replied, "I cannot disagree with you more, Jacques. Iraqis love us. We liberated them from a bloody dictator. The very few who fight against us are either remnants of the old regime who are responsible for massive massacres and the use of torture chambers or foreign terrorists who hate life itself."

We have a government that went into war in total ignorance of the enemy. President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, must, I believe, be understood within the context of a 1400 year struggle. I believe it was driven by our president's Christian instincts. If there is ever going to be peace, both sides have to move beyond such instincts.

AMB. FREEMAN: We have had Milton return to the theme of faith-based Middle East policy--armed evangelism, in effect. I suspect that half the audience are, like me, a direct descendants of Charles Martel, who won the Battle of Poitiers. This is a very valuable narrative. I wonder, in the case of the United States, however, whether we're not coming rather late to the concept of Christendom. It may reflect more about internal struggles in our own country than anything else. I always thought our most endearing characteristic was not our historical memory but our amnesia, as illustrated by the high school student who asked me whether the Vietnam War was before or after the Spanish-American War. The fact is, we have been having a struggle between secularism and evangelism in this country. And perhaps the concept of Christendom, which inspired the Crusades, has now become part of our philosophy. It is possible to create myths rather than inherit them. And I fear you may be very right that there's a good deal connecting us now to a long and tragic history on both sides. Clearly, on the other side, there is no problem with remembering the past.

Q&A

Q: You alluded to the fact that the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia criticized Hezbollah. Does it look to you that a realignment is coming? And if Hezbollah survives this intact, what does that do to Israeli relations with Iran?

PROF. TELHAMI: There are a lot of reasons why these governments have taken these positions. A lot of people are asking whether this is part of a new Sunni-Shia divide, because the Hezbollah is Shia. I think this is going to be increasingly part of the debate. There's no question that there is some Sunni-Shia divide, particularly pertaining to Iran and what's happening in Iraq. There's been a shift in the balance of power. A lot of Arab countries are looking at that ethnically, but also in terms of how political coalitions are going to emerge. But this particular crisis cannot be explained by the Sunni-Shia divide. First, the Egyptian and Saudi governments began taking a position and even blaming Hamas prior to the Lebanon escalation.

Abdul-Rahman Al-Rashid, who is a well-connected columnist and speaks for some members of the royal family indirectly, wrote a very bold column accusing Hamas of bringing this upon itself and saying, don't expect help from the Arab governments. They had taken a bold position because they felt that a lot of the militant Islamist groups were dragging them down a path that they don't want to go, and I think that's a collective decision that includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan and, more particularly, those that have strong relationships with the United States.

Second, when you think about this Sunni-Shia divide, you have to first look at it from the point of view of grass-roots politics. No one can possibly argue that the king of Jordan, who is more comfortable here than among the tribes of Jordan, is more Sunni than his Muslim Brotherhood or that President Mubarak is more Sunni than his Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood is supporting Hezbollah in this crisis, not going against it. That's not where the grass-roots religious momentum is coming from.

Third, in the case of the Saudis particularly, they have a bit of a sense of ownership of the Lebanese government. This is a government that they've invested in tremendously. They have a very close relationship with it. They spent a lot with the late Prime Minister Hariri and following his death trying to bring Lebanon back along the lines of their vision of the Middle East. Hezbollah is undermining and threatening that in the short term. So all of these were factors that go beyond the Sunni-Shia split.

The question is whether this is something that they can sustain, particularly if Hezbollah emerges a winner or is seen in the Arab world as a political winner, and if their public opinion is far more furious with them than it has been, particularly if there are even more civilian casualties in Lebanon. It's a risk they're taking. I think that's why the United States and others are betting that their interest now is to see Hezbollah defeated politically--at least, to emerge where there's no sense of victory for Hezbollah. But it is also in their interest not to see a lot of devastation. Not only is that going to sour public opinion against them, but it is in their interest to figure out a way to bring back the state of Lebanon. This is going to cost far more if we continue in the route of escalation.

DR. ALTERMAN: Let me invoke Anwar Sadat, because the Anwar Sadat professor did not. He decided in the 1970s that there's no percentage in being an enemy of the United States. Other Arab governments since have followed his lead. Even the Syrians keep showing signs that they're desperate for attention so that they can stop being an enemy of the United States. That puts the governments against the agenda of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which show no interest in being a friend of the United States. The governments look at finance, they look at military support, they look at support against internal insurgent groups. They all say, "Why don't we want the Americans' help? Why don't we want to be with the West? We have similar interests in all of these things." And in exchange, they put up with an American foreign policy about which many people in these governments have many misgivings.

This highlights the success of American diplomacy, which has brought these governments under our umbrella. But at the same time, there has been a failure to reach beyond the governments, a failure to build constituencies for an orientation toward the United States. I don't think we're at a breaking point because of it, but it seems to me that that's how you have to look at it. You have to look at it in terms of Sadat's calculations before he went to Jerusalem in 1977.

AMB. FREEMAN: You have certainly a heightened risk, if there were a sharp discontinuity in government anywhere, that a very anti-American opinion would take charge. In the case of the Saudis, the Tail accords, by which the Lebanese Civil War was ended, were brokered by Saudi Arabia. And one element of those was the disbanding of militias. So the Saudis have had a sense of frustration about the failure to disband Hezbollah that predisposes them, along with the fact that they've been aligned in Lebanon, with others, to be very skeptical about Hezbollah. Second, Hezbollah, in its broader incarnation, has carried out terrorist actions in Saudi Arabia. And this has simply buttressed the view of Hezbollah that I used to hear when I lived there. Various senior members of the royal family called it not the party of God but the party of Satan.

