By David Bender

        American Middle East policy is in shambles.  The war in Iraq has gone so horribly wrong that we have empowered the radicals and marginalized the moderates. Most in the Middle East (well over 90%) think violent jihadis are dangerous radicals who subscribe to an Islam that ought not even be considered Islam.  They have little direct popular support.  There is a reason that they wage their wars to bring about an Islamic state against the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel in the West Bank and Gaza:  In Damascus, Cairo, and Amman they don't find popular support for radical Islamic revolution. 

        The Middle East is a far more normal place than most would imagine.  People just want to live their lives.  But they're tired of waking up every morning and having to deal with the specter of the United States.  As one Syria friend once said to me, "I just want America to leave Syria alone; just let us live in peace."  She may have been missing some larger political realities, but it is an example of how most Syrians see the US.  She had no outright opposition to the US—indeed she respects it greatly for its freedom and prosperity—but she was tired of having to deal with it.  Looked at from the other side the US can be a terrifying country.  The military ability to literally end a state as a functional entity in a matter of weeks is an ability that only the US has and more often than not that ability is threatened and used against Muslims.  I remember this conversation with her as being one of the first times I was directly confronted with the notion that the United States can be seen as a very scary country.  She looked at what the US had done to Iraq and was terrified that it might do the same to her country.  It wasn't political; it was touchingly human.

        There are very real problems facing the Islamic world.  These problems are internal issues but ones that the US is involved in and has a stake in.  The Islamic world’s failure to engage in a discussion about its present and future, along with what I would call a virtual death cult of suicide bombings and violent jihad is something that affects the whole world.  Some of my Syrian friends understand this but feel totally powerless.  If you're a religious Muslim and you want to explore a moderate, progressive, modern Islam where do you go?  There's no place.  If you want to die in jihad against the Americans?  Go into any mosque in the Middle East and more than likely they can set you up to go to Iraq, get in a car, and push the button at the designated US military checkpoint.  Or in less dramatic terms, there are plenty of forums (mostly underground, but some in the open) where radical ideas of martyrdom and global jihad are discussed.  The middle ground is quickly being lost.

        US policy, however, has contributed to this marginalization of progressives.  Any Arab advocating democratic reform (and there have been many over the past 20 years) used to be seen as a brave dissident fighting tyrannical regimes.  Such a person is now seen as doing the Americans' bidding.  American policies since 9/11 have undermined the chance for an indigenous progressive Islamic movement in the region.  A situation has emerged where the radicals become the heroes resisting American imperialism and the progressives become seen as collaborators.  

       Many Syrians felt deep sympathy for Saddam after he was executed.  They know about Saddam's crimes and Syria and Iraq had terrible relations for most of Saddam's rule, but they see him as a victim in the end.  He stood up to the Americans—the only Arab leader to do so—and paid for it with his life.  Likewise, people may hate the version of Islam that bin Laden preaches, but they respect him as someone who refuses to accept American hegemony.  This is in contrast to the Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian governments, which have all based their political and economic survival on the continuation of an American dominated Middle East.

        There is a fight to be fought against radical Islam, but the enemy and methods needs to be chosen more carefully.  Afghanistan was a real refuge and breeding ground for radical global jihad.  Iraq, though, was an insane misadventure that has harmed US national security more than any other move in American history.  What the US needs is a policy that recognizes realities in the Middle East for what they are, not what it wants them to be. 

        In the Middle East, the US needs to quickly tone down the military aggression, which only empowers the militants and starting talking to those countries and groups that we think we can make a deal with.  We talked to the Soviet Union, the Vietcong, and Mao, we can talk to Asad and Sadr as well.  Syria is desperate to do a deal—it wants to come in from the cold.  The only reason it has such a close alliance with Iran is that Iran is the only country in the world willing to be friends with it.  But they want any deal to be one between independent states, not master and servant.  Iran is a tougher one, but when history is written it may be that the price of our failures in Iraq is Iran hegemony in the Gulf.  Today in Iraq, the US needs Iran more than it needs the US, which is not a negotiating position to which Americans are accustomed.

        But overall, the most important thing for Americans is to understand that the Middle East is a shockingly normal place.  People here have no interest in the destruction of the US, or fighting jihad, or anything else that makes such powerful polemical statements for American hawks.  They want family, friends, a good job, some material prosperity, and to be able to stop worrying about whether their country in going to come under attack and/or revolution.  This huge majority is our ally in the fight and the US has totally ignored it.  This is in part because most Middle Easterners don't put out videos on al-Jazeera and someone who explodes a car gets more news than a guy who wakes up and goes to work.  But there is a second reason that that stems from the American media.  There has been a failure in the American press to explain life and ideas as they exist in the Middle East.  The sheer normalcy of it is perhaps the news story.

    Syrians (and Arabs in general) understand the difference between peoples and governments impressively well.  Whenever I say that I'm American to a Syrian they invariably go on to say that Syrians like the American people ("They're good, cultured, generous people"), but hate the American government and American foreign policy.  We Americans have a harder time making a distinction between the governments of the region, the extremists, and the people, perhaps because of our inherent assumption that governments are representative of their people (Middle Easterners, with their universally dreadful governments, are under no such illusion).  The result is that we lump all of them together, which is why Osama, Saddam, and the Arab street are all seen as being a part of 9/11.