For those that believe that Iraq has made the US safer, let's see how many mujahideen we can create.
In Mideast, Anger and Solidarity
Arabs Praise Iraqi Insurgents, Condemn U.S. Occupation
Scott Wilson
AMMAN, Jordan, April 9 -- The U.S. military campaign across Iraq this week infuriated Arabs in the region and brought strident calls for Muslim solidarity against the American-led occupation.
Throughout the week, Arabic-language television networks have repeatedly aired images of U.S. tanks rumbling through Fallujah, a mosque damaged by a U.S. bomb and the corpses of Iraqis killed in the heaviest fighting in almost a year.
Arab commentators have compared the U.S. offensive to Israel's tactics against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, reinforcing long-standing Arab fears that the United States has no intention of leaving the region.
Leading Arab newspapers and clerics have praised Iraqi insurgents and the emerging anti-U.S. alliance among Sunni and Shiite Muslims as a turning point in the fight against the occupation.
One Egyptian opposition newspaper, Al-Ahali, declared on its front page that Fallujah -- a city west of Baghdad that has been at the center of resistance to the occupation -- has secured a vaunted place in Islamic history for its stand against U.S. troops.
"How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?" journalist Abdel Hady Abu Taleb wrote in Egypt's state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper. "Ever since the fall of Baghdad a year ago, the Americans have been making one excuse after another to explain the escalation of the resistance."
In small demonstrations Friday in several capitals, protesters called for their governments to denounce the U.S. military tactics, which Arab leaders have so far declined to do.
"This comes on top of a broad unhappiness with Arab governments from Morocco to Iraq," said Kamel Abu Jaber, a former Jordanian foreign minister. "It seems like these governments are living in one reality and the people in another."
In Sunni-majority countries such as Jordan, many have watched with trepidation as Iraq's Shiite majority has garnered new political power under the U.S. occupation. But many Sunnis appear now to be setting aside fears of a Shiite resurgence, at least for the moment, to express support for a widening anti-occupation resistance.
In the Jordanian capital, Muslim clerics underscored Sunni-Shiite solidarity during Friday prayers on the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
"After a year of the occupation of Iraq where are we? Where are the Arab rulers?" Ibrahim Zaid, a Sunni cleric, told several hundred people who gathered here in a parking lot in support of the Iraqi uprising.
"Now there is Fallujah, living alone. There are heroes calling and no one hears them, no one sees them," Zaid told the crowd.
"We feel anger and grief," said Khaldoun Bourno, 30, a Sunni who is general secretary of the Agronomist and Engineers Association in Jordan. "But this anger will not appear on the surface. Instead it will make many martyrs and lead to more and more demonstrations."
In Beirut, several Islamic parties demonstrated Friday against the violence in Iraq. But they drew little notice outside the Palestinian refugee camps and southern Beirut neighborhoods where Islamic organizations hold sway.
Writing on the front page of Beirut's An-Nahar newspaper, columnist Sahar Baasiri said U.S. military operations in Iraq "humiliate" Arabs, fueling resentment that helps explain the mutilation in Fallujah last week of four U.S. government contractors, which Baasiri condemned.
"It is not enough for the White House to blame the terrorists and remnants of the Saddam regime for the violence in Fallujah," she wrote.
The frustrations have not been confined to the poor or ardently anti-American segments of the Arab population. Middle-class professionals, some of them already opposed to U.S. policy in the region because of its support for Israel, are also expressing solidarity with the Iraqi insurgents.
"What's so sad is that Arabs are so used to these American actions that nothing seems to shock us anymore" said Lamia Mansour, 34, a marketing consultant in Cairo. "You can't answer back with logic because there is no logic to what the U.S. is doing and you can't fight back because who can fight the tyranny of the Americans?"
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