Tuesday, April 8, 2003
U.S. winning war but losing Arab allies
By SUSAN SACHS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
CAIRO, Egypt -- In the gloom at 4 a.m., while most of Cairo is asleep, Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd
watches the war on television and despairs over the path taken by the United States. This is not a
normal emotion for Aboulmagd, a sprightly man of 72 who has lived through more than his share
of revolutions, wars and international crises, yet has maintained a sunny outlook.
"We should never lose hope," he said the other day from his 18th-floor law office overlooking the
Nile, a room crammed with books and brightened with paintings of sailboats on calm waters.
"Frustration is not an option."
But in truth, Aboulmagd admitted, he is just whistling in the dark. Never have America's Arab
friends, he said, felt so estranged from the United States.
"People in Egypt and many parts of the Arab world used to love America, and now they have a
sense of being betrayed, misunderstood, taken lightly," he said. "And when it comes to the central
problem of the Middle East -- the Arab-Israeli conflict -- we feel that even a minimum of American
even-handedness is missing."
Aboulmagd is one of Egypt's best-known intellectuals, a senior aide to former President Anwar
Sadat, consultant to the United Nations and ever-curious polymath with interests in Islamic
jurisprudence, comparative religions, literature, history and commercial law.
Like many educated Egyptians of his generation, he is a man whose views on democracy and
political values were shaped by reading the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist papers and the
writings of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson.
For him the United States was a "dream," a paragon of liberal values to be emulated by Arabs and
Muslims seeking to have a voice in the modern world.
One of his daughters lived in the United States. Aboulmagd studied there, earning a master's degree
in comparative law at the University of Michigan in 1959. He served as president of the
administrative tribunal of the World Bank in Washington. And he has spent more than 20 years
working on projects aimed at promoting dialogue between the Western, non-Muslim civilization and
the Arab-Muslim world.
Yet these days, in his opinion, something has gone terribly wrong.
"Under the present situation, I cannot think of defending the United States," said Aboulmagd, a
small man with thinning white hair who juggles a constant stream of phone calls and invitations to
speak about modernizing the Arab world.
"I would not be listened to," he added. "To most people in this area, the United States is the source
of evil on planet Earth. And whether we like it or not, it is the Bush administration that is to blame."
When speaking of President Bush and his administration, Aboulmagd uses words like
narrow-minded, pathological, obstinate and simplistic. The war on Iraq, he said bluntly, is the act
of a "weak person who wants to show toughness" and, quite frankly, seems "deranged."
Such language from a man of Aboulmagd's stature is a warning sign of the deep distress that has
seized the Arab elite, those who preach moderation in the face of rising Islamic radicalism and
embrace liberalism over the tired slogans of Arab nationalism.
Similar opinions can also be heard these days from wealthy Arab businessmen, university
professors, senior government officials and Western-leaning political analysts -- the people who
one might have thought could be counted on to support the professed mission of the Bush
administration: to bring democracy to the Arab world.
The problem, he said, is that the war on Iraq is widely seen in the Arab world as an attack on all
Arabs, meant to serve the interests of Israel with no compensating outreach to aggrieved Arabs |
