With Friends Like These…

David Ignatius notes in today’s WaPo America’s worsening reputation among our “friends” in the Middle East:

Let’s start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year by Zogby International in six countries that are usually regarded as pro-American: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In these six “friendly” countries, only 12 percent of those surveyed expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. America’s leaders have surpassed Israel’s as objects of anger. Asked which foreign leader they disliked most, 38 percent named George Bush; Ariel Sharon was a distant second at 11 percent; and Ehud Olmert was third with 7 percent.

The poll data show a deep suspicion of American motives: 65 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t think democracy was a real U.S. objective in the Middle East. Asked to name two countries that had the most freedom and democracy, only 14 percent said America, putting it far behind France and Germany. And remember, folks, this is coming from our friends.

This reality is pretty grim, and is squarely at odds with the administration’s continuing unreality about the effects of the Iraq war on broad political developments in the region. (For a round up of the bewildering remarks by the Bush team on the current Iraq policy, see this piece by Fred Kaplan in today’s Slate.) The point is not that Hezbollah, for example, is right or good, but that they are so popular while the U.S. is reviled by more and more of the public in these countries. As Ignatius concludes:

You don’t have to agree with these Muslim critics to recognize that the anger they express represents a serious national security problem for the United States. That’s what President Bush seems not to understand in his surge of troops into Iraq, his bromides about democracy and his strategy of confrontation with Iran. It isn’t a tiny handful of people in the Arab world who oppose what America is doing. It’s nearly everyone.