• No appetite for more adventures  - Ali Abunimah
If public opinion has not yet had a decisive effect on US policy in Iraq, it may be restraining the Bush administration in Iran or Syria.

• A mixed Middle East legacy  - Yossi Alpher
There are aspects of the president's policies that possibly merit the support of American citizens.

• Bush's Armageddon?  - Ian Black
Bush's Iraq-driven unpopularity and concern about congressional elections restricts his freedom of maneuver on Israel and the Palestinians.

• The wages of American exceptionalism  - Clay Risen
Bush tore down the wall between domestic and international politics and demanded that voters judge him on his performance on the world stage.

No appetite for more adventures
 Ali Abunimah

US President George W. Bush has been deserted by all but his core constituency. With approval ratings consistently in the low 30s, the major reason for this loss of confidence is the war in Iraq. Two thirds of the American public disapproves of Bush's handling of the war and a clear majority now believes it was a mistake to invade the country. Calls for immediate withdrawal are growing, but slowly.

This sea-change reflects the public's reconnection with reality; Bush administration propaganda had built support for the war by hyping the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. At one point the US government and compliant mass media managed to convince almost two-thirds of Americans that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks. In the most optimistic scenario, the change in public mood will mark the beginning of the end of the disastrous US occupation of Iraq and could roll back harmful US intervention elsewhere in the Middle East.

With US soldiers dying at the rate of about two a day, and tens of thousands returning home with permanent disabilities and mental stresses, the war is starting to be felt deep in the heartland. People cannot long tolerate such sacrifices in pursuit of a cause in which they no longer believe.

Given the growing opposition, it may seem strange that there is not a more visible movement demanding a US withdrawal. But this is not so surprising given the abdication by mainstream Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, the current frontrunner for her party's 2008 presidential nomination. She voted to authorize the war, and now that it has gone badly, has tried to have it both ways--being critical of Bush's handling of it, but supporting its continuation. The Democratic establishment, with its eyes set firmly on the midterm congressional elections this November, seems to believe that its path to power is to tack to the right on the war and other "national security" issues regardless of the consequences for Americans, let alone Iraqis. Their strategy is based on the belief that those strongly angered by Bush will vote Democratic no matter what the party says about the war, so their focus is on attracting enough disaffected conservatives to give them the edge. Hence the effort to play both sides.

The result is that public opposition to the war has no expression through conventional politics. Yet this could change: Democratic Representative John Murtha, a highly respected former supporter of the war turned opponent, announced that if his party wins back control of the House in November, he will run for the position of majority leader. This could break open the suppressed debate within the party and country about immediate withdrawal. While it is difficult to see change coming from within the system, a break in the official pro-war consensus could begin to galvanize more widespread popular protest.

If public opinion has not yet had a decisive effect on US policy in Iraq, it may be restraining the Bush administration from launching new reckless adventures in Iran or Syria. Despite the fact that intense propaganda from the Bush administration, the Israel lobby and the mass media have convinced a majority of Americans that Iran is now the greatest threat facing them, a recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose military action against Iran even if all economic and diplomatic efforts fail to get Iran to shut down its nuclear program. While there is no guarantee that the government will not do something anyway, this is a very different climate from the one after September 11 and before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no appetite for new adventures.

Where there seems little prospect that Bush's political weakness could have any impact at all is on changing US policy toward Palestine-Israel. There is almost no dissent among the political classes about the current approach of supporting Israel unconditionally, while undermining the democratically-elected Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and punishing occupied Palestinians for voting for it. Although among Arabs it is widely believed that the US-Israel alliance is directly connected with the US decision to invade Iraq, few Americans make such an explicit link. Nevertheless, it is more common than a few years ago to argue that one is there, as the furious debate about "The Israel Lobby" paper written by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer shows. Unconditional US support is giving Israel the short-term boost it needs to disregard completely the rights of the Palestinian majority living under minority Israeli Jewish rule. But the suffering and anger caused by Israeli-style apartheid will consume Israel in ever greater conflict and isolation and all but guarantees the United States will create new enemies for itself long into the future.-Published 15/6/2005 © bitterlemons-international.org

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of "One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse".

