A Journey Without Maps

By Fouad Ajami
Nation & World 5/26/03
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030526/usnews/26fouad.htm

The anti-American terrorism in, and out of, Arab lands knows 
no respite. The weapon of choice in last week's terror attacks 
in Saudi Arabia was the car bomb--a tool not unfamiliar in the 
brutal landscape of a region in the grip of a crisis that seems 
never to abate. The terror masters paid no heed to the "road map" 
Secretary of State Colin Powell had come to promote as a path 
to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, or to the promise 
of Palestinian deliverance held out by the Bush administration. 
"It's a new environment," Saad al-Faqih, a London-based Saudi 
dissident and physician, said, describing the desert kingdom. 
"There is a completely different scene as far as the hostility 
against the United States--and the society itself is providing 
a natural shelter and protection to al Qaeda members."

In truth, there was nothing new about this latest act of terror, 
just as there is nothing new about the kind of shelter ordinary,
mainstream society in the Arab world grants this sort of violence. 
In Iraq, mass graves filled by Saddam Hussein's brutal regime 
now turn up almost daily. Yet few Arabs outside Iraq have 
stepped forth to acknowledge the criminality of the order that 
had been in place in Baghdad; few have said a word of praise 
for the foreign liberators of Iraq. Indeed, a well-known singer 
and rabble-rouser in Egypt has turned up with a popular new hit: 
"Better Saddam's hell than America's paradise," the song goes.

Beyond the poisoned atmosphere in Cairo, among the very 
Palestinians the road map aims to serve, no penance has been 
expressed, no second thoughts have been uttered over the support 
the Palestinians had so consistently given Saddam. If anything, 
popular opinion in Palestinian lands shames the Iraqis for 
the joy they have expressed at their own liberation, ridicules 
them as pawns of a foreign power, or worse.

No grand illusions. It may be the proper thing for America to 
take up the matter of Israel and the Palestinians; it may be 
a debt owed the stalwart British Prime Minister Tony Blair. 
But we should know the Arab world for what it is today and 
entertain no grand illusions about the gratitude the road map 
would deliver in Palestinian and Arab streets. We buy no 
friendship in Arab lands with pro-Palestinian diplomacy; 
we ward off no anti-American terrorism. There is no possibility 
the rancid anti-Americanism of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt would
be assuaged with a big push for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
The highest religious authority of that land, Sheik al Azhar 
Muhammad Tantawi, recently called the American-led coalition's 
effort against Saddam a "crusading war" and said that Muslims 
everywhere were obliged to take up arms against the "invaders." 
This kind of sentiment can never be stilled with a diplomatic 
effort on behalf of the Palestinians.

There are deeper furies that grip Arab society; we take up a 
false trail when we fall for the claim that our troubles in 
that world spring from our policy on Israel and Palestinians. 
This is the trail our interlocutors in those lands would 
have us follow. But they are shrewd men, the rulers who hold 
sway in those Arab lands. It is a cultural norm of the Arab 
world that strangers are never exposed to family demons. 
We are strangers in that world, and the Palestine story is 
all we shall be given, for it is the most convenient of tales.

A dozen years ago, after the first Gulf War, the Iraqi regime 
was in its death throes, but we spared it, left Iraq and 
the Persian Gulf, and began what turned out to be yet another 
futile pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian accord. Then, too, 
we fell for the idea that the American victory in the Arabian 
Desert had to be redeemed in the alleyways of Nablus and 
Ramallah. We took the bait that a great power's authority 
requires a Palestinian solution. Into the camp of the victors, 
we brought the Palestinians and the Jordanians who had shouted 
themselves hoarse in favor of Saddam Hussein. We took them
unreformed and unrepentant. Our leverage would never be so 
great again, our leaders believed then. In the years that 
followed, anti-American terrorism grew more brazen, and 
the masters of al Qaeda took our measure. Last week, 
Secretary Powell arrived in Riyadh to promote peace and 
instead found himself inspecting a scene of carnage, the 
latest heartbreaking testament to the furies that now blow
through Arab lands.