So there is a lot of history here that predisposes the Saudi authorities to be very skeptical and, indeed, opposed to Hezbollah. The interesting question will be, as Jon and Shibley have said, how long they can sustain this against public opinion as the catastrophe in Lebanon deepens.

MR. VIORST: The one element that the Sunnis and Shiites can agree upon in Iraq and even in some considerable measure among the Kurds--just a step underneath the surface--is that what they do not want is continued American domination. American influence in the region has brought only trouble, certainly since the end of the Cold War in 1990. America's presence hands these two factions the one issue on which they can agree, even while they are engaged in civil war.

AMB. FREEMAN: It is interesting in that context that the Iraqi client government we helped install has been on the side of Hezbollah. And some elements, like Muqtada al-Sadr, have been very outspoken on the subject.

Q: Dr. Alterman, you spoke of creating environments where individuals can hear different perspectives so that they will discuss them and then act, and have those actions reflect their beliefs. Could you discuss that a little bit more in depth from a policy perspective?

DR. ALTERMAN: Maybe I shouldn't be talking to somebody from the Center for American Progress about how you set up an activist network. But I have a friend who did some fascinating doctoral research in sociology on anti-abortion movements. He went to four different cities and asked people about how they got involved. He found that people are sort of oriented toward a view, but they don't initially consider it a core part of their identity. It's when people take action, when people participate, that they start to really feel a stake, and that idea starts to move into the center of their identity. That is how activist networks start. But the interesting part of this, it seems to me, is it's not the strength of belief that leads to action; it's the action that leads to the strength of belief. Let's think back to a few years ago in the Arab world, when Ariel Sharon after a horrific bombing in Israel moved back into the West Bank. There was a military action in Jenin that killed more than 50 people. And you saw an outbreak of boycotts of Israeli goods throughout the Middle East, boycotts that were led by women and children.

AMB. FREEMAN: Actually, boycotts of American goods.

DR. ALTERMAN: This strikes me as really important. We don't think of women and children as being politically active, but women and children did become politically active in their daily lives in a way that deepened their identification with opposition to what the Israelis were doing and U.S. support or acquiescence in what Israel was doing. That sort of dynamic was driven by faxes, by television advertisements. The ability of people to respond and to reach out is changing, and as the information-action nexus gets more complex and deeper, I think there is a lot of interesting opportunity. Just this morning I saw the most graphic images I have ever seen in my life on the web on a site put up by some Lebanese--I don't believe they are Shia at all--burned bodies, halves of bodies, absolutely incredible. These are the kinds of images that I think are going to move some people to discrete action in their own lives.

I have been interested in Khaled for a while. He is a televangelist in Egypt. He gets people to do small discrete things in their lives that identify them with what he's doing. They stop smoking. They put plants on their roofs to help beautify cities. They help somebody find a job. He has tote bags that have written on them in English, "I'm a maker, not a taker." This is all about individual actions, talking to people as individuals and getting collective change out of it. I think that is the world we are moving into in the Middle East, not just people saying, we all support the Arab view and taking that view. Instead, it is about being exposed to a multiplicity of views and people taking individual action in response to what they see, fueling identification. This means politics now work differently than they once did.

MR. KATULIS: The research we did in 2003, 2004 in Iraq, Egypt and some other places pinpointed what ordinary Egyptians, Moroccans and Kuwatis were saying was a tremendous transformation in the media landscape that was affecting their ability to, first, think about events and, second, act in a different way. When you look at the spread of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, I would say that media transformation and technological transformation have had a much more positive impact towards that end--to enable civic activism--as opposed to the focus on electoral processes.

We need more research to understand the younger generation, which has grown up with this access to the Internet and to SMS messaging. I don't know if you have been in the Middle East recently, but you sit in a meeting with younger Arab men and women, and it's a bit annoying because everybody is SMSing each other while they are in the discussion. It's changing the nature of discourse. Some people had high hopes in the 1990s for the impact of Arab TV and satellite television, but I think there is a sense of openness that can be exploited for positive change--and also on the other side by extremist groups. The American government is really not in the game with Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, which are strategically irrelevant in this new landscape.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think Jon Alterman was very kind in not dwelling on the impact of Fox TV in the Middle East. If you watched a hundred hours of Al Hurra and somehow began to be persuaded of the justice of the American viewpoint, and then watched 10 minutes of Fox, you'd feel convinced the United States is a racist and bigoted country, because that is the way it comes across out there.

Q: Would Mr. Katulis please give us his three suggestions for altering public perceptions.

MR. KATULIS: It's not only about altering public perceptions. If you go back to my proposition that the United States over the last three or four years has harmed its own national-security interests, in addition to harming its own image in the Middle East--and the two are intertwined--there are no quick fixes. You can't simply talk your way out of the problem and the hole that we have dug ourselves into. You need to change policies ultimately, and you can disaggregate the two.

For a lot of folks in the region, notwithstanding this new crisis, it is related to what we are doing in Iraq and our open-ended commitment. Public opinion in the region, and in Iraq itself, would like to hear a clear statement from the U.S. government that it has no intention to stay there forever, that it is ultimately going to leave. I have a proposal that I wrote with Larry Korb at the Center for American Progress. I think we need something responsible, a phased drawdown of our military presence there that helps us fulfill our moral obligations to the Iraqi people but ultimately makes a shift toward greater diplomatic and political mechanisms to help bring stability to Iraq.