The president of the United States has undoubtedly earned his low approval ratings fair and square: the war in Iraq was misconceived, has been colossally mismanaged, is costing American lives, and will almost certainly end up doing serious damage to Middle East stability. Looking to the future--to George W. Bush's presidential legacy--it seems likely that Iraq will be remain an indelible stain, alongside Guantanamo, the New Orleans hurricane fiasco and the president's failure to constructively address energy issues (also largely Middle East-based). Because the US has committed large numbers of troops to Iraq and the casualties they are taking cannot be rationalized in terms of achievements that serve American interests, the unmanageable situation there will continue for the indeterminate future to overshadow all other Middle East issues--indeed, nearly all other issues--in American eyes.

But it is by no means certain that all aspects of Bush's Middle East policies will end up as a negative legacy. Indeed, the American president has advanced a broad spectrum of radical American policy changes in the region, some of which may yet come to be seen as positive and progressive. Whether a reassessment of Bush's regional policies outside of Iraq will happen before the end of his second term or afterwards--indeed, whether a few years from now those policies will look more or less positive than they do now--one cannot say, essentially because they deal with ongoing issues that are far from resolution. But they are certainly worthy of mention, if only to suggest that the Bush Middle East legacy might not turn out entirely bad and there are aspects of the president's policies in the region that possibly merit the support of American citizens.

To begin with, Bush is the first president to declare as an American policy aim the establishment of a Palestinian state within the framework of a two-state solution. By the same token, Bush can take some of the credit for Ariel Sharon's decision to begin dismantling Israeli settlements in order to make room for a Palestinian state. Not that Bush's advocacy of a Palestinian state or endorsement of disengagement earned him many points with American voters, whether pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Nor did he dare or bother to devote significant American resources to achieving those objectives. Indeed, a Palestinian state today seems farther away than ever from fruition, and Bush's advocacy may have been too little, too late. But imagine if his predecessors had taken the step.

Second, Bush's dramatic and forceful advocacy of democratic reform in the region has been effective in some cases. In places like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, democrats and reformers have felt empowered for the first time to speak their minds, demand the right to vote and be elected, and express themselves in publications like this one. Most dramatically, in Lebanon a combination of people power and mainly American pressure forced Syria to end its occupation.

Not everywhere has Bush's reform agenda worked well. When it comes to elections, American policy has been incredibly misguided, insisting on holding them prematurely in places like Iraq and Palestine and acquiescing in the participation of armed Islamist militias. Currently it is backtracking by supporting a Palestinian effort to remove the legally-elected Hamas government from power and turning the other way at Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's suppression of non-Islamist reformers, thereby in some ways discrediting the entire effort.

Third, the events and announcements of recent weeks may point the way toward a resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis. If an international dialogue with Iran commences with American participation, Bush will be the first American president in over 25 years to consent to talk to the Islamist regime there. And while the European approach to Iran has in some ways appeared more promising, there can be no doubt that Washington's far more aggressive tack has helped generate the current slightly more hopeful situation, and that only American participation in dialogue with Iran holds out any hope of a peaceful resolution. Here, too, imagine if Bush's predecessors had agreed earlier to dialogue with Iran.

Finally, even in Iraq there are points of light. Removing Saddam Hussein hopefully set a precedent regarding just how much mass murder by a ruler the world will tolerate. Protecting and supporting the Kurds since 1991 has sent a positive message of hope to other non-Arab minorities in the Middle East, including Israel.

This mixed Middle East record points to another vital aspect of the issue: beginning with 9/11, the region has demanded and/or received the attention of the American president to a far greater extent than at any time in history. No longer is American Middle East policy confined to oil and the Arab-Israel conflict. This, for better or for worse, is yet another Middle East innovation of the Bush presidency.- Published 15/6/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Yossi Alpher is coeditor of the bitterlemons.net family of internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The word "Armageddon" derives from the biblical Har Megido--appropriately enough, considering the capacity of the Middle East to generate disaster for its own peoples and for outsiders who intervene. It is often used to describe a catastrophic event and is now being employed by some pundits to describe the likely outcome for US President George W. Bush's Republicans in the midterm elections this November.

Viewed from Europe, a continent consumed by the Iraq crisis but unable and unwilling to do much to influence its outcome, Americans seem to be repaying the president for his disastrous policies since he went to war in March 2003. There may be some wishful thinking in this conclusion from the other side of the Atlantic. But the evidence is pretty convincing.

