By Shibley Telhami
The Los Angeles Times
August 15, 2010, Express buzz
US President Barack Obama may have scored a diplomatic win by securing international support for biting sanctions against Iran, but Arab public opinion is moving in a different direction. Polling conducted last month by Zogby and the University of Maryland in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates suggests that views in the region are shifting toward a positive perception of Iran’s nuclear programme. This is bad news for Washington, which has counted on Arabs seeing Iran as a threat — maybe even a bigger one than Israel.
According to our polling, a majority of Arabs do not believe Iran’s claim that it is merely pursuing a peaceful nuclear programme. But an overwhelming majority believe that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons and should not be pressured to curtail its programme. Even more telling, a majority of those polled say that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, the outcome would be positive for the Middle East. In 2009, only 29 per cent viewed that as a positive.
The results varied from country to country, with a significant majority in Egypt viewing a nuclear Iran positively, while a majority in the UAE viewed such an outcome negatively.
The shortest path to understanding this turn in Arab public opinion is to examine Arab views of American foreign policy in the Middle East. In the early months of the Obama administration (spring 2009), our polling found that a remarkable 51 per cent of those surveyed expressed optimism about American policy in the Middle East. A little over a year later, however, the number of optimists had dropped to only 16 per cent, with 63 per cent expressing pessimism. This pessimism explains the turn in Arab attitudes toward Iran. Arabs tend to view Iran largely through the prism of American and Israeli policies.
Most Arabs have no love for Iran, and many see the country as a significant threat. But the Arab public does not see Iran as the biggest danger in the region. In an open question asking about the two countries that pose the biggest threats to their security, 88 per cent of respondents identified Israel, 77 per cent identified the US, and only 10 per cent identified Iran. The angrier the public is with Israel and the US, the less they worry about Iran, viewing it first and foremost as ‘the enemy of my enemy’.
When American officials speak of Arab attitudes toward Iran, they are generally speaking of the positions of Arab governments, most of which are quite concerned about the growing power of Iran, especially given the decline of Iraq’s regional power, which used to serve as a counterbalance. But even Arab governments that worry about Iran do so for different reasons. Some of Iran’s smaller Arab neighbours, particularly the UAE, have genuine security worries. For more distant states such as Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, the worry is largely about Iran’s influence on public opinion within their countries and Iran’s support for movements opposing their governments. They understand that Iran’s influence is drawn primarily from regional frustration with the US and with the stalemate on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is why they see addressing that conflict as the surest way to curtail Iran’s influence.
It was not that Arabs didn’t appreciate the effort the Obama administration made to change American attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. The reason for the shift cannot be missed: 61 per cent of Arabs polled identified US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict as the single issue in which they were most disappointed in Obama.
Year after year, our polling has shown that this issue remains the primary prism through which Arabs view American policy. Arab disappointment with the slow progress toward peace, the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and the tragedy of the Gaza flotilla have provided the central window for Arab views. And Iran has gained as a consequence.
When American officials speak to the Arab public and highlight the threat of a nuclear Iran as the central problem facing the region, they cannot expect to get public sympathy or attention. The view in the region is not that confronting Iran is an essential prerequisite to Arab-Israeli peace. Rather, most Arabs believe that peace between Israelis and Palestinians must precede limiting Iran’s influence.
Here, there is both good and bad news. On the plus side, the vast majority of Arabs are prepared to accept a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and a plurality believe that such a solution could come only through negotiations, not through another war. The bad news is that a majority no longer believes that such a solution will ever happen, which increases the anger of Arabs toward the US and causes them to see Iran in a much more positive light.
(The writer is a professor at the University of Maryland and a nonresident senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution)