So number one would be, let's change the direction in Iraq because it's not serving our interests. It is fostering a whole lot of moral hazard among not only Iraqi leaders, but actors in the region. We need to make that shift, by declaring that we are not going to stay there forever and by responding to what I think have been clear signals from the elected Iraqi government that they would like us to leave as soon as practically possible.

Second, I think we should call it what it is. Whether we call the internal conflict in Iraq a civil war or not is a bit of semantics. When you look at the 14,000 Iraqis who were killed in the first six months, 40 percent of them in May and June, you see that we have got to move beyond our talking points and spin on freedom and democracy and recognize that Iraq really is an ethnocracy and a failed state with a major internal conflict.

There are two other ideas, one related to Lebanon. We have a lot of aspirations to be a force for stability and progress in the Middle East. We have not met those aspirations. In a very real way in the Palestinian Authority, in Lebanon and other places, the focus has been on elections without helping build institutions. The Palestinian Authority security forces and the Lebanese army are clearly incapable of doing a lot of the things that we demand of them. What we need is some sort of program to help stabilize these institutions so that they can regain or capture a monopoly on the use of force in their own societies. We have very weak governments in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.

Third, in addition to some of these policy shifts, we need to take greater care of how we communicate our ideas. The Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication said that policy and strategic communications cannot be separated. I actually think there have been some improvements when you see Alberto Fernandez from the State Department finally appearing on al-Jazeera after a self-imposed boycott by U.S. administration officials. This goes back to a comment that I made earlier. A lot of what we do on Radio Sawa and Al Hurra is strategically irrelevant in the new media landscape, and what we need to do is engage more in the debates in the local environments and present our ideas. But it's not about talking our way out of this; we need to have serious policy change. It's got to start, I think, with Iraq. It's also got to involve some shifts in terms of reengaging in the Middle East peace process in a different way.

DR. ALTERMAN: I just want to highlight a hazard that I think we keep falling into. We keep thinking that a lot of this is about messaging. So we get some new undersecretary over at the State Department, and she--it's been a "she" the last three times--goes out and talks to people and finds out that maybe it's really complicated. Messaging is relatively easy because you can do it with a small team in the undersecretary's suite, and it doesn't mean that you have to deal with thousands of people in the U.S. government bureaucracy who might be alienated by what you're doing. There are a lot of people in the former USIA who spend much of their day complaining about how much better things were under USIA. We have to fundamentally rethink what our goals are and what our tools are. How can we can measure what we're doing and what we are trying to do?

We don't have a strategy. What seems to be happening is that we keep getting new undersecretaries who understand that it's really complicated, and they look around in SA-44, and they say, "I can't work with these people; I don't know what they think they are doing. I am just going to work with my team and we are going to work out better messaging." That is not the problem. We have thousands of people doing this stuff around the world. We have to figure out what they are doing, what they should be doing, and how to train them to do it right, because this really matters. We keep having leadership that acts as if it doesn't matter, and they are wrong.

AMB. FREEMAN: We had a brief moment in which we believed that history had ended, and therefore there was no need to continue the arguments that had driven history for the preceding 30,000 years.

MR. VIORST: This issue of American withdrawal from Iraq remains a key concern. Most Americans are convinced the issue is when we will withdraw. I don't think Iraqis are convinced that we intend to withdraw at all, and I see compelling evidence out there that supports them in this belief. Having lived through the British and the French, who left only when they were driven out, and seeing that we are investing such huge sums in our civilian and military facilities in Iraq, increasingly Iraqis say, "Come on, you're kidding. The United States is not going to leave voluntarily." They have a very strong argument, which undermines our credibility every day.

PROF. TELHAMI: I agree with the sense that public diplomacy as such isn't going to do it. In the short term, you cannot do it when it's about policies. The real question is, what policies are we talking about? Are we talking about this gap that Milton talked about, the civilizational gap, or are we talking about some profound change pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Is that really doable? I want to address that just briefly. But I want to talk first about this notion of a civilizational divide. Of course, there is one; there is no question about it. There is also the civilizational divide between America and India, between America and Japan, between America and China. There have always been civilizational divides across the world. There has also always been a civilizational divide in some ways between Europe and the Middle East. But is this really a central factor in explaining conflict?

I'm not just a student of the Middle East; I study conflict in general. The vast majority of conflicts in the world are within civilizations. Most people who die in conflict in the world are killed in civil wars. Even today, look at Iraq. What is the civilizational clash? Most people are killing their own. I think that we really have to be very careful in identifying this civilizational clash as the core reason for the conflict, even if it's there. It is not an explanation. I think that there is a clash, but it's not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of prisms through which one side looks at the other. Even within a civilization, you have this clash of prisms. Americans are looking at the Arab and Muslim world since 9/11 through the prism of terrorism, the prism of 9/11. We label groups terrorist by virtue of the fact that they engage in terrorism. So Hamas to us is not just engaging in terrorism; it is a terrorist group. When people in the Middle East are looking at it, they see the terrorism, but that is a small part of what they see. Their prism is the occupation and the role that Hamas is playing.

So we have a clash of views that has to be addressed, but it's not a civilizational clash. In the end, I think policies matter a lot. You cannot have successful policies unless you understand the prism through which the other side looks at you, and unless you are conscious of the narrow prism through which you look at the other. Generally, everyone is looking through a very narrow prism and not looking at the rest of the world, particularly in environments of conflict.