Bush, it is true, was given the benefit of already growing doubts when he beat John Kerry in November 2004. And not all the current discontent is about what is happening in Iraq; the handling of Hurricane Katrina and the budget deficit are significant factors too. Iraq, though, is responsible for most of his troubles. It "looms over everything," in the words of Karl Rove.

Polls show that less than one third of Americans--32 percent--now approve of Bush's handling of Iraq. Two out of three Americans believe the war has not been worth it, a view shared by eight out of 10 Democrats and a third of Republicans.

Very little can now shake hardened attitudes to the war and its aftermath: even the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, made little difference, just as the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 gave Bush only a brief respite in the polls. And an awful lot of blood has flowed down the Tigris and Euphrates since then, including that of close to 2,500 dead Americans.

So bad have things become that Bush decided to go for un-Texan contrition. Boosted by the presence of his loyal (and equally beleaguered) British ally, Tony Blair, he recognized that some of his language ("dead or alive," "bring it on") might have been inappropriate. He admitted too that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal had been highly damaging (by then he was also coping with media revelations about the Haditha killings, widely billed as Iraq's version of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam). Thus has persistent Democratic anger over the war met mounting Republican disillusion. Only the second-term Richard Nixon got worse approval ratings. And he had to resign.

It's hard now to remember the optimal scenario for Iraq after January's elections. The five months of bickering it took to form a government under the Shi'ite politician Nuri al-Maliki have brought the country to the brink of civil war. Hopes for bringing the boys home have had to be put back. Donald Rumsfeld, with his "known unknowns" and folksy quips, is still in the Pentagon, despite calls for his resignation.

And Bush's wider "war on terror" is far from being won, even in the eyes of those who think it is actually "winnable." Zarqawi's demise was a rare piece of good news, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri still taunt in their media appearances. And would even Bin Laden's death or capture have any more impact than the killing of his dark Iraqi "prince"? US soldiers are dying in Afghanistan in clashes with an alarmingly resurgent Taliban. Somalia in the Horn of Africa, scene of the 1993 killings of American troops portrayed in the film Blackhawk Down, is being taken over by Islamist militias who have defeated warlords quietly backed by the CIA.

For Europeans and Brits, Iran is one bright spot. There is palpable relief in London, Paris and Berlin at the change of tack that has come with the administration's decision to get directly involved in negotiations with Tehran about its nuclear ambitions, ending the 27 years of isolation that began with the overthrow of the Peacock Throne.

The perception in the Old Continent is that Condoleezza Rice understood that once the Iranian dossier reached the UN Security Council, European, Russian and Chinese solidarity would fall away. US engagement seems to be a victory for Washington's pragmatists and multilateralists over the discredited cheerleaders for the war in Iraq. None of that makes it any easier in principle to strike the "grand bargain" needed to divert the Iranians away from an atomic bomb, but it at least brings the essential protagonists together: Iranian support for the Iraqi Shi'ites, Lebanon's Hizballah and Hamas in Palestine could all be brought into play.

Bush's Iraq-driven unpopularity and concern about the congressional elections restricts his freedom of maneuver on Israel and the Palestinians. Ehud Olmert's visit to Washington in late May brought a reminder that the US backs a negotiated final-status settlement based on the roadmap: there was conspicuously no endorsement of the Kadima leader's unilateral "convergence" plan, only faint praise from Bush for his "bold ideas." The Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections (itself a blow for the wider Middle East democratization agenda) means that the US, like Europe, needs to work with Mahmoud Abbas. It's simply too early for an American green light for Israel to bypass him.

Prospects for intense US involvement look limited. Dennis Ross, a respected survivor of Clinton-era, post-Oslo diplomacy, recalled recently how much lost sleep and effort was required to secure implementation of just one limited Israeli-Palestinian deal (over Hebron). The combination of an administration on the skids and its deepening preoccupation with Iraq doesn't augur well for a high level of American activity. "Popping out episodically isn't enough," Ross argues. "You have to lose some sleep. Caring about the issue and doing something about it are not the same thing."- Published 15/6/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Ian Black is Middle East editor of the Guardian.

