Losing the Middle East?

DO THE Arab leaders of the Middle East think we're clever? Or to put it more politically: Do they think we can tell the difference between friend and foe? Among Arabs themselves, knowing who the good guys are has long been a devilishly difficult task, since the great divide--believer and infidel--is usually of little use in separating sides. From the tenth century on, the Middle East has been overwhelmingly Muslim, yet shifting allegiances and war were the common state of affairs between Muslim potentates. In contemporary times, it's only gotten worse since traditional ties of kith and kin--the second skirmish line of the Arab identity--have been extended into nation-states where modern ideologies have devolved into brutal despotisms that rely primarily on family, often with fratricidal intensity. The Assad regime in Syria, like Saddam Hussein's Baath party in Iraq or Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, can be a friend one day and try to kill you the next.

Fortunately, we don't have to play in intra-Arab politics. Knowing thine enemy for Washington ought to be an easier task. Which of course provokes the question: What in the world is the Bush administration doing indulging Saudi crown prince Abdullah's "peace" initiative? Why did the administration send the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, whose CIA credentials give him enormous significance in the conspiracy-laden Muslim world, to speak directly with Abdullah, as would a vassal to his lord? Why is the administration again sending General Anthony Zinni to the Middle East when there is an absolute certainty that in his mission he will appear feckless? And his fecklessness--made worse, of course, because Zinni is a renowned military man with quintessential American looks--will only undermine the more important, Iraq-related objectives of Vice President Dick Cheney's upcoming journey through the region.

An administration self-confident in war now insists on dissipating its awe by allowing itself to appear panicked by the Israeli-Palestinian "cycle of violence," warnings from the rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and a Gallup poll depicting America in a bad light among the Muslim masses. Whatever one thinks about polling as a valuable social-science tool--and using polls in closed, distrustful Muslim societies is dubious--the publication of the Gallup poll at the same time as Abdullah's "peace" proposal and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's visit to Washington is an exquisite irony. In the Arab world, no two states have done more to fan hatred of America than have Washington's two primary Arab "allies."

PRINCE Abdullah and President Mubarak encouraged Yasser Arafat to trash the Camp David talks with President Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in July 2000. Does the administration really believe that Abdullah has now abandoned the principles that define his identity, his faith, and his country's foreign policy? It is inconceivable that Abdullah now wants Arafat to accept less than what Abdullah, Mubarak, and Arafat rejected before. The only statements that matter are those that are publicly expressed in Arabic to the Arab world, and the three gentlemen have given no indication whatsoever that Arafat's decision to scuttle the Clinton administration's diplomacy was wrong.

Is it at all reasonable to believe that Prince Abdullah, a devout Muslim who with his family rules over the oldest, most militant Islamic state, could ever imagine an Israeli embassy in the "country of the two Holy Places" (Mecca and Medina), a land whose better-educated denizens can explain to you at length how a Jewish cabal is trying to ruin the Arab and Muslim worlds and despoil "Christian America"? And Riyadh, with its American-educated bureaucrats, is enlightened compared with Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi heartland in the Najd, where if a referendum were taken tomorrow about restoring slavery--banned in the Kingdom only in 1962--it might pass.