THE HEAVY LIFTING'S DONE:

Arab view dims on Iraq rebels: Insurgent tactics - like targeting civilians - are drawing rebukes from the Arab world. (Dan Murphy and Nicholas Blanford, 11/02/04, CS Monitor)

Conversations with ordinary people, intellectuals, and politicians illustrate that clearer lines are being drawn in people's minds between what is seen as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" resistance.

"People are coming ... to grips with complicated realities,'' says Abdel Moneim Said, director of Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "We can't deal with the emergence of groups like the ones who bombed Taba here in Egypt until we understand that some of these so-called resistance groups are intrinsically evil."

Egyptian militants killed 34 people in attacks on Taba, popular with Israeli tourists, and a nearby campsite on Oct. 7.

Mr. Said says that while most still see the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in stark terms, there is a growing number of regional thinkers who are also looking at the chaos of postinvasion Iraq as a partial consequence of Saddam Hussein's divide-and-rule policies and seeing some of the problems of pre-invasion Iraq reflected in their own societies.

"After three, four decades of independence we're coming to see that not all of our problems are generated from the outside," says Said. "Gradually Arab countries see it's not only independence versus occupation, it's also freedom, development, and progress or the lack of progress. We can see our societies are not what we'd like them to be."

When the US invasion began, a fairly one-dimensional view of the war's actors was held by most in the region, with its history of interventions by Western powers. Like an American western with a Mesopotamian twist, the Arab media scripted the war as the checkered headscarves of the insurgents (the white hats) against the Kevlar helmets of US airborne, infantry, and Marines (the black).

But among the events that have created doubts in some Arab minds have been the videotaped beheadings of a number of foreign contractors, the executions of 49 unarmed Iraqi military trainees last week, and the kidnapping of aid-worker Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi citizen and critic of the US invasion.

Open just about any paper or magazine this week and you're likely to encounter a thought-free piece about the daunting task facing whoever wins the presidency tomorrow. In fact, the economy is in rather good shape, being held back only by psychology, and the Middle East is reforming so rapidly that, especially with elections coming in Iraq in January, the Islamic world will likely one day be seen to have passed the tipping point towards liberal democracy prior to November 2004, not after.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 1, 2004 8:11 PM