President George W. Bush struck a note of caution in his June 8 Rose Garden speech addressing the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an American raid. This, despite the fact that the killing has given Americans a new reason to hope for a resolution to the Iraq war, or at least their part in it, soon: "Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues," Bush said. "We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him."

Bush clearly understands that, while Zarqawi was the most prominent leader of the insurgency, he was hardly the motivating force, and that as a result the violence in Iraq will continue. What is unclear is whether Bush appreciates how Zarqawi's death and its consequences neatly symbolize the dilemma in which he himself is caught: Just as Zarqawi's elimination is unlikely to halt the conflict in Iraq, there is little that Bush can do across the Middle East, or even throughout the world, to influence the course of events that he unleashed with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq five and three years ago--events that, in turn, are likely to determine the fall midterm elections and perhaps even the 2008 presidential race. At the time, he declared the invasions a victory; today Bush must realize that he and his poll ratings are hostage to the unintended consequences of that success.

Regardless of the justifications at the time, the invasions were the expression of an unprecedented American exceptionalism--namely, that with or without international support the country could and would deploy its military across the globe to effect drastic changes in the internal politics of individual countries. Such exceptionalism was embodied, quite consciously, in Bush's swaggering across the international stage--the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op aboard the USS Lincoln was intended for more than just domestic consumption. It told the world that Bush, and the United States, were beholden to no one and were ready to dominate everyone.

This bold, even arrogant, assertion proved a trump in domestic politics. Bush did not invade Iraq to boost his poll ratings, but he nevertheless did shamelessly leverage the invasion to win votes at home, inviting Americans to judge him on his willingness to use American power abroad. Thus, despite his obvious failures to improve homeland security, Bush defeated John Kerry largely with the support of voters who felt that he had made the world safer for them.

But the same arrogance soon backfired internationally. Not only has Iraq become a military quagmire, sucking away resources from efforts to combat bin Ladenist terror elsewhere, but as The Washington Post reported on June 12, it has become a training ground for non-Iraqi terrorists who return home and wait for a chance to launch their own jihads. And Bush's arrogance has ruined the country's image precisely at the time when he is finding that international cooperation is, in fact, vital for even the world's most powerful nation.

The American public was, perhaps understandably, slower to accept the mistakes made in Iraq than the rest of the world, but by mid-2005, and even more so today, voters of all stripes blame the president and his party for Iraq. At just over 33 percent, voter approval of his job on the war neatly tracks his overall approval ratings; given that voters also rank Iraq as the single most important national issue, that's likely no coincidence.

But interestingly, voters also are giving the Democrats higher marks on generic questions about "keeping the United States safe"--security questions that, at least directly, have nothing to do with Iraq. The Democrats have done little to deserve this--they have no sweeping national security plan to speak of--and one could fairly say that the president deserves credit simply for the fact that no terrorist attack has occurred on US soil since 9/11. And yet, because of events halfway across the world--in Iraq, but also the showdown with Iran, the Hamas takeover in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, terror plots in Europe and Southeast Asia--Bush and the GOP have seen their security advantage in the polls erode to virtually nothing. Indeed, just as Bush's perceived competence on matters of international security gave him an overwhelming victory in 2004, so too does his perceived helplessness in the face of global events hurt him in 2006.

Why is this? In previous administrations, what happened abroad had relatively little impact on a president's poll ratings; Americans felt insulated by their geographic, military and economic advantages, and they gave their leaders slack when it came to questions of international relations, even when they involved anti-American terror--Reagan in the mid-1980s, Clinton in the late-1990s.

But things are different today. Partly, of course, because of the attacks of 9/11, which brought the world to America. But also, and perhaps even more so, because during his first term Bush so believed in his own righteousness, and the righteousness of American power however it is deployed, that he tore down the wall between domestic and international politics and invited, even demanded, that voters judge him on his performance on the world stage. He forgot, however, that the world stage is never occupied by just one actor, and that one's performance is often defined as much by the other actors as it is by oneself.

Whether or not Bush made the right decisions after 9/11, or whether he even had a choice in the matter, is a question best left to historians. But for now, it seems increasingly like the voters have already made up their minds.- Published 15/6/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org.

Clay Risen is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. A former assistant editor at The New Republic, his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Foreign Policy.