20 February, 1998
The anti-Americanism in Arab world
By James J. Napoli
CAIRO: During the Persian Gulf war, several students were killed and scores were hurt in demonstrations at Cairo University against the allied assault on Iraq. The tone was anti-American.
Why were they protesting against the United States? Saddam Hussein was roundly despised by most Egyptians - many of whom had bitter experience as labourers in Iraq - and the Egyptian army was part of the US-led effort to dislodge Iraqi troops from Kuwait, a fellow Arab country.
"Why? Because everybody hates any country that has power and uses it," P.J. Vatikiotis, the great Middle East historian and political scientist told me.
Vatikiotis, a London University professor who died about a month ago, had a curmudgeonly way with words that made them - and him - memorable. They come to mind now as the United States and Britain seem about to start plastering Iraq with bombs and missiles again.
If it happens, people in Egypt are predicting there will be more campus demonstrations and, if anything, they will be more determinedly anti-American.
Here's the most powerful country in the world again using that
power to whack around a Third World pipsqueak. Or so it will be interpreted.
There's also a palpable unease among expatriates - already glum from the prolonged hang-over since the massacres of tourists in Cairo and Luxor in recent months - that the anti-American theme will be picked up by radical Islamic activists to give direction for more militancy.
Unlike the Persian Gulf war, when the objectives for military action were at least clear, there's only confusion now about the point of further bombing.
It's too much to believe that bombing would eradicate the likely sites for building weapons of mass destruction, and no one can quite believe that Hussein will come to his senses after Baghdad is pelted by high explosives and utter words like, "Ah well, now that I see that you mean business, of course I'll cooperate." That's not about to happen.
One other certainty is that the anti-American smog that has pervaded the Muslim, particularly the Arab, world in recent years would thicken. One consequence of an attack on Iraq might be the closing of Arab ranks against the United States.
The process already is under way. Neither Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak nor most other Arab leaders, no matter how disgusted with Hussein's behaviour, can advocate bombing another Arab country by the West, which is already perceived to be responsible for driving the people of that country into starvation, poverty and disease.
Earlier this winter, a delegation of Egyptian celebrities, including the famed film director Youssef Chahine, made a trip to Iraq bearing medicines and food. They focused on the West, particularly the United States, as responsible for the misery of the Iraqi people. The delegation would not have been able to make that trip without the complicity of the Egyptian government.
The anti-Americanism in much of the Arab world has roots in politics nurtured since Gamal Abdul Nasser came to power in Egypt nearly a half century ago. Socialism, pan-Arabism, Third-Worldism and a deep sense of victimization have all expressed themselves in anti-Western rhetoric.
You read it every day in the newspapers and magazines, which see Western conspiracies everywhere, and these are usually connected to some presumed Israeli plot. The papers here pounced on Monica Lewinsky's Jewish heritage and observed that the Lewinsky affair seemed to spoil Yasser Arafat's recent meeting with President Clinton.
Western influences (and Israel) are blamed for everything in Egypt and much of the Arab world, from aphrodisiacal chewing gum to AIDS.
There are, of course, good reasons for the Arab world to be suspicious of the United States. Its policies towards Israel, to take the most obvious example, have been blatantly skewed against the Arabs over the past 50 years. It didn't go unremarked in Cairo that Israel is able to ignore United Nations resolutions with impunity while Iraq seems about to be bombed for its sins.
President Clinton doesn't have to win a popularity contest in the Middle East. But he had better be sure, before he rouses the hatred of the weak by again unleashing stupendous military power against Iraq, that it's worth the cost.-Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Hartford Courant.