The fact that policies matter is obvious. Look at Iraq. We can disagree or agree on what should be done now. But, even though the vast majority of people opposed the war, if the outcome had been a vibrant, democratic, stable, prosperous Iraq in which Sunnis and Shias coexist and American forces had withdrawn, there's no question that attitudes toward America would have changed. So the issue wasn't actually even the war. The issue was designing a policy that works. This was a policy that didn't work, and people do punish you for it. When we're drawing up policies, we have to base them on reality and not have the amnesia that Ambassador Freeman talked about earlier.

MR. VIORST: Amnesia is part of memory; it's not only what you remember but what you forget or what you chose to drive out of your memory. And it is true, as Shibley says, that we do not have the same civilization as India or China or Japan. But we have made accommodations to them while failing utterly to make accommodations to the civilization of the Arab world, the Islamic civilization. And it's becoming increasingly Islamic. It was more Arab 20 years ago. Now Islamism has spread, and I wonder whether it's going to spread increasingly into the Islam even of Southeast Asia.

But I do think that our historical memory toward the Islamic world, and the Islamic world's historical memory toward us, is different from the exchange of memories that takes place between us and India or Africa or any others. We have a government that has absolutely refused to examine the sensitivities of the Arab world and then seems to be totally mystified when these sensitivities erupt in explosions.

The president didn't have to be terribly wise to understand what is happening. There's a huge amount of literature on the subject of historical memory. Had he gone to a nearby bookshelf, he could have found some things that would have told him that the Iraqis were not going to receive us with the flowers that Vice President Cheney promised. He refused to do that because it was not what he wanted to know. I'm afraid we are still in that position. Over the course of the past few days, we have encountered it once more, a war that is penetrating deeply into Lebanon.

DR. ALTERMAN: As somebody who was in the government during the year right after September 11, there was a sense in which people thought September 11 changed everything and disproved everything we knew. The fact that the expert community hadn't predicted September 11 delegitimized and marginalized the expert community as people were debating what would happen in Iraq. I saw that every day when I was in the State Department. What we're learning again is that history matters, that having expertise matters. But I think you also want this tension between people who think it's all the same thing over and over and over again and people who can imagine something that's very different. That's a useful tension. I think that tension was lost, and too much of the Iraq War was planned by people who didn't want to consider alternative views because the alternative views are held by the people who also didn't predict September 11. If they're the experts and they couldn't do that, what the hell good are they?

AMB. FREEMAN: I recall chairing a similar discussion of the relevance of history at Osmania University in Hyderabad in South India in 1967. It was a comparison of Chinese, American and Indian views of history and the weight of history on decision making. When I asserted that the Indians felt the burden of history the lightest because of cultural reasons, a gentleman in the back stood up and said, "As for our history, we are still having it." I've always taken heart from that thought.

I just want to note on Iraq, since there has been discussion of change, and on public opinion, the last issue of Middle East Policy contains the transcript of a very interesting discussion with Larry Korb, who co-authored with Brian a strategy for withdrawal from Iraq. There were four different proposals in that issue for a responsible exit from Iraq. In the same issue we also dealt with the orgy of xenophobic demagoguery that accompanied the Dubai Ports World issue and its impact on American business relationships with the Middle East.

Q: Why do Hamas and Hezbollah engage in these provocative actions now? Did they miscalculate? Did they think they were just going to capture some soldiers and negotiate a prisoners exchange, or did they anticipate that they would provoke Israel to a massive retaliation that would shift the weight of world opinion?

Second, it seems to me that in the history leading up to all of this, a seminal event was the failure of the Camp David and the later Taba negotiations. That failure has been widely attributed in the United States to the idiosyncrasies of Arafat. A widely held view is that the Israelis made an unbelievable offer and the Palestinians, led by Arafat, just rejected it and went back to terrorism. I would be interested in your view of those events and what was really happening and how that's perceived in the Arab world.

MR. VIORST: Let's try to keep an American focus on this. While the president was proclaiming the sanctity of democracy as a process, we watched over the most successful democratic election in the Middle East--and perhaps all of history--in Palestine. But we didn't like the outcome. I think there is some reason to believe we decided from the very beginning--as we decided in the case of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953--that, however democratic the election may be, we, the United States, were not going to submit to this result, and our friends the Israelis totally agreed. Exactly how this process played out in what meetings, we don't know and may never know, but it's clear that Israel and the United States rejected a democratic election because we disapproved of the winner.

So it was inevitable. I hate to use a word like "inevitable," because in history there is nothing that's inevitable. So let it suffice to say it was highly likely there was going to be a clash between the Israelis and Hamas. It began over the pretext--or, if you like, the small reality--of the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. But the product was not remotely in proportion to the event. Now the Middle East is engaged in a war once again that the whole Bush doctrine subjects to the disapproval of the Arab world. It is seen as hypocrisy when we favor elections only as long as our candidates win. We had ignored Abbas; the Israelis had ignored Abbas. We deprived the Palestinians of any stake in our candidate, and so he lost. After the election, there was no effort to find an alternative to conflict. And so this transpired.

MR. KATULIS: Why did Hezbollah and Hamas engage in these provocations right now? I think there are serious questions about the timing, but one simple answer is, because they could. They were in an environment in which they did not have any kind of restraint from the states or governing entities that should control them, and I would tie that back, in part, to American policy failure in the Middle East.

We were talking about reform and institution building and things like this. A fundamental basis for helping expand democracy and freedom is that there be rule of law and the state have a monopoly on the use of force. The Palestinian Authority did not have that. It didn't have it in the 1990s, when I lived in Ramallah and Gaza and it had weakened severely. One consequence of the actions we're seeing today is a weakening of the Lebanese authority. A longer-term strategic question that we need to ask ourselves when the dust settles from all of this is, what kinds of incentives can we--the United States and the international community--put in place to get institutions to do what we demand of them? I would argue that, for several years, we did not do that.

On Camp David and the Taba accords, I think it's a complex story. I lived in the Palestinian territories from 1995 to about 1998 working on democracy-development programs. One lesson learned at that early stage was that we had had a policy that focused almost exclusively on Arafat and his security structures. On the one hand, we got to help build up those security structures, but we can't let that be the be-all and end-all. Part of the problem structurally, with the peace process in general and the Oslo process specifically, was that there was little opportunity for input. I remember a billboard in downtown Gaza City; it had Arafat's face right next to the Dome of the Rock. In Arabic it said, "My dreams won't be completed without you, Jerusalem." In many ways, we weren't encouraging Arafat and those who were leading the Palestine Authority to include the broader Palestinian population in the decisions on each interim agreement that was passed by the democratically elected body of the Israeli side. It makes the task a little more difficult, but it actually makes the process a bit more sustainable. We should have had a strategy that would have made the job more difficult in the short run, but could have made the process a bit easier, so that Arafat couldn't say, "My population is not prepared." I think part of the reason the population wasn't prepared was that Arafat didn't do that, and we didn't encourage him to.

DR. ALTERMAN: We had observed that Israel has never responded to this kind of provocation in this way. There have been soldiers kidnapped, but there's never been this kind of massive military action. I think it may have something to do with not only a relatively new Israeli government, but also one that's led by people without long security resumes. Ehud Olmert was not a security guy; the defense minister was a labor organizer. So there is a sort of a pre-orientation toward demonstrating toughness against the first provocation to show that Israelis haven't turned soft. This leaves the Israelis strategically perplexed because the central organizing principle of the Kadima party was that unilateral withdrawal brings peace. Now Israel is fighting a two-front war in the very places it has unilaterally withdrawn from. Part of the difficulty is going to be how to replace that strategy at a time when Israel is fighting a war but doesn't have a strategic idea in place of how the war should end.

On the second point about Camp David and Taba, I don't see that the Palestinians broadly rejected the idea of coexistence with Israel. Fatah lost the election for a whole range of reasons, some of which have to do with incredibly poor organization, complete lack of party discipline, the fact that they had become an utter kleptocracy that didn't stand for anything--plus Mahmoud Abbas wasn't able to get anything through the legislature. It's not clear to me that people had signed on to a Hamas agenda, but now that we're in the situation we're in, I'm not sure exactly how we all dig out. It's very hard to have coexistence with people who say, "You can coexist until we decide to destroy you." I think that's true a little on both sides, but Israel is more justified in its interpretation of Hamas' intransigence than Hamas is of Israel's.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think the key point Jon has just made is that Kadima's political platform has just been totally discredited. One hand can't clap, and one side can't declare peace. One side cannot define borders between two sides. It's an illustration for anyone who is looking that Israelis and Palestinians need each other if either of them is to have a state with defined borders. At the moment neither has a state with defined borders. The second point is that the legacy of this conflict, whatever it is, is going to be apparent, and that we now have a war of flying bombs. Some are dropped from aircraft and some are fired on rockets. Distance is not the issue that it once was. Buffer zones are not as valid and useful as they once were. And the military situation has achieved a measure of asymmetrical equivalents, if there is such an idea, which is not easily going to be corrected.

If I were a cynic, I would look at the evidence and say that Israel always finds a reason to declare that there's no one to talk to on the other side. And when they finally elect someone who clearly has the authority to talk, if they could be persuaded to do it, Israel is determined to ensure that that government is destroyed. Israeli policy has very clearly been aimed at crushing Hamas, and many argue that, in fact, the IDF intended to go into Gaza, but not at the time that it did. All that happened with the kidnapping of this unfortunate corporal was that the safety went off the rifle, and they fired it a little earlier than they planned.

The second point regards cause and effect. There's plenty of provocation on both sides. It recalls the famous exhibit in the Paris zoo in the 1840s when they put a human being in a cage, on which there was a sign that said in French: "This is a vicious animal. If attacked, it will fight back." There is no question that both sides have given each other ample reason to do all sorts of atrocious things and that they are capable of doing atrocious things.

There is an interesting prospect for escalation here based on what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. The United States is the quartermaster for Israel; we pick up the tab and provide the supplies. The same relationship exists between Syria and Iran and Hezbollah. They are the quartermasters; they pick up the tab. Just as Israel doesn't apparently feel obliged to consult with us before it does some of the things it does, there's no indication that Hezbollah feels obliged to consult with Syria and Iran. Assumptions in the Middle East are that the United States connived with Israel in what is happening. I don't think so. Assumptions in the United States and Israel are that Iran and Syria connived with Hezbollah in what is happening. I don't think so. So we have an interesting situation where, once again, our ideas of what is and what actually is may be somewhat at odds.

MR. VIORST: It's an interesting point you make about who is conniving with whom except that, if America opens the door and says, do what you like, that is a form of conniving. And you're absolutely right that there's blame to go around in both quarters in this particular war. But I think what really is different now is that this is the first war in which the United States doesn't even make the claim that its objective is to stop the fighting and save lives. We now have a government that says, "Fight it out, folks. If that's what you want to do, the United States will stand by and hold your coat." But not only are we holding Israel's coat; we're brushing it.

Let me add one other small item. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, it was clearly understood that its strategic objective was (a) to destroy the military power of the PLO, which was easy enough to do, but also (b) to set up a puppet government in Lebanon, which for a brief moment seemed to have been achieved when Bashir Gemayel became the president. Well, Gemayel was assassinated, and it didn't work out. Now the question--and many Israelis are asking it--is whether Israel has the same failed plan again. Is that what is going to satisfy the Israelis, to set up another puppet--and, I repeat, Christian--government? Maybe I'm a little hooked on the Christian factor, but the fact is, that's what it was in 1982, and that looks like what it may very well be now. And what we have is the United States behaving not just negatively, but giving active encouragement to the Israelis. So, coming back to the notion of the Arab view of the United States, it's not getting any better.

AMB. FREEMAN: If you give someone a blank check, you're accountable for what happens, whether you're responsible for the decisions that person makes or not. That seems to me to be the appropriate analogy. The one thing we have asked Israel to do is to reduce the level of civilian causalities in Lebanon. So far, those are running at 94 to 95 percent of the death toll. That is to say, something like 5 or 6 percent of those killed have some association with Hezbollah, and the others are civilians who were in the way. So, whatever the Israelis are doing, they're not doing very well at responding to our rather modest request, and that is probably going to have its impact on public opinion.

Q: All of you touched on how public opinion of the United States is down in the Middle East. I was wondering if it's down because of what we did or is it down just because of our place as a superpower.

DR. ALTERMAN: An Arab friend said, "These governments aren't accountable to us in the Arab world; they're accountable to you in Washington." People simply, on a very broad basis, say the United States is responsible for the nature of governance in the Arab world. It's responsible for the internal conflicts; it's responsible for repression; it's responsible for extremism because they see us as having relationships with everybody in power. They see us as being supremely competent, so we're the people who are responsible for the mess in which they live.

MR. VIORST: I totally agree with Jon about the Arab disposition to attribute powers to us which we don't have. But one of the things that we learned after we became the single superpower is that the Arabs have a rather remarkable ability to frustrate us. It's certainly what they're proving in Iraq. This Arab ability is something we have repeatedly failed to take into account: the Arabs' capacity over the course of history to wage guerrilla war (or terrorism if you like, to put the worst face upon it.) It's true, the Arabs have not been very good in holding themselves accountable for many of their own horrors. Our policies have made matters far worse for them, but they have also been unable to fulfill their responsibilities within their own society. This is what I talked about earlier: that after World War II, when the Arabs were liberated from British and French control, they pleaded with the United States to give them time to develop some institutions. But we insisted upon their supporting us in the Cold War. The institutions never came about, and they haven't come about to this day. The Arabs know it just as well as we do.

MR. KATULIS: If you look at the research done over the last two or three years--some of the things that Shibley has done and some of the research that I've done--the primary impression is negative about the United States, and it's largely focused on policies: on our support for Israel, on Iraq. Then there are also quite ugly antisemitic conspiracy theories about domination of the media and a desire to control the world. But there really is this sense that we are trying to control events. We saw this in research that I mentioned we did in Iraq. In June 2003, I was in Mosul observing a focus group that our researchers, Iraqis, were doing. Just that morning Saddam Hussein had issued an audiotape. He was on the run and doing the war of ideas over the Arab media on audiotape. We had a group of Sunni men, one of whom said that this tape from Saddam Hussein is just another American game, the CIA is trying to frighten the Iraqi people, trying to blackmail the Iraqi people and to make them fearful.

A lot of those attitudes--that we have a lot of control and power over events--are still out there. I would qualify that because I think, as people have access to more sources of information through the media, the more skeptical they become when they see incompetence. It's stunning to people. They sort out the dissonance in the Arab world--how can they be so powerful and then be so incompetent--often by coming up with some quite convoluted theories. More and more, you see evidence in the Arab media of an American government that can't even take care of its own people when the country is hit by a hurricane.

Let me qualify it once more; it's not all negative when you do this research. Often times in polls you have a dichotomous choice of favorable versus unfavorable, and that doesn't get into the complexity and depth of attitudes. Individuals can simultaneously hold diametrically opposed opinions. Arabs and the people in the Middle East not only hate America and some of its policies; they fear, admire and respect it, too. When you do more open-ended research, you see that there are still some positives. There's the sense of economic advancement and the desire for progress. You can see this anecdotally when you look at people lining up for visas at the embassy.

AMB. FREEMAN: What is the scope of the issue we're talking about? I think it's fair to say that, 20 years ago, we would have been concerned primarily about Palestinian reaction. Today, we've been talking largely about Arab reaction. But I think the reality has moved beyond that, and we should be talking about Muslim reaction; the fifth of the human race that is Muslim feels increasingly intimately connected to these issues and affronted. If you recall history, you know the last time the Israelis really tried to crush and isolate Palestinians, we got the Munich Olympics incident, the Achille Lauro and things like that. The last time they invaded Lebanon, we got Hezbollah, which was a product of the 1982 invasion.

If the reaction comes this time, it's not going to come from a few million Palestinians or a few million neighbors of Israel. It's going to come in a broader context from hundreds of millions of people. We're talking about events that have a vastly larger leverage potentially on the world than we have been accustomed to. And the explosion, if there is one, can be much larger. The world can be transformed in far more disadvantageous ways by the mishandling of this situation than we often seem to recognize.

Q: I'm from India. We were told in 1937 and 1946 that, if only we could become familiar with the blessings of British civilization, we'd be fine. It was our democratically elected leaders who waged the war of independence afterwards. In the Middle East, how are institutions going to be built when the problem of colonialism is still there?

MR. KATULIS: When you look at British colonialism, I think one can make a case that it was much more effective than whatever attempt at American colonialism we've seen. President Bush in 1999 ran on a campaign promise that he wasn't going to do nation building, and he's fulfilled it. He has not done it in Iraq, Afghanistan or other places. The United States should impose this. We should work with the international community to help people do for themselves. What we don't have right now is leadership. Look at the G-8 statement, particularly, on Lebanon. There's a formula about what needs to be done to actually achieve some sort of settlement and calm down the crisis, but you don't have leadership, nor do you have policies. We have a president of the United States who basically says Kofi Annan should tell the Syrians to cut the "S" out. They don't actually develop an effective policy to help build these institutions.

In terms of institution building, there is local talent and people who can build for themselves, but you need incentives to help strengthen the state structures. I think we should be careful because we need stability. We need to help societies build these structures themselves. We can't do it for them, which is part of my critique of Iraq, and we're trying to do too much for others. What we need to do is create incentives. Otherwise, you foster moral hazard and a sense of colonialism.

There's a better way of doing it than what we've done before, but it's not on the agenda. We've got a lot of rhetoric and talking points about advancing freedom and democracy, which I happen to think connect with where a lot of people in the Middle East want to go, but there's a disconnect in terms of what they see on the ground. We need to revisit that and say, what can we do to actually help people do for themselves? This requires international support. It shouldn't be a paternalistic attitude, where the United States says, we're going to do this for you, we're going to train you and you're going to be good civil servants. I think there's a basic impulse there for stability and order in good governance even before you get to democracy.

AMB. FREEMAN: In defense of the president, Leon Hadar has pointed out that, in Texan, "Shiite" and the word that he mentioned to Tony Blair sound the same, so undoubtedly he was telling the Syrians to cut out the Shiites. Since several people have raised the issue of civilizational conflict, I think Gandhi probably spoke for many in the world when, as you recall, he arrived in London and was asked what he thought about Western civilization. He replied that he thought it would be a good idea. He also quite relevantly remarked that an "eye for an eye" and "a tooth for a tooth," and pretty soon you have nobody with eyes and nobody with teeth. This is probably a pretty fair description of the level of mayhem that is now in place.

Q: A couple of days ago, I was in the Senate attending a hearing on a similar issue of Islam and the West and the discussion seemed to shift into anti-terrorism--what you can do, what policies to adopt against terrorism. But it started with basic worldviews. The Pew Endowment conducted a massive survey in nine Middle Eastern countries asking about the views of Muslims toward the United States and the view of the United States towards Islam. The conclusion seems to be very scary for the policy makers. They didn't understand why Muslims hate them and that there is increasing anti-Americanism. There's a push now to find top-down solutions, quick ones, for anti-terrorism. Politicians are affected by the polls, and they want quick solutions. This only makes the Arab governments more oppressive to their people and increases the anti-Americanism.

DR. ALTERMAN: Governments are really good at dealing with other governments. They've been doing it for a long time. There's a way to do it; we understand what to do: we have diplomatic notes, we have demarches. Governments are really bad at dealing with other governments' people. We don't have instruments to do it; we don't know how to do it. They don't know how to deal with us. I don't think the realistic answer to this problem is that the U.S. government will figure out the secret and suddenly we're going to be effective in dealing with broad populations. Part of what we need to do is to think of other kinds of institutions that can affect institutions in other places. We need to understand where the trends are going. A lot of this is going to be reactive, but the idea that somehow the U.S. government is going to be effective in dealing with another population when other governments have been incredibly ineffective in inspiring our population to go one way or the other is to bet on the wrong horse. We're going to have a lot more success with educators, academics, exchanges and those kinds of things over a long period of time on a micro level in affecting attitudes than we're going to have with a government strategy. Least of all are we going to figure out how to package this and then all the problems are going to go away.

MR. KATULIS: I think your comment is tremendously insightful and it raises a lot of difficult questions for policy makers, especially on the Hill, who are hit with 30 or 40 different issues in one day and want a quick solution. I have a theory that democracies often make their biggest strategic mistakes in response to a threat from the terrorism of non-state actors. They end up undertaking policies, in part, to respond to their population's fear and, ultimately undermine the strategic struggle. Coming up is the five-year anniversary of 9/11; I think there will be a lot of reflection and, hopefully, some shift on it. It's a really hard struggle. Strategically, part what we do at the Center for American Progress is try to help people think differently about security, reframe the nature of security, not just look at challenges in Iraq or other places as problems that require military solutions, but that we have a full range of power--diplomatic, political and economic.

A few years ago I went to Yemen and wrote a chapter based on some research there. I interviewed several ministers in the government and other leaders. It was focused on better governance in Yemen and what the international community is doing. I heard from the minister of justice, who said, we're confused about American policy in Yemen. You have one hand saying to reform your structures, respect human rights, political rights, civil liberties, and you'll get all this money from the Millennium Challenge Account. But, on the other hand, you have intelligence agencies saying, if you arrest these three- or four-dozen people and detain them without charge, you're really going to be helping us out. You'll always have ambiguity in any government, particularly a large superpower like the United States, but there should be a way to get a little more policy coherence on a lot of the objectives that we say we want to achieve.

One point back on the topic is understanding the audiences--not just listening to elites in these countries, but getting out and listening to how we're perceived. I have a chapter in a book coming out called "No Chance for a Caliphate," which says that when you look at broad public opinion across Muslim-majority countries, there's no sense that there could be some sort of radical caliphate, especially when the alternative is democracy. But we have a president who has put at the center of his national-security strategy the danger of the emergence of a caliphate. And that if we leave Iraq too soon, this will spread to Indonesia and other places. That's deeply irresponsible for a leader. Americans need leadership that educates them about the complexities of the world. Otherwise you get mush, and bad rhetoric like " World War III" from Newt Gingrich and what's going on in Lebanon and Iran. We need better leadership, leaders who think about the long term.

MR. VIORST: I agree with what Jon says about governments being much better at dealing with governments than they are at dealing with people. On the other hand, we have been remarkably consistent in the last few years in making the United States universally loathed among Arabs and among Muslims. I think Chas. is correct in moving this boundary outward. Over the course of the past few years, we have devastated our good name. What shreds we had of a reputation for fairness and decency and an unwillingness to tolerate violent solutions to problems have just gone up in smoke.

There must be something governments can do to reverse the course it last followed, and clearly we haven't been doing it. Not just the administration downtown; these guys upstairs from here in the Capitol have not been doing very well either, by racing through resolutions in support of the Israeli position. I don't think that shows much wisdom on the part of Congress.

If you're talking about how this is to be turned around, I can't be optimistic, not because there's not some means to do it. There is some wisdom which might be summed up in that discredited term "evenhandedness," for example. Evenhandedness might in the long term serve Israel as well as the Arab world. I'm certainly gloomy about the reality of the present circumstances, but I'm not so gloomy in the feeling that we are helpless. There are some things the government of the United States can do by choice.

AMB. FREEMAN: It's truly bizarre that a country, which lived for 40 years under circumstances where a president had three-and-a-half to four minutes after being notified to make a decision that would result within six hours in 160 million deaths, and whose survival was at stake physically as well as ideologically in the struggle with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, should be so terrified of pinpricks from a bunch of people in Afghanistan's caves. 9/11 was very traumatic in many respects, but the loss of life was one-fourth that which we lose annually to handguns in this country. In fact, more Americans have died from peanut allergies over the last 10 years than died in that set of incidents. So to be afraid and to engage in fear mongering, and to become unhinged and to behave as though we've had some sort of national nervous breakdown rather than rationally, is the root of the problem.

I'm engaged at the moment in an effort to develop comparative data on Chinese defense spending. You discover that the American defense budget of $440 billion is not anything like the defense-spending level. It is $750 billion--$120 billion supplemental for combat operations, $70 billion for veterans affairs. In the case of the Chinese, we count their homeland-security functions at $88 billion a year. Nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy budget, not DOD, is $10 billion--some space programs that are not in the Air Force budget but in the intel budgets for other people, and so forth and so on. It adds up to about 5.5 percent of our GDP, which is more than we ever spent when we were truly threatened with annihilation. Something fundamental needs to be reexamined, and I have a few suggestions. Perhaps we should abandon our experiment with diplomacy-free foreign policy and try to persuade people to do things our way rather than bludgeon them into it. We would do better to reaffirm our own constitution and values than to abandon the role of law both at home and abroad. And, if the United States behaves as a scofflaw internationally, why should we be surprised that the law of the jungle is adopted by others as their standard of behavior? What we see in the Middle East now is the law of the jungle.

Here are some sensible diplomatic things that might be done. One is to try to make friends and to work with them. The only friend we have made in the last five years is Colonel Qadhafi, which is not something I would boast about in polite company. I think we should choose our enemies as carefully as we choose our friends--and, perhaps given the example of Colonel Qadhafi, even more carefully. Finally, I think we should try to divide our enemies, not unite them. These are perhaps heretical and irrelevant pieces of advice, and they certainly will not be heeded by either of our political parties, because they both share the same assumption that the correct response to provocation is to obliterate those who provided it.

I would conclude by saying that the issue we have been talking about--Arab opinion, or American opinion and Arab opinion as they intersect, or maybe even Islamic opinion--doesn't begin to describe the universe of the problem that Milton referred to and which I have just described. I will give you two points to ponder in this regard. We have several policies which are running out of road, going over the precipice or stalling out. Think of Korea. Think of Iran. Think of the Middle East, where there has been no peace process for five years. In Korea, the latest polling data shows that if there were a conflict with North Korea, 49 percent of South Koreans would side with North Korea against their American allies. That is a remarkable achievement of our policies and is worth noting.

Second, in terms of our influence and our ability to attract and educate and inspire others, here is a very interesting statistic. In 2000, the United States had 9 percent of the global tourism market. We had 6 percent in 2005. So wherever people are going to learn, to have fun and to be inspired, it's not here by anywhere near as much as it used to be. This brings me back to the thesis that we need to get our own act together; we need to practice democracy rather than seek to impose it on others. And nowhere is this probably required more than in the Middle East. I should add a large footnote to those remarks by saying that the Middle East Policy Council, of which I am president, does not take positions on issues, and therefore the foregoing is entirely my personal opinion and should be ignored, as I'm sure it will be.